Thread by @henkvaness

(New thread). A Facebook group of people who support a fugitive Belgian soldier is removed, reddit.com/r/belgium/comm……. But in Telegram, a new group has emerged with already 182 members. (1/...)

In this Telegram channel, people are appalled that Facebook removed their group. And they need moderators (2/...)

It's not the only Telegram channel. Another one has now 115 members. (3/...)

The original group in Facebook had 37000 members on May 23, 2021, 11:21:02 GMT, with an upcoming event (May 29) of "Hide and Seek" in the same park fugitive is said to be on the run earlier. (4/...)

It seems that the FB group is splintered into even more channels on Telegram, see screenshot. In the next tweet, a screenshot from one of these channels where someone claims to have the full text of a goodbye letter the fugitive send. (5/...)

The next goodbye note was quoted in the Belgian press in hln.be/binnenland/con… and appeared yesterday at 10.11 in the channel "Jurgen (last name, redacted) for president" in Telegram: (6/...)

Here is a machine translation of that letter (7/)

Meanwhile, in this cat and mouse game, other groups on Facebook created earlier than today are kept alone by Facebook. For now? It shows the problem of removing information from FB, it can take hours or days before something is spotted (8/)

I noticed that at least 20 Russian Telegram channels have a substantial number of postings about the case. Some of them translate the goodbye letter into Russian. I see different ways of spelling, " Юрген Конингс" and variations. (9/)

Tools I used for telegram research: #osint:
1. search.buzz.im
2. lyzem.com
4. tgstat.ru
3. telegramchannels.me
5. telegramdb.org
6. @MaltegoHQ with @_SocialLinks_
7. tlgrm.eu/channels
8. xtea.io/ts_en.html#gsc… (10/)

I can tell you a bit more about the deleted Facebook group that supports the fugitive. It got publicity, but it didn't have a lot of interactions. The next few tweets will explain why (11/)

The total public referrals to the group "Als 1 achter Jürgen" on Instagram and Twitter: 1004, mostly Twitter . (12/)

Top 8 of Tweets that referred to the group. They include some usual suspects. (13/)

Which groups referred to "Als 1 achter Jürgen" on Facebook? Here are all I could find, including some Dutch ones and Russian ones (14/)

When I study the impact of the postings in "Alles 1 achter Jürgen", I notice that the impact was bigger in Russia than in other countries. In the next tweet, I'll explain why. I only looked at which groups forwarded the message from the now-deleted group (15/)

By far, "Запретная археология" was the biggest group that referred to "Als 1 achter Jürgen" with 186,835 Members. The second group was also Russian, with 27,541 members (16/)

I also noticed it was quoted in УКРАЇНА 🇺🇦 - ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКИЙ with 22,792 Members and in anti-virus vaccination groups (17/..)

So what?

1. Biggest impact in other groups, quoting the group of the fugitive military person, was in Russian groups - not in Belgian groups what you normally would expect.

2. Dutch groups also joined the chorus

3. Some of the groups are anti-vaccine, anti-gov M(18/)

Some of the Russian groups portray the fugitive as a modern Robin Hood, quoting including the caps, "A BELGIAN SOLDIER DESERTS WITH HIS WEAPONS AND PROMISES TO ASSASSINATE TRAITORS AND TYRANTS" (19/)

Besides that, also "Chronicles from Occupied France" was quoting the Belgian fugitive, as an example of somebody who fights against authority and should be applauded (20/20)

Belgian newspaper @HLN_BE used this research thread for hln.be/binnenland/opv… , published 1.30 hrs ago. It explains partly the Russian interest (21/21)

For non Dutch speakers , you can download the Dutch news article about this thread also here and translate it yourself via Google Translate drive.google.com/file/d/1AOgzh3… (22/22)