“And then suddenly … Junaid sends me a message mid chat. Over a few days, Thorne and Potaka kept chatting on Facebook Messenger about the oddness of Thorne finding himself with an impersonator. So,” Potaka tells me, “I sent a message saying, “Do you remember what I said to you last time we met?” and I didn’t hear anything back.” She thought: “I’ll just have a little bit of fun, just to see if I can suss out what this weird impersonator is doing with this fake Junaid Thorne account. With the instincts of a journalist, Potaka couldn’t help herself she wanted to track down Thorne’s doppelgänger.
In April 2015, Thorne let Potaka know via Facebook Messenger that someone had set up a fake Twitter account in his name. One of the people Potaka had interviewed for a documentary in 2014 was the young Perth-born Islamic preacher Junaid Thorne. So why would this Australi Witness, by all accounts an ISIS-supporting Australian, like Mariam?” Islamic State supporters hate Shias, and Veiszadeh is Shia Muslim, and “all of the ISIS guys are Sunni Muslim. He also seemed to claim lawyer and anti-Islamophobia campaigner Mariam Veiszadeh was a friend. The now-suspended Twitter profile of Australi Witness claimed he used to work for Amnesty International. To her, there was something odd about the way Australi Witness presented: “I’d followed a lot of them on Twitter and … understood the language they would normally use.” Some of the media seemed to be quoting Australi Witness as if he were a genuine jihadi.Īs someone who’d been following and talking to jihadis for some time, Potaka had a sense of the ideology. Excerpted with permission from " Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout" by Ginger Gorman, published by Hardie Grant.Įarly in 2015, Australian TV news journalist Elise Potaka noticed a Twitter user with the online alias Australi Witness, who was attracting attention from journalists and terrorism experts.
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