Conspiracy theories about a photograph of a boy sleeping on the floor at a hospital in Leeds being "staged" began circulating on December 9th. We took a look at the spread of these claims on Twitter.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote Others have already dug into automated activity related to this topic in some detail (and Twitter appears to have acted on some of it, as we didn't find large numbers of the repeated tweets described in these threads.)
@ZellaQuixote We combined a few different searches in an effort to pick up as much of the traffic as possible, ending up with 13307 tweets from 10457 accounts:
- Leeds + floor + boy
- Leeds + staged
- hospital + staged
- Leeds + floor + boy
- Leeds + staged
- hospital + staged
@ZellaQuixote Next, we used the retweet network to help divide the traffic into tweets that claim that the photo/story was "staged" and tweets that don't. 4266 of 13307 tweets (32.1%) fell into the "staged" category (upper right cluster in network.)
@ZellaQuixote Here are the first 20 accounts/tweets we found casting doubt on the authenticity of the Leeds hospital photo. (We may have missed some, especially given that some activity that others have posted about has already been removed.)
