The ‘Mossad’ Twitter Account That Fooled the World

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By day, Shawn Eni is a mild-mannered Canadian living in Modi’in and working in business software. By night, and also a little bit by day, he runs a Mossad parody account on Twitter that seems to regularly fool a whole lot of people.

Eni started the account as a joke, of course, in September 2016. He never really thought anybody would take it seriously – after all, he was poking fun not at the Mossad itself, but at those on Twitter who blamed Israel’s intelligence agency for all sorts of bizarre things.

“People who are anti-Israel usually blame the Mossad for whatever,” said Eni in a phone interview on Monday. “Among them stealing shoes, and sharks and vultures.”

So Eni started cracking jokes about the silly conspiracies, and began to gain a loyal following. But he never imagined he’d reach where he is today – more than 46,000 followers, and a slew of interactions with prominent accounts who seem to think he really represents the Mossad.

“I thought it would be an inside joke among the Israeli social media circle,” he said, “and then it really took off when I answered Linda Sarsour.”

Sarsour, the well-known and controversial pro-Palestinian activist, tweeted in August: “I just lost all my text threads? I have an iPhone. Any idea why?” Eni’s account simply quoted Sarsour’s tweet and wrote: “Yes.” It remains one of the account’s most popular tweets to date, with more than 3,600 retweets and over 8,000 likes.

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