A SIZEABLE percentage of the membership of The Majority, a Unionist campaign group and media outlet which claims to “expose Nationalist ideology”, is made up of fake accounts promoting escorts, marijuana delivery, and other services abroad, The National can reveal.
Analysis of the 100 most-recently active accounts on the site show that a massive 84% of them are clear fakes, with pictures being taken from stock websites, K-pop stars, and celebrity hairdressers among others.
Eleven of the 100 most-recently active accounts are possible fakes, with too little information offered to conclude either way. Just five of them, which includes the site’s founder Mark Devlin, are clearly real.
There is a total of 638 active members listed on The Majority’s site. The lower down the “recently active” ranking a person is registered, the more likely they are to be a real person.
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While the oldest users registered appear to be largely real, the list of the 400 most-recently active users is dominated by fake accounts selling essay writing services, aviation customer services, or escort services in India offering “fun, feeling and outstanding companionship”.
There is even one account promoting a marijuana delivery service in California, where the recreational use of the drug is legal.
Many accounts have profiles written in Dutch. They almost exclusively use an image of a young woman and claim to be working in technical support in Amsterdam for a multinational such as Google or Yahoo.
Three of the accounts written in Dutch claiming to work in tech support in Amsterdam
Others promote robot vacuum cleaners for sale in Australia, a blinds and curtains business in Dubai, or online casinos.
It is also possible to sort their member list by the users with the most “points”. When sorted by this metric, the website lists more than 2000 members, suggesting around 70% of the accounts registered are never used again, as they do not show up under “active accounts”.
A large number of these 2000 also appear to be fake bots, with randomly generated names and locations ranging across Europe and the wider world. Other than these two details, the accounts are empty.
Seemingly without exception, these empty accounts display the date registered, followed by “never” under the “last online” section of the profile.
Of The Majority’s 100 users with the most “points” on their account, just 15 are verified people.
The Majority did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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