[Thread] 1/ Here's an update on #coronavirus and 5g conspiracies on Twitter! Yesterday I downloaded around 43000 interactions (tweets, replies, rts, mentions, etc) from around 37200 unique accounts. That's a lot of unique accounts. The sample was mostly from 6th-10th April 
2/ The network was giant and complex (see graph). Remember this graph shows all accounts to mentioned both 5g and/or corona covid19 in the same tweet. It will have picked up people who both believe or do not believe in the conspiracy, but tweeted those two terms. #coronavirus
3/ However it means we can explore who was saying what. The colours are communities (e.g. people who tend to interact with each other). I resized nodes by out degree (who is tweeting the most about this), and this amjadtwtt account came up. Tweets a lot of conspiracies, a lot
4/ concern how corona is a pretext for us to stay home while they install 5g. Hard to tell if it just tweets all conspiracies. A very spammy account, retweeting a lot of replies and mentions. Then there is this cluster, which seems to be that strange nexus of alt right, Christian
5/ and Serbian nationalist community, anti-vaxxers that we saw a few days ago. A smattering of anti antisemitism in there too. But apart from these strange and suspicious anonymous accounts, we know a lot of high profile actual humans have been sharing the conspiracy.
6/ I resized the nodes to make them bigger the more an account was retweeted. Came across this light blue one, '@realffk aka (Femi Fani-Kayode) a Nigerian lawyer/politician with almost a million followers and a verified account. What did Femi have to say about 5 & #coronavirus?
7/ Ok first up he is retweeting videos by conspiracy theorist David Icke, believer in the lizard people. Yikes. Also blog post called '5g, Gods Generals and the hordes of Mordor". Erm. He also tweeted an article by a site I don't recognize saying UK will pull out of 5g
8/ contracts with China from a news outlet called 'the organiser' - which describes itself as a weekly outlet in Bharat representing cultural nationalist views. I hadn't heard that UK was pulling out, no other major publications had announced it. So I checked the source....
9/It led me to this site called Creative Destruction Media, apparently connected to @LToddWood CD Media reports that they had from 'two sources close to the matter' that PM Boris Johnson was planning to cancel contract withs Huawei'. Not sure how this obscure, right wing news
10/ got the scoop. Although this questionable news site seems to be anti China, promoting information that could be damaging to Huawei and China , the Indian news site that picked up had the story shared at least 2478 times, including by Femi #coronavirus
11/ So that thread took us from a parochial Indian English weekly, via an alternative US right wing news site, to a Nigerian politician, to Huawei US politics, to conspiracy theorist David Icke. And that's just one of the many strands in a vast web of conspiracies...
12/ The 5g conspiracy is multifaceted. In its crudest form, some people believe it causes corona, but some are about how China wants to sabotage 5g rollout in the US, others are that the lockdown is a pretext to install 5g across the world. Mindbending stuff #coronavirus
13/ interesting the guy I mentioned today behind that rightwing news site. Erm
