Exposing a large political sock-puppet network on Medium and Twitter

Fake accounts with thousands of followers have been blogging propaganda for years undetected on Medium and Twitter

🧵1/ Ready for a sockpuppet odyssey that goes from Twitter to Medium? Meet Rebecca Klein. She's an 'Israel' based in Dubai, has a fantastic set of chompers, & a verified account. She also loves the UAE, and by the looks of things, spaghetti junctions. #deception #disinformation

2/ Klein was part of a network promoting Cop28 in UAE. Following my thread, the network took evasive action, changing their usernames (this is called handle switching). As you can see, Klein became Samantha Ali.

Also, 'Forgetting Rebecca Klein' is a great movie title.

3/ Some of you may know that everyone has a unique Twitter ID. This ID remains the same even if you change your username. So if you know the unique ID, you know the new username

Amazingly, Samantha Ali has already got her verification back. Her bio has changed slightly though.

4/ It includes the pleasing phrase "balancing Quills and Diplomatic Skills'. I thought this quite witty for a sockpuppet so decided to Google it, to see if it was a quote. It wasn't, but took me to the medium blog of Samantha Ali, with 6k followers!

5/ Some of you may be thinking that whoever runs the Rebecca Klein account simply copied the profile of a real Samantha Ali?

No. There's a lot of deception involved. First up, the image is a stock photo, that was even used on the @ilo website

6/ The medium URL actually uses the name 'joiecooper2', not Samantha Ali, or Rebecca Klein. A Waybacksearch reveals the Medium account also changed name, bio and image from Joie Cooper to Samantha Ali. This is the previous image and bio

7/ Samantha Ali/JoieCooper's account was deleted following the publication of the @dpcarrington article in the Guardian But there are many records of her publications on the Waybackmachine. She posted every 2-3 days since 2021. Topics seem to reflect UAE foreign policy but also

8/ are very pro-Israel anti Muslim Brotherhood. Also anti-Qatar, which is interesting as much of this content was occurring after the Al Ula summit in 2021.

9/ But it's not just Samantha Ali doing tireless reporting on the Middle East . There are dozens of fake Medium accounts posting similar content about Mid East Politics. Look at these characters, all with thousands of followers and stock photos.

10/ This post defending Sultan Al Jaber by Samantha Ali has 335 hand claps and two comments. But the comments are also from fake accounts. Classic Astrotufring

11/ So there you have, some agency is running a large, incredibly juicy astroturfing campaign across Twitter and Medium. What's more, Twitter's verification system is so broken that an obvious sock puppet can change their entire personality and body and still get verified.