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Accounts on Twitter resharing a post about journalism failing to capture the mood of the country is a coordinated bot effort. We cannot find evidence for this. Over the weekend, it was suggested that there might have been coordinated effort from a number of Twitter accounts to share a part of a viral post about UK journalists missing the mood of the country. Some on Twitter have also claimed this was the work of bots. The post these supposedly suspicious tweets quote from was brought to prominence last week when a screenshot of it was shared by Alan Sugar on Twitter, but it had been circulating on Facebook before that. Other versions of the post had also appeared previously on Twitter too. The most widely shared section of the post reads: Journalism is missing the mood in this great country of ours - the United Kingdom. We do not want or need blame. We do not want constant criticism of our Government who are doing their very best in a very difficult and unprecedented global emergency As we’ve discussed before, copy and paste posts like these are unlikely to be bot activity. The accounts sharing this message have very little in common—they were created at varying dates, have tweeted about different topics prior to sharing the tweet, and took different approaches to sharing the post’s content, some just sharing one part of the post while others shared larger parts, or added their own opinions or feelings. Also, relatively few accounts are actually sharing the post on Twitter. The original post these tweets quote from encourages people to share its sentiment, so it’s likely people are just following this instruction. First Draft News’s article on how to spot a bot is a helpful guide to whether something is legitimate bot activity. Hear us talk through this fact check on our weekly podcast. Listen
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