Uncovering Pro-Israel and pro-UAE fake accounts using Medium.com to disseminate propaganda
Sock puppets are creating and actively using Medium accounts to smear the Muslim Brotherhood and promote FP objectives of UAE and Israel
I wanted to do a post to show how disinformation fake accounts on Medium follow a remarkably similar pattern to Twitter. Also bonus content on anti-Muslim brotherhood narratives.
Does anyone Remember Samantha Ali?
Of course you might!
Samantha Ali was the face of a recent campaign to spread climate-related propaganda around the UAE hosting Cop28.
Only then she wasn't Samantha Ali, she was Rebecca Klein. She changed profile pictures and bio after the expose. But she's still verified!
Ali/Klein was one of dozens. Despite the obvious fakery (that was even covered in @guardian ) she is still active on Twitter. What's more, thanks to the wonders of algorithms, Twitter is even recommending I follow her. How meta! (Not you Zuckerberg, the other guy @elonmusk)
Samantha Ali also had a Medium blog account with 6k followers. It has been active since at least 2021, and she used to be called 'joie cooper'.
In addition to writing about climate change, she spent a lot of time attacking the Muslim Brotherhood. I thought this was worth
mentioning given the recent excellent investigation by the EIC on UAE funding a Swiss company to smear the brotherhood (They also used medium blogs & fake accounts). I don't know if this network is connected to Alp Services but this playbook is common
Anyway, there are still a lot of these fake personas blogging on Medium. Many of them use stock photos & post content every 2 days. These ones also tend to reflect UAE foreign policy and write a lot about the Muslim Brotherhood. But they are also engaging in evasion
This includes Samantha Ali. Who has now changed her name on Medium to "Abegail Jacob". She has also changed her profile picture and bio. In her bio she admits to 'writing Fictions'.
Finally you tell the truth Abegail!
It's not just Samantha Ali too. Another one of the network - Tunebelamari, has also become Chava Mizrahi 'A photographer Bitch with sarcasm'.
Perhaps 'stock photographee bitch' is more accurate.
Interestingly, both Ali Samantha and Photographer Bitch have follower numbers that are still increasing. Chava has received an additional 200 followers since June when they were revealed to be fakes. I'm sure they're all real too.
An interesting tell with Medium (this happens on Twitter too) is that some of the accounts have a mismatch between their ID and the actual name. So Chava (photographee b) still has 'tunebelamari' in the URL.
This used to be the case with Samantha Ali, who used to have 'joiecooper2' as the URL.
It's interesting to see though that Ali Samantha has now had at least three iterations on Medium - Joie Cooper, Samantha Ali, and now Abegail Jacob.
We eagerly await the 4th coming
It is also worth noting that the Medium Identity doesn't necessarily relate to the Twitter identity. Remember, before Samantha was Samantha on Twitter she was Rebecca Klein, while on Medium she was Joeie Cooper. On Twitter Samantha is still Samantha, not Abegail
In terms of the pervasiveness of their discourse on Medium, especially regarding the Muslim Brotherhood, I invite you to search " Muslim Brotherhood" on Medium. For me, 8 out of the first 10 results are written by fake propaganda accounts (Zachary Weaver, Abegail and Chava)
So TL;DR is.
1) Fake accounts are still actively posting on Medium & Twitter (& are still verified)
2) Those accounts are engaging in evasive action to avoid detection
3) Followers are 'growing'
4) Search results about MB on Medium rank fake accounts highly
#disinformation