Ottawa Citizen now claiming a coordinated social media campaign was directed to attack them while lauding the team and owner Melnyk
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...box=1542415345
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The accounts then began liking and retweeting each other’s posts and in short order a narrative began to unfold beneath the Globe and Mail post: The Senators were victims and the media — specifically the Citizen and the Sun — had treated the organization unfairly.
But that conversation would start to unravel before the evening was done, with other Twitter users criticizing some of those accounts.
It wasn’t because the court of public opinion had decided definitively one way or the other, it was because there was something curious about some of the accounts pushing the narrative: They didn’t appear to be real people.
Following the publication of the initial Uber-video story, a review by this newspaper found at least 20 contrived Twitter accounts, seemingly created to launch a co-ordinated disinformation campaign and to attack media coverage of the Sens while lauding the team and its owner Eugene Melnyk.
At least seven of those accounts went offline — either deleted or having blocked their tweets from public view — after questions about their authenticity were raised. The remaining accounts also stopped tweeting.
The episode, experts say, opens a window into how social media can be weaponized by unknown actors, even in a low-stakes environment.
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