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6 tweets,
5 min read
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Is there anything unnatural about naturalnews(dot)com? This site calls itself "The world's top news source on natural health," a subject which starts with anti-vaccine rhetoric and branches out into #FalseFlag theories about, well, pretty much everything.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First, let's look at the titles of the actual articles. These two figures are based on 13532 titles from 2017-09-01 to 2019-04-07. Major topics: #antivax barflegarble, "shadowbanning" by social media sites, and mass shootings (with accompanying conspiracy theories, of course.)
We downloaded tweets linking to naturalnews(dot)com, yielding 5375 tweets from 2439 accounts in the past 10 days. 690 tweets (12.8%) came from 70 accounts (2.9%) flagged as mostly/fully automated, and another 209 (3.9%) were posted by 46 partially automated accounts (1.9%).
(explanation of scheme for classifying accounts as varying degrees of automated here)
What does the content of the tweets linking naturalnews(dot)com look like? Topics are similar to the articles (#antivax, #FalseFlag conspiracy theories, etc.) with #WalkAway and several #QAnon hashtags thrown in for good measure.
Natural News is not the only news source of dubious accuracy popular among its fans. The accounts that link it mostly link right-wing conspiracy theory sites such as ZeroHedge, Gateway Pundit, and Infowars. Russia Today/RT shows up as well, along with a couple MSM websites.
