Thread by @z3dster

The following account spread fake news and you should all stop following

it used to impersonate CNN and actively troll

I'll explain how I came to know this below

Starting the description doesn't add up and no youtube channel exists with that name

Questionable but thats not all, lets look at old tweets

You can run scripts that will delete your own old tweets, however as much as we may want it we don't have the ability to delete other people's tweets

In this case whomever is behind the account removed their old tweets

We know the account was created Feb 2016 but a search for tweet from the account before 12/31/2016 comes up blank

twitter.com/search?q=from%…

But we can also search tweet to that account in that time

twitter.com/search?q=to%3A…

In the search we can see old handles the account may have had based on the @'s

@/BBCBreakingnow

and

@/cnnbrkss

show up

Now how can we prove this account was 100% either of those account?

Twitter in the back end uses an ID number for each account that stays the same through handle changes

You can pull it out from the HTML or use a service to find via the backend interface (API)

Now we can go to archive.org and see if they have saved any pages from those previous handles and they have one page for cnnbrkss web.archive.org/web/2016110810…

if we check the html for that page and search for the id from the tweet above we find that sure enough same

We can see a few of the sort of tweets that page has deleted

So now we have proof that account used to pretend to be a fake CNN account and push fake news

Archive has nothing for BBCBreakingnow but that account is still live at that handle and follows 6 account, one of which is the PoliticsVideoChannel

We can query Twitter to find out when the accounts were created and ID

Can't prove it but I suspect whoever is behind Political Video also created this channel but found it less successful

They often used the fake CNN account to retweet the BBC one

There is zero reason Twitter knowing about the history of that account pretending to be CNN should allow the account to still be on the site

So please unfollow, retweet, and let anyone you know following it know to unfollow it

Using tweepdiff.com you can see who you know that if following that account, please share this thread with them