THREAD: I've spent the last day of September trying to come up with as accurate a number as I can possibly arrive at for the number of times QAnon-related hashtags have been used on Twitter in the first nine months of this year. And I now have a figure: 20.6 million times
These are the hashtags I've used. I decided to stick with hashtags rather than specific terms and phrases as those quarterly samples included many tweets from news organisations, journalists and ordinary users. While samples with only hashtags mostly featured tweets by QAnoners
There are 4.8 million tweets in the first quarter (1 Jan-31 Mar). #QAnon (2.8m) #WWG1WGA (2.1m) are the most popular ones in the period. Biggest tweet of the quarter is full NESARA GESARA. The global geographical spread of the hashtags shows QAnon is still primarily US-centric
There are 10.9 million tweets from 1 Apr-30 Jun. #Pizzagate (1.1m) has a sudden resurgence. And we see the rise of #TakeTheOath (480k). Biggest tweet of the quarter is indeed a #TakeTheOath video. Geographical map shows QAnon is beginning to spread to Europe and South America
In the third quarter (1 Jul-30 Sep) we see the full adoption of #SaveTheChildren (1m) and #SaveOurChildren (480k). As Twitter restrictions come in, all the other hashtags fall sharply. Biggest tweet of the period is related to child trafficking. QAnon has become bigger globally
Add the numbers from all three quarters (4.8m, 10.9m, 4.9m) and you get the magic number of 20.6m tweets. Once again, this is not a definitive number. For that, I'd have to sift through all the tweets from each quarterly sample. But it's as close to accurate as I can get.
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Pro-Kremlin influencers claim the captain of the Dali ship is a Ukrainian.
But online records show a Ukrainian man was the Dali's captain from March to July 2016. The ship that hit the bridge reportedly had an all-Indian crew.
Claims by influencers such as Alex Jones and Andrew Tate that the Baltimore Bridge collapsed due to a "cyber-attack" have been viewed millions of times.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore has said the early investigation points to an accident, with "no evidence of a terrorist attack".
This video, viewed 1.4 million times, claims to show evidence of pre-installed explosives causing the Baltimore Bridge collapse.
What the video shows is not explosives, but most likely electrical wires catching sparks.
DC Weekly, a website founded by a former US Marine now living in Russia, has fuelled disinformation stories about Zelensky and Ukraine, including a fake story that he bought two luxury yachts with US aid money, later repeated by some members of Congress.
These are just a few of the disinformation stories published by DC Weekly about Zelensky and Ukraine recently.
They all follow the same pattern: an obscure YouTube video featuring false claims, an article on DC Weekly referring to that video, and viral posts on social media.
All of those articles featuing false claims about Zelensky and Ukraine are written by Jessica Devlin. According to DC Weekly, she's a "highly acclaimed journalist" from NYC.
Except, that's the image of author Judy Batalion. Jessica Devlin is a fake persona. She doesn't exist.
A vast Russian influence operation on TikTok involving 12,800 fake accounts spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine to millions of users in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Israel and Ukraine, has been uncovered by BBC Verify and @DFRLab.
Back in the summer, this video, featuing an AI-generated voice, racked up millions of views on TikTok and later on Twitter.
It falsely accused Ukraine's former defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov and his daughter Anastasiya Shteinhauz of buying a a €7m villa in Cannes, France.
We debunked the viral video back in July. The villa seen in the video wasn't bought by Reznikov, and was actually up for sale.
So, @O_Rob1nson, @adkrobinson and I tried to find out more about the account that originally posted that video to TikTok.
The meme shared by Elon Musk about the pizzagate conspiracy theory is itself based on the completely false claim that James Gordon Meek, a journalist who recently pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography, had debunked pizzagate. Meek never reported on pizzagate.
The completely false claim that James Gordon Meek had debunked pizzagate was spread back in the summer by QAnon followers, like this blue tick account.
The New York Post has never published such a story about Meek. It's a totally fake image and a made up headline.
Elon Musk has once again fallen for a completely false claim, this time based on a fabricated New York Post headline pushed months ago by conspiracy theorists on his own platform.
If he'd done a simple check before tweeting, he'd have found out the whole thing was false.
This video, viewed over 3 million times, claims to show an Israeli settler run over protesters.
The video's from 9 September, during a protest in Tel Aviv against the government's judicial reforms, and involves no settlers.
This video claims to show two "terrorist" Palestinian journalists reporting near a rocket launcher.
The two are in fact Syrian journalists and the video is from 7 October. They reported retaliatory strikes against the Syrian government, after it killed 65 civilians in Idlib.
While Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital has been described by the WHO as a "death zone", the claim that all the premature babies there have died is inaccurate.
Two premature babies tragically died over the weekend, while 31 have now been transferred to an Emirati hospital in Rafah.