An enormous pro-China Twitter mob descended on Houston Rocket’s General Manager Daryl Morey after his ill-fated Hong Kong tweet and, in the process, thrust the NBA into the hotspot, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Morey was the victim of what experts say is a massive, coordinated assault after his Oct. 4 tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters, the report noted, citing a review of about 170,000 tweets directed at the NBA executive. Experts are not ruling out the possibility that the full-throated attack was state-sponsored.
Operation – Clemson – University – Researcher – Darren
“I’m not saying this is a state-affiliated operation,” Clemson University researcher Darren Linvill told TheWSJ on Wednesday. “But I’ve only seen so many brand-new accounts used at one time when it was a state-affiliated operation.”
Much of the action happened during the daytime in China, TheWSJ noted.
TheWSJ – Analysis – Tweets – Morey – Oct
TheWSJ based its analysis on the 168,907 tweets directed at Morey between Oct. 4 and Oct. 10 that were collected by Linvill and his Clemson colleague, Patrick Warren.
Morey’s account was inundated with comments from pro–Chinese government accounts in the 12 hours after he posted his tweet, which championed Hong Kong’s fight for freedom. The tweets mentioned him more than 16,000 times, Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted in a separate analysis of Morey’s tweets.
Nimmo – Problem – Solution – Troll – Mob
Nimmo said the problem does not have an easily solution since it was a troll mob.
“It looks like there were humans at the keyboard for many of these posts,” he told reporters. “This wasn’t primarily a bot swarm. It was a troll mob. Which is a lot harder to deal with.”…