900 false Twitter accounts campaigned against independence, says Spanish daily

Starting in 2014, over 900 false Twitter accounts posted almost a quarter of a million messages against the Catalan independence movement, with 299 of the accounts still active this week, a report by the Spanish newspaper El País claimed on Wednesday.

The investigation by the daily says thousands of tweets using hashtags such as #vullsaber and #quierosaber (#iwanttoknow in Catalan and Spanish) flooded the platform to question Catalan independence as part of an orchestrated campaign.

The messages, says the newspaper, were not from real individuals with legitimate accounts, but came from an office in the city of Olivos in Argentina as part of the so-called 'Operación Némesis' (Operation Nemesis), aimed at undermining support for independence.

Claiming to have had access to a database of 922 false Twitter accounts and 246,000 tweets, El País says the campaign lasted for months, and above all promoted Societat Civil Catalana, an association of groups that oppose Catalonia's independence.

The number of false messages involved would make Operation Nemesis the largest campaign to influence social media ever carried out in Spain, although the newspaper also says it is difficult to judge its full impact on social media users.

The revelations come on the heels of a recent scandal in which Barcelona football club is accused of paying the same company to post messages on Facebook to discredit the rivals of current president, Josep Maria Bartomeu.