[Disinfo Thread]. This one is the #coronavirus. Specifically, it refers to the fake news story from the sketchy news portal "MCM News", which tweeted yesterday (29th Feb) that the Vatican confirmed that the Pope and two of his aides had coronovirus. Story relies on a fabricated 
2/ statement from the Vatican that does not exist. It is clearly malicious. I did a cursory analysis and found that the link has been tweeted or retweeted or mentioned around 2,541 times. That's a heck of a lot (Bear in mind that's just a search for Tweets sharing the URL)
3/ According to irumble, the first person to share the link on Twitter was the account below, which appears to mainly tweet in Chinese. Almost all the accounts sharing the link were not verified, except about 3, one of whom raised questions about the veracity of the source. One
4/ asks for confirmation, the other @LuftuTarkkan appears to share the information without qualification or caveat - at least in the tweet with the link. He has of 300k followers 😶
5/ However, the most interesting thing (perhaps), is that despite the seeming origin of the story on a possible Indonesian web portal, the largest distinct community sharing the link appear to be pro-Trump, Make America Great Accounts.... See next tweet.
6/ The most frequent 4 terms in the bios of the accounts sharing the link are "MAGA, Trump, KAG (Keep America Great), WWG1WGA" - essentially all terms associated with extreme Trump supporters and alt-right conspiracy theorists.
7/ Indeed, 721 of the 2181 accounts in the sample that had biographical data contained one of these pro-Trump or Alt right terms. The accounts also started sharing the information relatively early on after the URL's initial post (I need to double check how far my data goes back)
8/ So to sum, the most cohesive identifiable community spreading the fake news story that the Pope has corona virus is the MAGA crowd. It's been shared a lot, even by verified accounts. Bottom line, why would you trust MCM News portal, despite its outstanding pedigree *sarcasm*
