That tweet trolling a Muslim woman during the Westminster attack was actually by a Russian bot
On the day of the Westminster attack that left 6 dead, a Twitter troll shared an image of a Muslim woman on the phone, wrongly claiming she was ignoring the victims on the bridge:
Both the photographer and the woman in the image debunked @SouthLoneStar's account of the scene, saying it was taken out of context:
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Nonetheless, the tweet got over 1,800 likes and 1,600 retweets, picked up by alt-right personalities and white nationalists like Richard Spencer:
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Now, it turns out that this account that spews hatred and anti-Muslim sentiment to its 16,000+ followers is a Russian bot, which has since been closed by Twitter, according to Wired.
The report looks at a cache of posts from 2016 collected by New Knowledge, an American security startup, and reveals a network of Russian bots posting about "the Brexit vote, pictures of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn, anti-Muslim language around European terror attacks and racial slurs against refugees."
In June 2016, @SouthLoneStar, which claimed to be a "Proud TEXAN and AMERICAN patriot", tweeted about Brexit: "I hope UK after #BrexitVote will start to clean their land from muslim invasion!"
The account also appears in the Russian congressional investigation released by U.S. democrats.
Topics Cybersecurity
