It’s no secret that MTV are consistently ranked 3rd in Lebanon, behind LBCI and Al Jadeed. I’ve published the ratings on this blog on multiple occasions, and will post more recent ones tonight or tomorrow once I finish going through them.

It’s so obvious the ratings and viewership lie won’t work, that MTV has chosen to abandon their attempts to say they’re the first (in terms of viewership, or ratings) and decided to come up with the bullshit argument that their audience is “high quality” instead. This for me was the first victory: having their CEO admit they aren’t the most viewed, nor the best rated, never were and hopefully never will, and instead claim (falsely) that they are the most expensive ad slot cause their viewers have more purchasing power.

However, even MTV’s most staunch fans need some sort of facade to believe the TV station’s outlandish, unfounded claims. One way they have been doing that, is by creating Twitter accounts that only tweet when one of their prime time shows airs. I was able to isolate a few dozen of these accounts, but I expect there’s a lot more. I excluded people who might be real, and just tweeting on the hashtag to get a prize.

The Mysterious Accounts

Below I’ve attached a few screenshots of the accounts. What’s interesting is it doesn’t seem to be bots, but some poor soul who is forced to manually tweet from the different accounts when the show airs, in order to try and make their hashtag trending.

Some accounts have a profile picture and cover photo, others have one of those and some have neither.

What’s also interesting, is that these accounts only tweet phrases or emoji with the show’s hashtag, and sometimes, the spelling mistakes are exactly the same, suggesting someone was copy-pasting an initial message while overlooking the typo.

I’m not sure if they don’t know about bots, or they thought these accounts would seem more authentic, but whoever handles those accounts deserves a raise for the painstaking work they do. It’s also important to note that they delete the tweets of some of these accounts after an episode of the show airs, making it extra suspicious. If it’s super fans creating a twitter accounts to post 3–4 tweets on the hashtag exclusively, then delete them after the show, it’s clear these tweets were meant to poison the hashtag and make it seem like it’s trending and popular, when it’s not.

Of course, many of the users just join the hashtag to win whatever prize is being offered, I did not include these accounts in my research. Here are 10 example accounts. Look through their tweets, follows/followers and likes and tell me what you think

Misleading?

Honestly, I’m not surprised MTV might be doing that. They’ve done much worse before. I’m just glad that after what they did to Ghayd from El 3ama, more and more people see clearly now what kind of business it is, and why it’s important they make less ad money to fund their mouthpiece that threatens many Lebanese people’s way of life.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that they’re doing that on purpose, or with malicious intent, it’s just too suspicious to ignore. If the people who run their social media have a better explanation, then I’m all ears. However, fake or not, malicious or unwitting, it just shows that the hashtag isn’t as popular as they portray it to be, and that was clear in the “i love MTV” hashtag that was mainly their employees, and people making fun of them.

El 3ama Isn’t MTV’s First Offense

The “ayamserious” account on Instagram had over 30,000 followers, until it made fun of Anabella Hilal and was removed by MTV. It’s still not back.

MTV have a history of being anti freedom of expression, even though they were once victims of unjust and unfair censorship. It’s because of them that many people got arrested for tweets that otherwise would have never been seen. It’s also their MO to shut people up who make fun of them, hiding behind copyright laws when they crop content watermarks from other creators, and claim them as their own, whether is videos, pictures or even jokes, without attributing the original creator, and making money off of it too. A serious copyright infringement if I ever saw one.

I’ll post the ratings, broken down into several categories, tomorrow morning. Stay tuned