Are vested interests running dark influence campaigns in Ireland to disrupt discussion of housing crisis and property tax?
Are vested interests running dark influence campaigns in Ireland to disrupt discussion of housing crisis and property tax?
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I put up this podcast today, and discussing the twitter handle [https://twitter.com/banshorttermlet](https://twitter.com/banshorttermlet).
This account was created two years ago, but only started tweeting in the last month, at a vast rate, up to 180 tweets per hour, throughout the day. It is also clear that it is spoofing its originating device identification.
This is evident from analysis using [https://accountanalysis.app](https://accountanalysis.app) and [https://new.tweetstats.com/](https://new.tweetstats.com/), you can run it yourself. The content of the tweets is highly repetitive, and is repeatedly used to divert any discussion of the housing crisis – particularly the role of vacant properties – onto discussion of Airbnb.
Given that homes used for Airbnb amount to less than 1 per cent of the number of vacant residential properties, the amount of attention that Airbnb gets is suspicious, to say the least. The BanShortTermLets account is clearly a highly-dedicated, and probably professional operation.
Is it getting too paranoid to think that someone with an interest in disrupting the discussion around vacant property and the housing crisis is using this to hype attention onto a minor side-issue? It [wouldn’t](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) be [the](https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham) first [time](https://web.archive.org/web/20220522095254/https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2010/08/9328/are-oil-companies-greenwashing-gulf-coast-cleanup?qt-more=0).