If there’s one thing racists know how to do, it’s doing racist crap. That’s what’s behind the royal family in Britain taking extra measures with its social media operation amid a rise in racist online abuse targeting the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle) in the months after the announcement of her pregnancy.
Here’s more via CNN:
Kensington Palace staff are devoting more resources to deleting comments targeting Meghan, and blocking abusive Twitter and Instagram accounts. Software is being used to filter out the use of the n-word as well as emojis of guns and knives.
As part of the effort, the royal family issued a set of guidelines last week for people engaging with its social media channels.
Separately, the advocacy group Hope Not Hate analyzed a sample of more than 5,000 tweets containing the most commonly used anti-Meghan hashtags. The analysis of the tweets, posted between January and the middle of February, shows that a tight-knit group of accounts is behind much of the trolling.
The story goes on to note that at least twenty accounts were responsible for about 70% of the tweets, sharing anti-Meghan hashtags, pictures and memes. The fact that such a small number of users generated such a large number of the tweets suggests that the accounts were created for the purpose of producing negative content about the duchess, Hope Not Hate said.
