Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), tweets daily out of WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. But within minutes of many of his tweets going live, he is flooded with personal attacks, memes, and slurs.
While social networks like Twitter should be a space for legitimate criticism of institutions like the WHO, messages spread by inauthentic accounts en masse and in a coordinated manner distort public debate and prevent honest discussion in the digital space.
We therefore wanted to find out: Do the tweets targeting Dr. Ghebreyesus’s account come from inauthentic accounts, or genuine human frustration? What types of attacks are addressed at Tedros, and are there patterns that might hint to a larger coordinated network of accounts? In scraping a collective 15,000+ tweets from over the course of two months, we attempt to answer these questions, and to illuminate how Twitter disinformation disrupts the activities of one of the world’s most prominent public health officials.
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Source: WHO Director-General Attacked on Twitter with CCP-Related Memes – bellingcat