🤖 1/ Ok this is pretty wild. I saw some sus pro-Israel astroturfing activity on a BBCNews Facebook post about aid arriving in Gaza. Lots of Hasbara comments like "Hamas will take the aid". The following 2 identical posts were side by side so I looked into it. #disinformation
2/ Specifically I looked at Dean O' Connor. Firstly up, there were two almost identical Dean O'connor pages, both created on consecutive days last week (15 + 16 May). The one that posted is the one on the right.
3/ When I reverse image searched the picture I was inundated with dozens of pages from forums about romance scams asking about people using this same picture. A lot of people scammed out of thousands. Someone even asked on Quora about O'Connor!
4/ The real person is Brigadier General John "Jack" O'Connor of the US Army. As a high-ranking officer he's pretty well known, and there are photos of him all over the Internet. Here is a legit one from the US Dept of Defense website!
5/ So far, I've found a FB page and two X accounts puporting to be John O Connor. The FB page is run from Vietnam (which is a red flag).
6/ The new "Dean O Connor" (Interesting the person is keeping the O Connor) even has a TikTok profile!
7/ I suspect there is a large astroturfing network here running some pro-Israel campaign. Somehow John O Connor's photos remain a favourite of fake account generators.
From Brigadier to Bot, quite a demotion.
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