Keir Starmer’s Troll Farm - Guest Post By @damian_from
If I asked you to guess how many followers Keir Starmer’s twitter account has gained in the last two years, what would your estimate be?
100,000 more followers? 250,000 more? 500,000? The answer is in fact 36. Yes, you read that right, just 36.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, Keir Starmer’s account had only 36 more followers than it had two years ago. An unbelievable but true fact.
I have been auditing Starmer’s account for two years. Why have I been doing that you might fairly ask? I live and breathe politics so search for as much information as I can to know more. I suppose I am a bit like a bookie in that sense, I want to know as much as I can about the runners to help me predict outcomes more accurately.
I was intrigued by the fact that Starmer had only 36 more followers now than two years ago, so began auditing his account hourly using professional auditing software to closely monitor its behaviour and find out what was going on. Having carried out an extensive and in-depth audit of Keir Starmer’s twitter account from 2020 to the current date, I am now able to share my findings.
But before I do that I will briefly provide my twitter credentials.
I joined twitter in May 2018 and have 16,432 followers. They are all real followers, no fake accounts. I regularly audit my account and have a follower audit score of 100%. I follow 2,431 people, I don’t do transactional follows. I organise twitterstorms, take part in lots of campaigns and try to create a space for constructive and civilised political debate. People seem to enjoy my tweets and I genuinely appreciate their support.
My account achieves exceptionally high levels of engagement. I have organised twitterstorms which trended at number one worldwide and numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 in the UK, plus lots more trending hashtags. In the last 28 days 233,000 people have visited my profile.
My account has probably recorded the highest levels of engagement for an account of its size on twitter globally. It is interesting and amusing that a socialist account gets the highest levels of engagement on a capitalist and largely right-wing platform.
I am not saying those things to boast. I can’t really claim much credit for those statistics. I don't do much, I just write tweets and anyone can do that. My engagement levels are mostly thanks to my followers and the people who RT and like my stuff. But there is also something else which is quite an important factor: I know how to make twitter work. I know how to use the platform to optimise engagement, I know the formula. My engagement statistics prove that.
I wanted to start off by proving my credentials to provide assurance that the analysis you are about to read comes from a knowledgeable and expert source.
Finally, before I present my findings you will need to know about the trap I laid for Starmer’s account during the audit. I will reveal the tactics I used to force his account into breaking twitter's terms of service.
The Sting
Almost immediately after I tweeted that Starmer’s account had only 36 more followers now than it had two years ago, the account’s follower count started increasing.
That instant reaction to my tweet piqued my interest further. In response I launched a pincer attack on the account by starting two simultaneous campaigns, one asking people to unfollow Starmer and another asking them to report his fake followers. The campaigns helped caused the account to lose as up to 20,000 followers a day. The account then had to gain thousands of fake followers to hide the loss of the real followers. However, losing real followers and gaining fake ones has impacted the account’s audit rating, the account’s overall credibility score. In the last week it has seen its audit rating drop by 2%.
Now we have covered the background to the story we can get straight to the audit findings.
Audit Findings
Keir Starmer’s account is losing thousands of real followers every day. It is is gaining thousands of fake followers to hide the loss and prevent the account’s total number of followers from falling. Twitter’s terms of service explicitly prohibit manipulating follower numbers. In plain English, Keir Starmer’s account is committing fraud. I have repeatedly reported the fraud to twitter but have received no response.
Having established that his account was gaining fake followers to hide the loss of real followers, I then measured the scale of the problem. Starmer’s account is losing real followers at a phenomenal rate. The account has regularly been losing as many as 500 real followers an hour on average. At peak times the account has been losing 2,500 real followers an hour for several hours at a time. Due to the haemorrhaging of real followers the account has regularly been forced to gain over 20,000 fake followers a day to hide the losses.
Keir Starmer’s Troll Farm
Accounts can and do gain fake followers. Almost everyone has some fake followers. Fake spam accounts roam twitter looking for accounts to latch on to and post their spam. However, the consistent and high rate at which Starmer’s account is gaining fake followers discounts the possibility that this is an ad hoc or random event. The numbers are too high and too consistent. The fact that the account gains exactly the same number of fake followers as the number of real followers it loses is conclusive proof that the account is committing fraud.
Judging by the scale of the operation, it is clearly being run by a professional organisation experienced in running troll farms. A troll farm is an organisation which employs people to make deliberately provocative online posts to cause conflict or manipulate public opinion. These accounts are now created automatically using software, allowing thousands of accounts to be controlled by one person. This is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for twitter. In less than 5 years the percentage of fake accounts as a proportion of all accounts on the platform has increased from 50% to 75%.
The existence of a troll farm supporting Keir Starmer’s account raises other questions. Who is running the troll farm? Is it a private organisation or state actor? Who is paying for the thousands of fake accounts and in which country is the troll farm based? Establishing those facts would require a further investigation.
Fake accounts and artificial engagement
Artificially boosting follower counts is the first job of fake accounts but their main function is to artificially boost engagement levels for selected accounts. When you see a tweet with a very unusual RT/like ratio it is usually a sign that fake accounts are at work. They tend to like more than RT because if they RT it is easier for people to identify them as fake accounts and track them.
I have carried out quantitative studies to identify this type of artificial engagement. One of the studies was to categorise responses to tweets posted by Wes Streeting, a member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet. The study showed that most of the tweets supportive of Mr Streeting had been posted by accounts which had either just been set up, had high tweet/low follower ratios or were based abroad. So it appears that not only is the troll farm providing fake followers, it is also providing artificial online engagement to Starmer and his supporters.
Conclusion
To be explicitly clear, I am not claiming Keir Starmer knows that his twitter account is committing fraud and that a troll farm is actively supporting his account. But the fact remains that both of those things are currently happening. If Starmer becomes aware of it, and this article is in part an attempt to raise awareness, then he must take action to stop the fraud continuing.
How can the Labour leader lecture anyone on corruption and honesty when his own twitter account is committing fraud by hiding the loss of thousands of real followers to deceive voters into thinking he is more popular than he really is?
It is one thing for a celebrity to gain fake followers to give a false impression of their popularity to help boost merch sales. It is quite another for a politician to gain fake followers to give a false impression of their popularity to deceive voters.
That is a very serious fraud indeed.
Damian from Brighton - @damian_from
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