How low can you go? An employee of the American Petroleum Institute, which supports the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, has apparently been setting up multiple fake Twitter accounts to give the illusion of grassroots support for their devilish enterprise. Brant Olson at the Rainforest Action Network's blog has investigated the accounts, which all popped up abruptly on the #tarsands hashtag.

Fourteen of those accounts are clearly fake. The simultaneous posts were all sent via the “Netvibes Official Widget” that allows users to post to multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. All fourteen accounts were established in the same week in July, most on the same day. Each of their avatars appear to have been pulled from the web. One was pulled from NebraskaDUILawyers.com. All use variations on very simple names (jimjohnson16, richhoward1) and have very similar “everyperson” type descriptions (“Environmentally and economically concerned citizen looking for real facts. We need to make wise choices in during these uncertain times [sic]“), and all tend to retweet one another, bombard journalists with favorable opinions on the KeystoneXL pipeline, and generally cheerlead for tar sands.

Things get much stranger from there. Well, they usually do when you follow the money. Brant connects the tweets to a former senator who now works for the American Petroleum Institute. Check out the full story HERE.

 

 

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