From Brigadier to Bot: the Demotion of a US Army Officer to Pro-Israel Sock-Puppet

Replies to a BBC News article suggest sockpuppets are spreading pro-Israel talking points

Ok this is pretty wild. I saw some sus pro-Israel astroturfing activity on a BBCNews Facebook post about aid arriving in Gaza. Lots of Hasbara comments like "Hamas will take the aid". The following 2 identical posts were side by side so I looked into it.

Specifically I looked at Dean O' Connor. Firstly up, there were two almost identical Dean O'connor pages, both created on consecutive days last week (15 + 16 May). The one that posted is the one on the right.

When I reverse image searched the picture I was inundated with dozens of pages from forums about romance scams asking about people using this same picture. A lot of people scammed out of thousands. Someone even asked on Quora about O'Connor!

The real person is Brigadier General John "Jack" O'Connor of the US Army. As a high-ranking officer he's pretty well known, and there are photos of him all over the Internet. Here is a legit one from the US Dept of Defense website!

So far, I've found a FB page and two X accounts puporting to be John O Connor. The FB page is run from Vietnam (which is a red flag).

The new "Dean O Connor" (Interesting the person is keeping the O Connor) even has a TikTok profile!

I suspect there is a large astroturfing network here running some pro-Israel campaign. Somehow John O Connor's photos remain a favourite of fake account generators.

From Brigadier to Bot, quite a demotion.