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Piers Morgan has suggested he is considering taking legal action over a “defamatory” post claiming he paid for his Twitter followers.
The Good Morning Britain host has 7.5 million followers on the social media site, and is regularly in the headlines as a result of his divisive tweets.
However, on Thursday he was the subject of a thread alleging he could have paid for “fake” followers to boost his audience.
The thread – consisting of 22 posts by a user referring to themselves as Anonymous Journalist – accused him of having as many as 4.6 million “fake” followers.
In the thread, it was claimed that Piers could have paid for as many as 13 million followers, two thirds of which would have been removed by Twitter, although he has vehemently denied this.
“I don’t know who you are, but this is an absolute lie,” he fumed. “I have never bought a single Twitter follower, and wouldn’t know how.”
Looping in the official accounts for Twitter and Twitter UK, he added: “So I strongly suggest you delete this defamatory thread before I take further action.”
When one Twitter user asked him directly about so-called “bot” accounts, he insisted: “All high profile Twitter users have bot followers, and Twitter purges them occasionally (I’ve lost around a million followers in past 2yrs during these purges). But I have never bought a follower, that is a lie.”
The thread previously caught the attention of Piers’ rival, Lord Sugar, who even reached out to the anonymous Twitter user responsible for it directly:
Lord Sugar recently hit out at Piers on Twitter after it was revealed that the daytime star had been given a coronavirus test, which he was entitled to as a broadcaster who travels to work in the pandemic.
Piers tested negative for Covid-19, having previously experienced what he described as “a mild symptom” of the virus.