Who was behind the NHS Susan Tory propaganda account?

Somebody has been stealing the identity of NHS staff in order to set up fake Twitter accounts to sow public confusion and support the government narrative of the day, whatever it happens to be.

These fake NHS worker accounts began by pushing the pseudo-scientific "herd immunity" strategy before switching purpose to begin pushing for the easing of coronavirus restrictions - which will obviously lead to another wave of deaths if it's done before the government has developed the capacity to carry out mass testing and contact tracing.

The "NHS Susan" account was one of them, which posed as a pro-EU, disabled, trans, junior doctor who was pushing a #BanTheClap campaign to stop people clapping for the NHS on Thursdays.

The intention was clearly to sow confusion and create a fake veneer of medical approval towards policies and ideas that the vast majority or real NHS staff would strongly object to.
But it was always completely fake because the photograph that was used on the "NHS Susan" account is actually a picture of a Greek nurse called Mia who was featured in an article about the valuable contribution of foreign medical workers in the NHS.

An independent investigator from Far Right Watch has claimed that "NHS Susan" was part of a botnet of at least 128 propaganda accounts, all operated from a single Hootsuite account.

The Hootsuite account is reportedly registered to a single individual, with three others having permission to post, although the exact identities and employment details of these individuals hasn't yet been revealed.

The investigator hasn't released the bot operators' identities yet, but they claim to have contacted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), asking questions, and offering to share the data they've collected on the propaganda botnet for the purposes of internal investigation, but they've said they've been given the cold shoulder.

You would have thought that at the very minimum the DHSC would have a duty of care towards NHS employees who have had their identities stolen, but apparently nobody there is even remotely interested in investigating what's been going on.

One thing that did happen was that when people started investigating who was behind these bots, the Tory propaganda accounts like "NHS Susan" were instantly killed off.

It seems highly unlikely the mainstream media will pay any attention to this pro-Tory disinformation campaign, just like they ignored the massive orchestrated Tory election fraud on election day 2019, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the bizarre antics at the Department of Education when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings were running the show there.

In the wake of the initial revelations the DHSC has launched an extraordinary counter-campaign replying to every verified Twitter account to have Tweeted about the scandal with a copy n' paste assertion that "these claims are categorically false" and a link to a web page that doesn't actually contradict a single one of the claims.

It's absolutely undeniable that fake accounts like "NHS Susan" were created by somebody, and that they stole the identity of real NHS staff for the profile pictures, so the claim that the story is "categorically false" is blatantly untrue.

Perhaps some of the assertions aren't exactly correct (we'll see soon enough if/when additional data is released), but the kernel of the story, the fake pro-Tory Twitter accounts, is undeniably true because people have got the screenshots, so it's simply a lie to say the whole thing is "categorically false", especially when not a shred of counter-evidence has actually been produced.

A more sensible and less partisan approach from the DHSC would have been to announce an investigation into who was behind the fake NHS accounts, and to categorically condemn the theft of NHS staff members' identities (who, after all, are their own employees).

The fact that the DHSC has gone down the road of blanket denial, whilst offering no condemnation of the identity theft, and providing no counter-evidence whatever to actually undermine the claims does look deeply suspicious.

There will be more revelations about this Tory propaganda botnet later today, hopefully including the exact identities of the individuals who have been operating it.

The account to follow for more information is John O'Connell.

Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees what's been shared. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.

I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.

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