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Elise Thomas Profile picture
@elisethoma5
Sep 14, 2020 • 3 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
This is a great piece. QAnon's rapid advance into wellness and spiritual community groups has been one of the striking features of the conspiracy explosion we've seen during this pandemic.
@_MAArgentino has done great work on 'Pastel QAnon' and the shift in aesthetic of this particular tentacle of the QAnon away from, e.g. the evangelical US-based QAnon's eagles and crosses to the kind of branding you'd see on a flower-scented soap
The collision of this with the trend away from QAnon's more traditional hashtags to more ambiguous hashtags like (#)Savethechildren as documented by @Shayan86 is likely to contribute as well

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More from @elisethoma5

Elise Thomas Profile picture
Sep 18
Pivoting off the excellent reporting in the #FactoryofFakes stories into Russia’s Social Design Agency aka Doppelganger, I’ve found a network of live X accounts which appear highly likely to be part of the operation.

Spoiler alert: they’re very dumb. Thread Image
As @VSquare_Project and others have reported, the SDA’s operation includes a “bot farm” generating millions of posts and thousands of memes and videos. I suspect this is what I’ve found.
It is extremely crude. What they appear to be doing is using mostly freshly created accounts to spam trending hashtags with messages aligned with their target narratives, with no tailoring or subtlety or real effort to not look like every other spambot out there.
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Read 23 tweets
Elise Thomas Profile picture
Aug 19
1. I may never forgive 2024 for making me type 'Vance jizz cup' into a search bar

2. The earliest posts I found come from an account w/ what appears to be an AI generated profile pic. The account was created Nov 23, has been dormant for months, woke up three days ago...
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immediately tweeted 100+ times in support of the Democrats and then posted this thing about the sperm cups Image
I have not yet seen anyone claiming to be able to independently corroborate the existence of the jizz cups. There are now multiple media articles about it, but they seem to be entirely based on journalists (loosely defined) finding it on social media and just reporting it as fact

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Read 4 tweets
Elise Thomas Profile picture
Jun 13
Building off work by @sekoia_io, I tracked part of the Russian influence op Doppelganger back to a dodgy advertising company in Moscow. Seeing how the Kremlin uses spammers and scammers in info ops can help us to see where they might go next @ISDglobal isdglobal.org/digital_dispat…
For months, Doppelganger has been using tactics which are strikingly similar to those of spammers and scammers to maintain a foothold on social media platforms.

Turns out, that may be because part of the campaign has been outsourced to actual spammers and scammers.
In their recent report @sekoia_io uncovered an exposed dashboard linked to the Doppelganger campaign. The dashboard was being used to monitor at least six Doppelganger domains. blog.sekoia.io/master-of-pupp…
Read 26 tweets
Elise Thomas Profile picture
Apr 1
I want to show you a truly incredible tweet. An amazing disinformation turducken. Here is Alex Jones, retweeting nonsense about Ukraine from Russia propaganda network RT. And that 'MAGA' account in the middle?

That's a CCP influence op.

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For at least seven years, the pro-CCP influence campaign known as Spamouflage (unless you're Google and insist on calling it Dragonbridge) has been infamous among researchers for two things: its enormous scale, and its almost complete ineffectiveness.
For years Spamouflage has run tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of accounts over the years across every social media platform you've ever heard of and many you haven't. nytimes.com/2023/08/29/tec…
Read 15 tweets
Elise Thomas Profile picture
Dec 5, 2023
There has been a lot of speculation about how generative AI will impact disinformation campaigns. This latest from me for @ISDglobal looks at an early real-world example of how this is playing out - and it doesn't bode well.
isdglobal.org/digital_dispat…

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A network of ~60 accounts have been targeting Russian opposition figures @Navalny, @Pevchikh and @ACF_int in a sustained harassment campaign.

It began around July, originally using a more crude method of content creation. On Sep 26, it appears to have started using #ChatGPT.
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This campaign poses as pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian, with accounts pretending to be largely women living in American states.

However, it is conducted primarily on weekdays and lines up strikingly well with Moscow and St Petersburg business hours.
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Read 17 tweets
Elise Thomas Profile picture
Dec 13, 2022
In Wieambilla, QLD, two brothers launched a horrific attack killing two police officers and a neighbour.

While there's a lot we don't know, one brother appears to have been deep into conspiracy theories. Here's my initial analysis for @ISDglobal #auspol isdglobal.org/digital_dispat…
@ISDglobal The comments left by one of the alleged perpetrators, Gareth Train, across several fringe and conspiracy blogs appear to point to a cocktail of conspiratorial beliefs ranging from anti-vaccine, anti-5G, New World Order, Illuminati, climate change, MK Ultra... you get the picture.
This trend towards totalising conspiratorial worldviews, in which people believe not just one but many conspiracy theories and subsume every aspect of their world into those conspiratorial beliefs, is something we've seen a lot since 2020.
Read 8 tweets

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