An astroturf campaign has been running on Twitter to defund the BBC. Although there are several legitimate movements to undo the Beeb, this one is being led by an account with the at-handle @defundBBC. The account was set up Sunday, the 7th of June, and had nearly 60k followers within 48 hours — nothing suspicious there.
A quick trawl through @defundBBC’s followers and I’d say 80% are fake accounts or bots.
The whole campaign was revealed by a disinformation specialist named Mark Owen Jones. He says the director of the campaign is James L Yucel, who is a student at Glasgow University.
Two other related accounts were set up within 24 hours — @DefundBBC_ and @EndBBC. All three accounts are running similar, generic messages.
Jones developed a graph analysis of the Twitter swarm surrounding the campaign. He looked at nearly 20,000 tweets from around 12,000 accounts. He found that most of the storm was created by retweeting @DefundBBC. The second most retweeted account in the swarm was the account of Laurence Fox – the actor from Netflix’s White Lines and famously from QuestionTime. Fox had been retweeting the account himself.
Other confirmed retweeters included a Breitbart reporter, a couple MPs, and someone from Celebrity Big Brother — I’ll leave it to listeners to guess (India Willoughby).