Posts were sent using Hootsuite, a mass-posting tool. Account registered to 1 person with 4 assigned contributors.
Despite the @DHSCgovuk reply to my queries of 'no comment' (and that's all she wrote), that person is a contracted Government employee temporarily assigned to this department.
They declined.
I asked to deal directly with their Soc Med and Comms team to work through the data.
They declined.
Our digging continues.
After all, who cares about industrial scale misinformation in the face of so many deaths?
I quoted "28 fake #NHS Staff accounts" for clarity.
In actuality, there are 128 confirmed, 9 probables and 14 possibles, and amongst those, there are 16 which do not claim an #NHS connection.
43 accounts use actual photos of actual NHS staff.
"43 accounts use actual photos of actual NHS staff."
Of which I have contacted a mere handful, 7, and confirmed that their identities were being used without authorisation.
Reason for only 7 contacted ? They're understandably a bit busy right now.
The accounts have now mostly gone, not suspended by Twitter but deleted by the account holder(s) in one simultaneous mass cull a few days ago ... At the click of a button.
Which itself, goes to prove the singular control of all the accounts.
When we state 'DHSC', to clarify, this is either directly, or indirectly via a ''Marketing Agency'' set up a few months ago with one client (guess who) and three staff (all ex DHSC). A poor attempt at deniability.
DHSC and various NHS Trusts seem to show no interest in the welfare of the genuine staff members who's identities have been lifted and used for Government Propaganda.
Surely 'Duty of Care' comes into it?
No interest in the data when I offered.
The accounts originally pushed for the 'herd immunity'. In later days they changed tack and were were pushing for the country to 'open up again'.
Not to much of a stretch that the operation was to test the waters for a change in policy. Just a theory.
It was dismissed out of hand.
All confirmatory. at first glance but demands further analysis.
This is not new. The methods, the technology, the tools, all used before by the various #Brexit Campaigns.
What's different here is the scale, and almost certain Government Department involvement, either officially or 'under the radar'.
The data is still being analysed. More data is coming in. It's complex and needs to be packaged up into form understandable by non-geeks (no small task) And then gold plated.
In addition, I recall well how the whistleblower for the Cambridge Analytica scandal was crucified, publicly. I seek to avoid that, as you can imagine.
We, as a team, need to do more work and take legal advice. We do this in our spare time (we all have jobs, mostly)