Thread by @marcowenjones

🧵1/ Thread on the Islamophobic and antisemitic disinformation about the #SydneyAttack . I downloaded X posts that wrongly stated that the attacker, Joel Cauchi, was either a Muslim or Jewish terrorist

2/ The size of the network was at least 140,000 posts (from X). This time series graph shows that initially, most of the disinformation (red bars) accused the attacker of being a Muslim or Islamist. At about 1700 UTC we see more and more disinfo about the attacker

3/ being Jewish (orange bars). This temporal analysis reflects the fact that there is a notable tendency when it comes to such attacks in Western countries to accuse, without evidence, the perpetrator of being Muslim. To accuse the attacker of being Jewish is less common

4/ This time series graph highlights a number of the accounts who got the most engagement on their disinformation, including @goldingbf @SaffronSunanda @visegrad24 @Klaus_Arminius @mattwallace888 and @xavierjp__ . These six accounts alone got more than 10 million views

5/ Often the same accounts come up when it comes to hate speech. @Visegrad24 , which gets a lot of engagement, is definitely one of these accounts. Accounts like @Mattwallace888 , who boosted the 'cohen' rumour also have huge reach, with over 1.7 million followers

6/ I think particularly problematic is that two British journalists/media personalities @JuliaHB1 and @RachelRileyRRR both connected the attack to Islam. As people who work in media, they should, in theory, know better.

7/ The origin of the false accusation against Ben Cohen (which relied on the not-so-subtle premise that Cohen is a Jewish name) is less clear. One of the earliest mentions on X was this obscure account - which hasn't tweeted much. Smells like an influence op.

8/ Some of the other most shared posts implicating Cohen can be considered 'pro-Russian' - like @stairwayto3dom - certainly anti-Ukrainian. Others claiming he was a Zionist include the well known 'Russian bot' (as the Guardian termed her) Maram Susli

9/ Another problematic aspect of the Cohen disinformation is that Australia's Channel 7 news actually seemed to pick up these X rumors, and in a promo, falsely named the attacker as 'Benjamin Cohen'. (They are going to issue an apology later according to the Brisbane Times).

10/ So it's pretty clear what happened here. There was a tragic attack in Sydney. The familiar accusations that the perpetrator was Muslim circulated initially. The war in Gaza also prompted some to instrumentalise it to make propaganda points - eg Rachel Riley's 'global

11/ intifada' comment. Similarly, there were attempts to claim the attacker was a pro-Israel Zionist by accounts who famously are pro-Assad and pro Russia - such as Maram Susli. This was likely a reflexive accusation designed to diffuse the inevitable political cost

12/ this would have had on the pro-Palestinian movement. As Riley's tweet shows, it was already being used to mobilise criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters. As is common with disinformation, political actors will exploit an event to mobilise narratives that better fit their

13/ broader narratives. Ultimately, and sadly, this narrative of 'the attacker is either a Muslim or a Jew' reflects the politicization of the Gaza war along pro West versus pro Russia lines, and does nothing more than aggravate polarization. But that's the point I guess.

13/ But this is how digital disinformation works - it's a combination of bad faith posts, misinformation/sloppy journalism, prejudice, global geopolitcs and polarization. Anyway, given the dangers of such rhetoric, I hope at least

14/ that journalists and influencers who aren't simply disinfluencers do some soul-searching to explore why they jumped to such conclusions . #disinformation

15. * note on methods. I downloaded all tweets mentioning sydney + keywords including *zionist* *jewish* *muslim* *islamist* using @nodexl . This yielded over 1780 unique tweets (excluding RTs). I used GPT to quickly code their stance (i.e. who they were accusing of being behind the stabbing), and manually cross checked 50 for accuracy. I ran a network analysis and some either time series analysis to rank influencers.

16. Errata - tweet 6 should be @RachelRileyRR - not Rachel Riley with three Rs. Thanks @richardjbellamy for spotting this.

17: update: By including *Bondi+ Cohen* in the search results, it's quite clear that one of the most influential early spreaders of the disinfo that the attacker was Benjamin Cohen was @aussiecossack - Simeon Boikov - described as a 'pro-putin' influencer holed up in the Russian consulate

This feels disingenous. The way disinfo works is for people to seed rumors online, so that they get picked up by people and amplified by influencers or media outlets- even if unconfirmed. It is based on the simple premise that if enough people say something, it becomes a narrative. If you don't know this you're a liar or naive, and definitely shouldn't call yourself a journalist in 2024

Update: @JuliaHB1 and @RachelRileyRR apologise for their tweets implicating Muslims and Islam in the Sydney attacks. They're quite problematic apologies that don't seem to reflect on the implications of why they jumped to conclusions, but apologies are something. I imagine this will be the end of it. Islamophobia doesn't seem to be much of a priority in the UK

ABC have done a great timeline - features some of my analysis