The Guardian used public records and open source materials to identify Daniel Linden of the Shirion Collective.
A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.
Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centred on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.
The Guardian investigation used public records and open source materials to corroborate information originally provided by the White Rose Society, an Australian anti-fascist research collective.
Linden set up Shirion’s crowdfunding efforts, appears to play a central role in operating the network’s social media accounts, and coordinates the group’s efforts on a Telegram channel. Public records and online materials indicate he lives in Gainesville, Florida, but he has also had recent stints in Durango, Colorado, and Medellin, Colombia.
The Guardian emailed Linden at several addresses associated with him and his business ventures, and attempted to contact him via phone, text, a direct message on Reddit and a post tagging an X account associated with one of his ventures seeking comment on this reporting, but received no response.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused. Regardless,” she added, “he is spreading hateful messages.”
The revelations shed light on the nature of Shirion, which has been criticized in the US congress and attracted media attention around the world, and its role in pushing back against criticisms of Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Gaza.
The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.
Across its two X bios, Shirion describes itself as a “surveillance collective” and a “surveillance network” that searches for “digital fingerprints” to “aggressively track what the MSM [mainstream media] won’t” and “aggressively track and expose antisemitism”.
On Telegram, Shirion hosts a private channel with 885 members at the time of reporting. The channel is further divided into rooms for discussion of events in specific territories (like Canada and Latin America), or for coordination of online activity including mass reporting of X accounts.
Shirion organized two GoFundMe fundraisers in April and May of 2024. The earlier fundraiser brought in more than $57,000, including an anonymous $10,000 donation, for an operation in which trucks with big-screen monitors showed footage of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel near universities in various US cities.
The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.
Rawr
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/29/daniel-linden-shirion-collective-pro-israel-palestine-hate