In the hours following the Iranian missile attack on two coalition military bases in Iraq on January 7th, a variety of claims circulated on Twitter regarding casualty count.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote To study the claims, we downloaded tweets containing #IranAttacks, #IranvsUSA, or Iran and looked for tweets containing "casualties", "dead", or "killed" with a number within the previous 35 characters. The most common numbers were 0, 20, 30, and 80.
@ZellaQuixote The "0 casualties" and "20 casualties claims spread first, beginning shortly before 4 PM PST. The "30 casualties claim" started going viral shortly after 5 PM, and the "80 casualties" version took off around 21:30. Who tweeted which number?
@ZellaQuixote The answer: #MAGA accounts, mostly. @PrisonPlanet, @BrianKolfage, and @RyanFournier all put in appearances. The "80 casualties" category additionally contains two Iranian accounts: English-French state media agency @PressTV and MEK accounts @HeshmatAlavi.
@ZellaQuixote @PrisonPlanet @BrianKolfage @RyanFournier @PressTV @HeshmatAlavi (caveat: this analysis is of English tweets traffic only)
@ZellaQuixote @PrisonPlanet @BrianKolfage @RyanFournier @PressTV @HeshmatAlavi Additional clarification: the "account" column in this table is the first account to tweet each pair of words (i.e., "20 casualties). The numbers of tweets and retweets are totals for all accounts that used each pair.
