‘I was the most trolled person in the world’ – Meghan

Meghan Markle has said she was the “most trolled person” in the world, referring to the online abuse she received in 2019, a year she partially spent on maternity leave.

A report released by Twitter analytics provider Bot Sentinel indicates Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, were the target of a co-ordinated hate campaign on that platform, bolstering the couple’s claim of widespread harassment.

After analysing 114,000 tweets related to Harry and Meghan, Bot Sentinel identified 83 accounts that it alleges were behind 70pc of the more virulently anti-Sussex tweets.

The accounts had more than 187,000 combined followers and had the potential to reach 17 million other Twitter users, the report estimated.

Some of the tweets used coded racist language, according to Bot Sentinel, which said that Meghan, who is biracial, was the subject of about 80pc of the harassment.

The pattern that emerged from how these accounts interact with one another was not “organic”, the report said, suggesting a coordinated effort to amplify harassment of the royal couple.

Most of the hate tweets appeared to be generated by humans, said Bot Sentinel chief executive Christopher Bouzy.

“We looked for automated accounts and found very little evidence of bot activity,” he added.

Four of the 55 primary accounts pinpointed by the report have been suspended for violating the platform’s policies, according to a Twitter spokesperson, but the company said it found no evidence of “widespread coordination, the use of multiple accounts by single people or other platform manipulation tactics”.

Mr Bouzy said there was an observable drop in the activity targeting Meghan and Harry shortly after his report was published.

“If the activity had been organic, we wouldn’t have witnessed such a sharp decrease in that short period of time,” he added.

The operators of those accounts were savvy, he said, noting that they used measures such as temporarily making accounts private to help evade detection. (© Washington Post)

© Washington Post