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Meghan Markle Trolls Turned Hate Into Estimated $3.5M Industry on YouTube
BY JACK ROYSTON ON 1/18/22 AT 1:00 PM EST
Meghan Markle was the target of a monetized hate campaign by 25 YouTube channels that earned an estimated $3.5 million from ad revenue, according to a data analysis agency.
The three most successful YouTube accounts trolling the Duchess of Sussex have earned around $494,729 over the duration of their existence, a report by Bot Sentinel calculated.
One also made racially charged comments about Dodi al-Fayed, Princess Diana's Middle Eastern boyfriend at the time of her death, saying: "You just know they're gonna be covered in hair all over their body a bit like, you know, an ape."
The estimated incomes were based on YouTube Studio revenue inadvertently revealed by one account, Yankee Wally, in an online video, as Newsweek reported in December.
Yankee Wally's data showed she earned around £2,503.84 (more than $3,300) in a single month in November last year and had "Revenue Per Mille," or earnings per 1,000 views, of $7.
The company used that figure to estimate total earnings for the three biggest anti-Meghan channels across all their videos.
The same formula was applied to a broader group of 25 channels to produce an estimate of $3.5 million across 497.5 million views.
Bot Sentinel's report stated: "According 2taz, Murky Meg, and Yankee Wally aren't the only YouTube channels focused predominantly on disparaging Meghan Markle.
"We were able to identify at least 25 similar YouTube channels with a combined 497+ million views and an estimated $3.48 million in total YouTube earnings."
It added: "In 2019, Yankee Wally, Murky Meg, and According 2taz began creating low-quality YouTube videos targeting Harry and Meghan.
"The trio created hate-filled and mostly inaccurate videos to monetize conspiracy theories about Harry and Meghan.
"The three YouTube channels had a combined 70+ million views, and an estimated $494,729 in total YouTube earnings."
The report describes how Yankee Wally made racially charged comments in her videos, including about women of color and Middle Eastern men.
In a October 11, 2021, video, titled "The Mystery & Middle East Connections of #meghanmarkle," she said: "I didn't think Dodi al-Fayed was good looking at all in fact I thought he was rather awful looking. He had that billiard ball head.
"Nappy hair, I don't like that. And you know, you just know they're gonna be covered in hair all over their body a bit like, you know, an ape and I really, really don't like that either."
Dodi Fayed died alongside Princess Diana in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, while their car was being followed by the paparazzi.
A July 23, 2019, video by Yankee Wally was titled, "Meghan Markle is uncultured, uncivil spoilt and rude. But she CAN see 500 yds with her rat-eyes!"
Another video titled, "there's a very dangerous organisation formed, to demolish the Monarchy. we must act fast," included a list of pro-Sussex Twitter accounts.
Yankee Wally said: "These are aggressive people you know. They are, they're WOCs that have got a chip on their shoulder bigger than you'll ever, well, you know what they're like. They just get off on hate."
WOC is an acronym that stands for "women of color."
The report stated: "In this video, Yankee Wally shared a list she believed was filled with women of color, and she wanted her subscribers/followers to target the women on the list."
Elsewhere, the three YouTube accounts shared conspiracy theories about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, including suggesting that the duchess faked her first pregnancy.
The Bot Sentinel report reads: "Based on the data and extensive evidence we collected, our research has revealed a sustained coordinated campaign to defame Harry and Meghan, and tarnish their brand.
"The campaign spans several social media platforms across multiple continents, and the key participants are predominantly Caucasian women between the ages of 38 and 65.
"Racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators of the core group. Subgroups are driven primarily by their hatred of Meghan Markle, taking their cues from the core group.
"The bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theories they believe are reminiscent of QAnon, but the hate and vitriol they spread would classify them as a hate group."
Yankee Wally told Newsweek in an email: "I object to ALL of those allegations. That's a gross invasion of privacy."
After a story about her earnings in December, she added: "Every year I have to fill in a tax return for USA. Failure to do so results in deduction of 40 percent.
"I always complete mine so I pay 20 percent. 41 percent of all ad revenue goes to YouTube, I'm 65 and retired, not on any government benefits.
"The income varies greatly. I've earned as little as $700 a month. Now that Bouzy has continued to use his twitter account to say I'm a 'hate' account, I'm feeling less inclined to make videos at all.
"Regarding Meghan Markle; hate is too strong an emotion to waste on someone that I just don't like."
Newsweek has reached out to Murky Meg and According 2taz for comment.
Newsweek has also approached Google, owner of YouTube.
Meghan Markle trolls are turning YouTube hate accounts into a big money industry, netting millions across 25 channels, a data analyst estima
woah
I wonder (hope!!!) wether this has to do with:
[image description] tweet by Christopher Bouzy(@cbouzy):
We are working on another exclusive. Hate accounts were not alone, and they had help spreading their toxicity. Stay tuned...
(btw I love that this gif comes up when you search for o_o )
Twitter Data Has Revealed A Coordinated Campaign Of Hate Against Meghan Markle
A concentrated set of users drive 70% of the hate contgent targeting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, a new analysis found.
Ellie Hall
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on October 26, 2021, at 1:20 p.m. ET
Taylor Hill / WireImage
Prince Harry and Meghan visit New York City on Sept. 23, 2021.
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have long cited social media toxicity as a factor in their decision to step back from royal life. And now, an analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about the couple has revealed a coordinated campaign of targeted harassment of Meghan on Twitter — and the 83 accounts responsible for approximately 70% of the negative and often hateful content.
On Tuesday, Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel released a report examining Twitter activity related to the Sussexes and found that the majority of the hate and misinformation about the couple originated from a small group of accounts whose primary, if not sole, purpose appears to be to tweet negatively about them. Bot Sentinel’s analysis also revealed a level of sophistication and coordination between the accounts, who use their combined 187,631 followers to fuel a campaign of negativity against Harry and Meghan.
A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday that they are “actively investigating the information and accounts referenced in this report — we will take action on accounts that violate the Twitter Rules.”
The couple currently does not have a social media presence on any platform (neither does Archewell, their charitable foundation and production company). Meghan told Fortune in October 2020 that she hadn’t been on social media in a long time “for [her] own self-preservation.” In a January interview, Harry said that he and Meghan “will revisit social media when it feels right for us — perhaps when we see more meaningful commitments to change or reform.”
Bot Sentinel is a crowdfunded website and browser plug-in created in 2018 to analyze the activity of Twitter accounts and identify those that violate the platform's terms of service. It evaluates an account and assigns it a score based on the likelihood that the account is either run by a bot or by someone engaging in targeted harassment, trolling, or other behavior banned by Twitter’s rules. Past analyses by Bot Sentinel include the right-wing campaign to discredit the results of the 2020 American election, accounts behind COVID-19 disinformation, and online abuse toward UK football players after the team lost in the Euro 2020 final.
Bot Sentinel CEO Christopher Bouzy told BuzzFeed News that this anti-Meghan Twitter campaign is unlike anything he and his team have ever seen before.
Meghan and Harry in black and white in Bath, England
Max Mumby / Getty Images
“There’s no motive,” he said, comparing the anti-Meghan campaign to other disinformation and harassment campaigns on Twitter such as the #StopTheSteal movement to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election or the campaign to remove actor Amber Heard from the upcoming Aquaman sequel as a result of abuse allegations made against her by ex-husband Johnny Depp. “Are these people who hate her? Is it racism? Are they trying to hurt [Harry and Meghan’s] credibility? Your guess is as good as ours.”
In the report, Bot Sentinel includes examples of tweets from this group of 83 users that violate Twitter’s terms of service against targeted harassment. BuzzFeed News received an advance copy of the Bot Sentinel report and the list of users identified within it and found hundreds of additional tweets that violate Twitter’s rules.
Twitter’s terms of service forbid abusive behavior and engagement “that harasses or intimidates, or is otherwise intended to shame or degrade others” and prohibit social coordination between accounts that results in harm to others or that encourages dogpiling.
Bouzy emphasized that the negative Twitter activity is not fueled by automated bot accounts, but real accounts run by humans.
“This campaign comes from people who know how to manipulate the algorithms, manipulate Twitter, stay under the wire to avoid detection and suspension,” he said. “This level of complexity comes from people who know how to do this stuff, who are paid to do this stuff.”
The front page of the Bot Sentinel report
Bot Sentinel / Via botsentinel.com
Bouzy said the users targeting Meghan and Harry are operating “in a more clever way than we normally see.” He said their hateful tweets are mixed in with tweets that do not violate Twitter’s terms of service, making these accounts harder for Bot Sentinel to automatically detect.
Bouzy told BuzzFeed News that it’s easier for these single-purpose anti-Sussex accounts to also avoid detection because they pair their negative content about Harry and Meghan that violate the terms of service with positive comments about other members of the royal family, particularly Harry’s brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
For this report, Bot Sentinel used hashtags and specific royal or Sussex-related keywords, such as #HarryandMeghan and #MeghanMarkle, to identify a sample group of 114,000 tweets.
Bot Sentinel identified 55 “primary accounts” responsible for the vast majority of original and derivative negative content against Meghan. Another 28 users were flagged as “secondary accounts” that primarily amplify the tweets of the first group. According to Bot Sentinel’s analysis, these 83 accounts are responsible for 70% of the negative hate content targeting the couple on Twitter. In the report, Bot Sentinel estimates that the accounts have a combined potential reach of at least 17 million Twitter users.
BuzzFeed News examined the timelines of these 55 primary accounts and found tweets with clear racial undertones, one calling for Meghan’s death, as well as posts claiming that she faked her pregnancy and that her children were either born via surrogate or are not real.
“There’s a difference between free speech and literally harassing someone,” Bouzy said.
The report states that 40% of the primary accounts listed have been previously suspended by Twitter, and Bouzy said that most of the primary accounts engage in behavior specifically to avoid suspension, such as making their accounts private or temporarily deactivating them, only to return days later.
“What these accounts are doing — they’re really flying under the wire,” Bouzy said. “They’re right at the edge. They’re doing things our technology isn’t going to catch.”
Once these primary accounts were identified, Bot Sentinel looked for accounts that would quickly share their content and identified 28 separate anti-Meghan-and-Harry accounts whose Twitter activity showed hundreds of retweets from accounts in the first group.
Further analysis of followers, retweets, mentions, and other interactions between these 83 identified accounts indicated a high level of coordination between them. Many of the tweets from these accounts violate Twitter’s policies against coordinated harmful activity, which, among other things, prohibit accounts from encouraging their followers to engage in targeted harassment. One of the primary accounts in the list, @duchofnarsussex, has openly recruited individuals to join an anti-Meghan-and-Harry “intelligence agency” to “end the House of Monte-Shite-SO” (the Sussexes live in Montecito, California). The person behind the account, who declined to provide their name, told BuzzFeed News that it was created “for fun” and that “these things are being taken as literal and they are nothing more than jokes.”
“These primary and secondary accounts are pushing [hate and disinformation] out, and then it’s being taken over by organic hate,” Bouzy said. “You have the ringleaders, then the secondary accounts, and then an outside network that also amplifies and pushes a certain narrative.”
John Lamparski / Getty Images,
The Duchess of Sussex speaks onstage in New York on Sept. 25, 2021.
Bouzy said that although he was aware of the campaign against Meghan before this report, the impetus for the investigation came after he shared a positive tweet about the Sussexes that resulted in him personally receiving hateful messages from anti-Meghan accounts.
When Bouzy tweeted that Bot Sentinel would be launching an investigation into anti-Sussex accounts on Twitter, he became the target of a full-fledged harassment campaign unlike anything he or his team had experienced before, he told BuzzFeed News.
While every investigation pursued by the company garners hate tweets and sometimes even death threats, he said, the targeted harassment from anti-Meghan accounts was “different” and “personal.”
Bouzy said that accounts spammed his timeline and mass-reported him to Twitter (encouraging their followers to do so as well), all while sharing false allegations about him and Bot Sentinel in an attempt to preemptively discredit the report’s findings.
BuzzFeed News made a request for comment to Twitter about the accounts identified in this report on Monday. By Tuesday morning, 4 of the 83 accounts had been suspended and 6 had made their accounts private, a tactic that Bouzy said is often used by abusive accounts to prevent other users from reporting their tweets.
“This is a game they play with Twitter, and they know exactly what they’re doing,” Bouzy said.
A concentrated set of users drive 70% of the hate content targeting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, a new analysis found.