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Ben Collins Profile picture
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16 Oct, 3 tweets, 1 min read
New from me:

One in every 50 tweets about voting in September came from QAnon accounts.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Two in every 25 tweets about #voterfraud from August 15th to September 30th came from QAnon accounts.

All of this is AFTER steps taken by Twitter to limit QAnon's reach in June.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
QAnon accounts are defined in this study by accounts with QAnon or Q-related catchphrases in their bios (like WWG1WGA or TheGreatAwakening).

It also excluded tweets about voting that had to do with K-Pop and BTS, of which there were plenty.

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More from @oneunderscore__

Ben Collins Profile picture
15 Oct
NEW from @BrandyZadrozny + me:

YouTube says it is banning QAnon, other conspiracy content that targets individuals

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
As far as we can tell, all of the major radicalization-driving QAnon videos — some of which have tens of millions of views — are still up at press time. YouTube said enforcement will take a minute.

We'll keep you updated.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
In our reporting, YouTube was QAnon's largest remaining radicalization driver.

This enforcement action puts YouTube somewhere in between Twitter (make QAnon accounts harder to find, ban overt harassment) and Facebook (outright ban on QAnon content).

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 5 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
11 Oct
More astroturfed fake African-American pro-Trump accounts. Almost 10,000 retweets in three hours.
Posing as Black users is a concerted disinformation effort by pro-Trump trolls in this election cycle, as noted in this story, and one that dates back more than a half-decade, discovered by Black women on Twitter, including @blackamazon and @digitalsista.
nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1…
This specific account was spotted by @BenCollins1776, my namesake and considerably better Ben Collins. Benception.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
9 Oct
New from me + @BrandyZadrozny + @Tom_Winter:

Alleged Michigan kidnapping plotters’ online lives reveal Boogaloo ties, Trump support, and swift online radicalization

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
In 2016, one of the alleged plotters of Whitmer’s kidnapping pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that absolved Russia of meddling in the 2016 election, calling investigations of Trump an "uprising.”

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
One of the alleged plotters of Whitmer’s kidnapping was radicalized very fast.

Last year, he was posting selfies and Joe Rogan clips. After the pandemic, it was only Boogaloo memes and Bill Gates conspiracy theories.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 5 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
7 Oct
Four years ago today, Pizzagate was born when Wikileaks dropped John Podesta's hacked emails.

Users on 4chan and Reddit said if you replaced the words "pizza" with "little girl" in his emails, suddenly they were eating children.

A year and three weeks later, QAnon was born.
In the last four years, an infrastructure for an alternate reality was built on social networks to frame one political party as Satanic child eaters.

It went unchecked by social networks and winked at by politicians who it didn't yet harm.

Millions joined those communities.
This is important to note: The reason 4chan users were so ready to accept "pizza" meant "little girls" in creating Pizzagate?

In 4chan speak, "cheese pizza" was a backronym for "CP," or child porn, which saturated the site for years.

Read 6 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
6 Oct
BREAKING: Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms

Facebook "will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon" like any other militarized social movement, militia or terror group.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Facebook's QAnon ban is the most sweeping content moderation step I've seen from any social media company so far.

This won't just ban certain posts. Facebook will ban Groups, Pages and Instagram accounts that post about QAnon, a militarized movement.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
QAnon will now be treated like other militias and terror groups that have been tied to real-world violence and repeatedly fantasize about violence and mass slaughter.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 9 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
30 Sep
"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by" is not disavowing white supremacists.
The president was asked point blank to disavow white supremacists.

Here's what he said:

"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what, somebody's gotta do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem."
Story incoming on this, but The Proud Boys took the president's statement for them to "stand down and stand by" as marching orders.
Read 5 tweets

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