Daryl Morey’s tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters set off a pro-China “troll mob” on Twitter that resulted in notifications flooding his phone at nearly two per second, according to a report Wednesday.

Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, was mentioned more than 16,000 times in the 12 hours immediately after his now-infamous Oct. 4 tweet, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Many of the mentions came from users who’d never tweeted before — 4,855 users exactly — and 3,677 accounts didn’t even exist until Morey’s post, according to the paper’s analysis of 168,907 tweets at Morey between Oct. 4 and Oct. 10.

“It looks like there were humans at the keyboard for many of these posts,” Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told the Journal. “This wasn’t primarily a bot swarm. It was a troll mob. Which is a lot harder to deal with.”

That means Morey’s phone was peppered with notifications at two per second — including more than 4,700 which included the phrase “your mother is dead,” or “NMSL” in Chinese.

“This is a classic intimidation tactic: mass-posting at someone’s account to scream them into silence,” Nimmo said.

Less than an hour after posting, Morey deleted his tweet — but not before it kicked off a global firestorm that has soured relations between the US and China in the basketball realm.

Twitter is banned in China but is accessible via a virtual private network, which encrypts and reroutes internet traffic, the Journal said.