Report suggests Harry, Meghan fell prey to vicious smear campaign online

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle became subject to intense bullying through a concerted smear campaign online, latest report suggests.

As revealed by the findings of the new analytics report that analysed 114,000 tweets, the royal couple had 83 accounts trolling them.

On Tuesday, October 26, Bot Sentinel shared that the 83 accounts were responsible for more than 70% of the vicious comments.

"Using internal and 3rd party analytic tools, we estimate a combined unique potential reach of 17,000,000 users," the Bot Sentinel explained in its report.

Bot Sentinel discovered a link between the accounts by tracking additional elements such as retweets and mentions.

The company further elaborated, "We used friend/follower connections, retweets, and mentions to identify accounts that were part of the same hate network. Our research revealed these accounts were brazenly coordinating on the platform, and at least one account was openly recruiting people to join their hate initiative on Twitter."

According to the report, Twitter suspended multiple accounts for targeting the couple, but they used strategies to escape suspension, including adding "parody" to their profiles.

As the report summarized, "Others would use racist coded language about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to avoid detection," Bot Sentinel said in the report. "We also observed several accounts either lock or completely deactivate their profiles to preserve their accounts."