{"id":33733,"date":"2018-04-25T09:45:31","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T14:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33733"},"modified":"2018-04-25T09:45:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T14:45:31","slug":"the-guardian-is-committing-journalistic-malpractice-by-not-retracting-this-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33733","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This\u00a0Claim"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This\u00a0Claim<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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On the 19th of April, The Guardian<\/em> published an article making the positive assertion that two Twitter accounts were run not by real people, but by automated bot software<\/a> based in Russia. Since the article was published, the owners of both accounts have stepped forward, on video, demonstrating in no uncertain terms that they are in fact real human beings and not software programs.<\/p>\n

As of this writing, days later, there has been neither retraction nor correction of the false claims made by The Guardian<\/em>, and the article<\/a> remains as published<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The article\u2019s author, Heather Stewart, makes the following claim:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne bot, @Ian56789, was sending 100 posts a day during a 12-day period from 7 April, and reached 23 million users, before the account was suspended. It focused on claims that the chemical weapons attack on Douma had been falsified, using the hashtag #falseflag. Another, @Partisangirl, reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Stewart explicitly asserts that the Twitter account @Ian56789 is a bot. That account\u2019s owner appeared for an interview<\/a> on Sky News<\/em>, completely disproving this assertion. Stewart also names the Twitter account @Partisangirl as a bot account. The account\u2019s owner, Maram Susli, is a well-known Syrian-Australian activist with many publicly available videos<\/a> and a Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n