Twitter accounts posing as feminists and posting outrageous messages to discredit the movement are common. At Maldita.es we have already told you about several of them and how they can become disinformation. One of these profiles that we have detected is that of @AndaluciaCortesof which we have denied that a poster that spread about an alleged act of Yolanda Díaz together with Mertxe Aizpurua in the Miguel Ángel Blanco pavilion in Ermua (Vizcaya) was real.
If we analyze the profile we can see that follow the same modus operandi what other troll accounts. In addition, the name she has on is Trinidad Mendizábal Novo, that of another account of this type (which no longer exists) and the cover photo is the one used by the profile, also a troll, @LCortesHurtado, who called herself Lucía Cortés stolen and is currently suspended.
Use the name and photo of other profiles that we have told you about in Maldita.es
The name of this account is Trinidad Mendizábal Novo and the handle (the name that goes after the at sign), is @AndaluciaCortes. Trinidad Mendizábal Novo was the name of another troll account (@TrinidadNovo) that we already warned you about on Maldita.es, whose profile went viral for posting messages like this: “We must open the melon of the decriminalization of postpartum abortion. There are women who end up in jail for disposing of their babies after birth. We need a law that exempts women from the charge of homicide if the babies are male under one year “.
The search for that name, Trinidad Mendizábal Novo, was unsuccessful, no trace or fingerprint of any person so named, beyond the Twitter account. That same account changed from handle later and became @LCortesHurtado instead of @TrinidadNovo. We can verify this by searching for tweets from that account through the WayBack Machine tool.
Screenshots from Twitter and from a version archived on the WayBack Machine.
The account we are talking about now, @AndaluciaCortes, mix elements of that previous account before and after changing the name: She calls herself Trinidad Mendizábal Novo and uses the profile picture she had when she was renamed Lucía Cortés Hurtado. At that time her cover photo was the logo of the Por Andalucía party and she now uses the name of this autonomous community in her handle.
That profile picture actually belongs to a teacher from the Central University “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas, in Cuba, as we can see in the portal researchgate. Her name is Lucía Argüelles Cortés and not Lucía Cortés Hurtado or Trinidad Mendizábal Novo.
As we say, at Maldita.es we have alerted you to several of these accounts, but their usernames are constantly changing. Even when Twitter finds them and shuts them down for breaking their community standards, they appear again with very similar names and descriptions with a single objective: to create controversy in the name of feminism.
Interact with other troll and parody accounts
It is common for these types of accounts to interact with each other to gain visibility and reach as many people as possible. This profile does too.
For example, in this tweet that we deny about an alleged act by the Second Vice President of the Government and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, in Ermua (Vizcaya) mentioned other troll accounts like Rosario or Toñi Gómez.
She also interacts with accounts that call themselves “parodies”, like this one that uses the journalist’s name Rosa Villacastin or this other one who calls himself Marga Jimenez.
Capture of interactions of the @AndaluciaCortes account with other troll and “parody” accounts.
The problem with these accounts is that, although they call themselves “parody” or even on occasion refer to the fact that they use the account “with irony”, their contents become viral as real and not only on Twitter, but also jump to other networks such as Facebook or WhatsApp in the form of a screenshot.
