A BRIGHT young tech guru has revealed the shock threat he made against a man who ran a Christian Twitter account designed to automatically retweet Donald Trump.

William LeGate, 22, unmasked the identity of a man who ran a Trump supporting social media "bot" and then threatened to contact his employers " for comment" - a move which could have serious professional ramifications for the man.

William LeGate, the tech entrepreneur at the centre of a Twitter censorship row

A screenshot of a Twitter account which uses the handle @Peplamb Credit: Twitter

LeGate is currently at the centre of a viral conspiracy firestorm after it was claimed he was part of a shadowy Silicon Valley plot to censor social media - allegations he and Twitter sources flatly denied.

But The Sun has been handed screenshots which show how LeGate threatened a man who ran a Christian Twitter "bot" using an account named @PepLamb.

"I had to deal with harassment by @williamlegate for a while now!" Peplamb tweeted.

"God is great and he will not see HIS people oppressed!"

This bot is designed to automatically publish biblical quotes and republish The Donald's tweets, bringing them to a larger audience.

Its operator allegedly claimed to be American, but LeGate used his sophisticated tech skills to discover that he was, in fact, Indian.

A screenshot of the messages LeGate sent to 'Rajesh', an Indian man he accused of running a pro-Trump Christian Twitter account Credit: Provided by William LeGate

He then wrote to the man on LinkedIn and threatened to contact the man's employers with his findings.

The bot programmer also claimed to have received an email from a man who threatened to "contact my friends at Twitter" to get PepLamb banned for breaking the social network's terms of service.

Bots are automated Twitter pages which are said to have played a large role in helping Trump's message spread online, with Oxford University boffins suggesting up to one-third of pro-Trump tweets were written by machines after the first and second presidential debates.

"Peplamb is a bot from India posing as an American from Arizona," LeGate told The Sun.

"They guy behind it is running a pretty sophisticated operation and gets to top of Trump's replies every time."

But LeGate also has an almost magical ability to do the same.

His anti-Trump tweets have often appeared directly beneath Trump's own, prompting the British conservative YouTuber and InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson to question whether Twitter was choosing to give left-wingers' tweets more prominence than right-wing people's posts.

This is one of the tweets which sent questions about William LeGate viral across Twitter Credit: Twitter

Watson lives in London but was one of Trump's most prominent supporters ahead of the American election and achieved global fame after playing a key role in making stories including the "Hilary is sick" claims go viral across the world.

The self-described "contrarian polemicist" is one of many conservatives who fear Silicon Valley is waging a war on the right wing by trying to silence activists or journalists on social media and shut publications out of search engine results.

Concerns about the tech industry's alleged censorship campaign have become so acute that a left-leaning journalist at The Guardian recently questioned whether her fellow liberals needed to "fight to defend" free speech after a far right website was knocked offline.

President Donald Trump is famous for being a prolific and passionate Twitter user Credit: AP:Associated Press

We asked Watson how he felt to hear about LeGate's threats against the man who built the PepLamb bot.

"This underscores how the left is so incapable of engaging in thorough, reasoned debate on a level playing field that they routinely resort to dirty tricks and underhanded behaviour in an attempt to intimidate and shame conservatives," he said.

"The major concern is that powerful Silicon Valley companies, which have become the de facto public commons, are full to the brim with the kind of self-proclaimed 'progressives' who wouldn't hesitate to stoop to such tactics in the false belief that they have the moral high ground, in order to censor and silence dissenting voices."

Some people believe LeGate is secretly working with Twitter and has access to the social network's systems, which he is alleged to have used to discover the personal details of his opponents and unmask the people who anonymously run right wing accounts.

But he denied this suggestion and instead claimed to be at the centre of a vast conspiracy fuelled by false allegations and fake stories published on right wing websites.

The programmer claimed to have received threats of violence and said his opponents had made doctored or falsified tweets which were used to build a dishonest case against him.

He claimed: "I've received not dozens but literally thousands of death threats from these people.

"The allegations that I somehow have access to Twitter's systems or private user data is absurd and completely unfounded."

The programmer does admit to having friends at Twitter, but indicated he did not work with them to get people's accounts shut down and instead relied on simply reporting people who posted content he felt was against Twitter's rules, leaving the social network to choose who to ban.

Twitter has previously been accused of making some tweets less visible to users than others, an alleged practice that's been dubbed 'shadowbanning' Credit: Reuters

He added: "People are after me because of the 'reach' I have on Twitter.

"I have no interest in 'shutting down' right wing account or exposing private info like people's addresses.

"All of this controversy stems from my discovery that one of Trump's biggest fans on Twitter, who claimed to be an American, was actually a Twitter bot being run from India.

"People immediately assumed I must have had access to internal Twitter data to make this discovery."

LeGate said that Twitter has the right as a private company to censor any posts or accounts sharing prejudiced or hateful content such as racism or homophobia.

We also spoke to a Twitter source who denied that there was any campaign to silence right wing voices.

They also insisted that LeGate did not have access to Twitter's internal systems.

The social network claims it only shutters accounts when they break its rules and allows all its users to report people whose behaviour they find unacceptable.

Another screenshot from @Peplamb showing it automatically retweeting Donald Trump

Some of the wilder accusations against LeGate are basically unprintable, because they are based on tweets which may or may not be falsified and therefore cannot be proved.

The tech guru also uses a very sophisticated bot to automatically block people from following his tweets.

He is also known to shut down his account and has been accused of deleting tweets.

LeGate said fake tweets are easy to produce and claimed his opponents often posted doctored messages next to genuine ones, making it difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction.

Jamie Bartlett, an intellectual and writer who is one of Britain's most prominent tech experts Credit: BBC

In the age of social networking, it's often very hard to know who to believe.

Jamie Bartlett, a writer and broadcaster who is director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, told The Sun Online that it's is extremely difficult to work out the difference between truth and lies in the online world.

His widely praised BBC series, The Secrets of Silicon Valley, told the story of a former Facebook executive who believes society will COLLAPSE within 30 years as robots put half of all humans out of work.

"It can be extremely difficult to separate truth from fiction on social media," Jamie said.

"Falsehoods, disinformation or lies can be dressed up to look almost indistinguishable from reliable, trustworthy information.

"And the falsehood peddlers have a suite of tools open to them: video or image manipulation, professional looking sites, or carefully crafted accounts."

Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative who has was banned from Twitter Credit: EPA

Sometimes, however, the wild rumours actually turn out be true.

The evidence which suggests Silicon Valley is working to silence right wingers and conservatives is now mounting.

Google recently came under heavy criticism when it sacked programmer James Damore after he published a 3,000-word memo blaming “biological causes” for women’s lack of achievement in the technology industry.

Facebook has also been accused of developing a tool which will censor and suppress people's posts - and admitted to developing an interface which can read people's minds.

Last year, Twitter itself was slammed for giving British right wing "internet super villain" Milo Yiannopolis a life ban after he published jokes about one of the stars of the female-led Ghostbusters film.

Milo has dubbed this alleged anti-Conservative blitz "the shuttering" and fears that Google, Facebook, Twitter and other big tech firms are determined to turn the internet into a left-wing "safe space" where edgy content which offends people is banned and only "progressive" opinions are allowed.

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