Tony Khan: Anti-AEW sentiment online driven by staff running thousands of accounts, signal boosting

This story was updated at 5 PM Eastern.

The online vitriol between fans defending the respective WWE and AEW products on social media is a daily occurence in pro wrestling, but Tony Khan says he knows why that is: an online campaign against his company.

The AEW head took to Twitter Friday to claim that “an independent study has confirmed that much of the staunch anti-AEW online community aren’t real individuals, it’s a staff running thousands of accounts + an army of bots to signal boost them. Look closely, these aren’t real people. Who’d pay for such a *wildly* expensive thing?”

Khan then went on to tweet “Research this one yourselves. You internet detectives thrive in these situations.” before plugging Friday’s edition of Rampage.

Several minutes later, he kept going.

Several minutes after that, he questioned why so many of those accounts were just tweets and replies.

The source of the independent study, or the study itself, that was cited in the original tweet wasn’t identified by Khan.

On Wrestling Observer Live, Bryan Alvarez said that Khan had commissioned the study and observed afterward that Khan owned his own analytics company. Khan said he is using an independent person to do the study and not his own which we incorrectly attributed to Alvarez earlier.

Wrestling Inc. reached out to Khan for comment and got the following response:

“Waiting for final study but here’s what my expert confirmed. It’s people with real live accounts making posts and then using their bots to manipulate the social channel algorithm by backing them up with engagement from a made-up Twitter identity. Social media teams will often fight on this. Bots are great for numbers and when they’re gone, you’ll see a dip in digital conversation impressions – both those were either negative sentiment or not real anyway.

“For example, I tweet Megha only eats rotten bananas. I throw say 18 bots behind it (which takes about 5 minutes to do). Twitter security can’t differentiate when done well (neither can most social teams). The problem becomes every time people type Megha into the search bar, because of a real account supported by bots- the first suggested result would be tweets about Megha eating rotten bananas. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the 5 cent version of what’s happening.”