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About the Cambrian News
The Cambrian News is a weekly paper circulated in Wales, established in 1860 and headquartered in Aberystwyth. Known to many for their headlines.
Online Comments
The online version of the newspaper has recently been besieged by a bigoted, xenophobic troll going by the handle 'FredEvans'.
The comments go against the Terms and Conditions set out by the Cambrian News community rules yet they seem unable or unwilling to take action.
'Fred' has become a talking point offline, having been in conversation with people asking "does anyone know who this Fred is?"
Looking at the comments
Between the 9th December 2022 and 31st August 2023 'FredEvans' has left a surprising 2,630 comments over 1,142 articles.
The volume of comments ever increasing, with a notable uptake around August of 2023.
'Fred' has clearly been busy and leaving so many comments can be time consuming. The graph below shows which days and time 'Fred' leaves comments.
Are all of 'Freds' comment bigoted?
Running all of 'Freds' comments through Sentiment Analysis shows that 67% of their comments are negative.
Top keywords
The word cloud below (everyone loves a word cloud) shows 'Freds' most used words.
Getting Triggered
'Fred' is selective and doesn't comment on all posts. To determine which articles trigger them, I clustered articles based on similarity and extracted the top keywords from those clusters.
Don't feed the trolls
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
While the Cambrian News has permitted 'Fred' to persist in spreading hateful views, several users have chosen to mimic 'Fred' by establishing accounts under the same handle to post contrasting opinions.
Engagement with 'Fred' has resulted in more comments by them.
Interestingly many of these accounts have a short response times to 'Freds' comments.
Worth mentioning is an account under the handle 'Lea Shore,' which often holds views similar to 'Fred' and is quick to respond to comments. Over half of the comments from this account are considered negative.
Could 'Fred' be operating multiple accounts? The available data is insufficient to confirm this. Could this situation be an example of "correlation does not imply causation"? Quite likely.
So who is 'FredEvans'?
I don't know nor do I care. But here is how midjourney imagines what 'Fred' might look like.
Hopefully the Cambrian News finds a way to mitigate the trolls soon.