Thread by @SlickRockWeb

Over the weekend a small group of Portland protestors decided 2 burn a Bible then a flag. The incentives are not clear & its also not clear how this relates 2 protesting Police Brutality. In any case Russian Ruptly was of course in exactly the right place to film it all. #InfoOps

Breitbart[.]com, saraacarter[.]com and zerohedge[.]com all used portions of the Kremlin aligned Ruptly video, but not showing initially the 2 protestors struggling to ripe the cover off one Bible & then place it correctly in the fire so the Ruptly cameraperson could zoom in on it

Again "a Bible" & "a flag". The two protestors that lit the flag on fire started waving the flaming flag on a long pole also conveniently caught on Russian backed Ruptly. Later the images were digitally altered to then make it appear protestors were burning a cross. @ushadrons

This fake burning cross even made it to a number of high profile accounts like former NFL football star, Herschel Walker who lamented in this video (with almost 1 mill views) about how he was saddened that protestors would burn a cross in Portland. They of course did not do that.

More idiots that fell for the digitally altered image showing a "fake burning cross" at the Portland Protests. And of course it is being magically funded by #Soros the far-right boogeyman. #BLM #Portland #osint #InfoOps #disinfo

Quick thanks for the h/t from @UShadrons who did a bunch of the initial work, noticed the "burning cross fraud" and alerted us to this #infoOps #osint #disinfo

https://twitter.com/ushadrons/status/1289969198479761408

So Hoaxy data is interesting for seeing how this started & spread over the weekend. Not surprisingly, large blue check marked accounts heavily promoted this. Ian Miles Cheong @stillgray was one of the first large account to get the ball rolling with this. #infoOps #osint #disinfo

Here is the original Ian Miles Cheong @stillgray tweet where he got the original video from the @shelldrayk account. Again there were not Bibles ... it was a single Bible and a bunch of other street trash protestors had collected. #infoOps #osint #disinfo

Humor break. Spelling always seems to be a problem when trying to get something trending in the early morning hours here in the US. Seems like "burning bile" would be very tricky and smell awful. #Bibles or was it bile?

Back to the Hoaxy data for the Twitter search "burn Bibles" again @stillgray was the primary node but there was also a couple other large secondary nodes including an account @RN_JB7. Overall the "bot like" level for was close to 10% (on the high side) #InfoOps #disinfo #osint

Turns out the @RN_JB7 account appears to be a non-native English speaker. Here is James' tweet that ended up getting a fair amount of promotion and more RTs than likes. James averages 320 tweets per day and had these as its top hashtag usage over the past 3200 tweets.

Here were a couple of the other tweets representing major nodes from the Hoaxy data. #infoOps #blm #osint #disinfo

Can't forget to add a touch of Islamaphobia. This account is also promoting the RestatMIGA Op which is another story for another time. #infoOps #disinfo #osint

Another set of Hoaxy data, this time looking at the search "bible burning", showed more large blue checked accounts jumping into the action. No surprise that Charlie Kirk was a major node. But somewhat surprising, so was Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler #infoOps #osint #disinfo

A good tweet by @Ushadrons to end on. Makes you go Hmmm ?

https://twitter.com/ushadrons/status/1290350074480951297