[Thread]1/ Here is a table of how many suspended accounts per country have been published on Twitter's public state-backed information operation. With the case of Saudi, Egypt and UAE, Twitter sometimes combined their results, so I have included calculations (in orange) showing
2/ this. China comes on top, with a Saudi specific takedown combined with a Saudi/UAE/Egypt combined takedown in second. Third place is a UAE specific takedown combined with the Saudi/UAE/Egypt takedown. Attached here is a list of the MENA specific accounts
3/ Some separate calculations have been to, as we know that 88000 accounts linked to the Saudi company SMAAT were suspended, but not included in the archive (we also know this was the case for China).So some takeaways, according to official Twitter takedown data Saudi and the UAE
4/ are some of the worst actors when it comes to twitter info ops - worse than Russia, Iran and Turkey. Of course Twitter takedown archives do not give the full picture (as highlighted by the 88000 unlisted accounts) but the official figures can be instructive! Thanks @a_teti
5/ for the KUBE acronym!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The Bahrain Royal Court report that the Prime Minister of #Bahrain, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the longest serving Prime Minister in the world, has passed away bna.bh/.aspx?cms=q8Fm…
Since Bahrain's Independence in 1971, Khalifa bin Salman has been one of the key driver's of political developments in Bahrain. Regarded as intelligent, shrewd and competent, KbS was also a ruthless defender of the status quo in Bahrain. His influence really increased
post-Independence, especially in regards to internal security, where he advocated for the demise of Bahrain's National Assembly in 1975, and drove much of the repression of Bahrain's opposition movements, and especially the Shia population
[Thread] 1/ This morning's copypasta pro-Trump astroturfing suggests there is going to be a lot of divorces because of Joe Biden #Elections2020#disinformation
2/ A lot of the accounts are sports fans of some description, like this, erm, 77 year-old pro FC Bayern fan who loves Trump, but also wants to see him lose (can't even tell if it's sarcasm) #Election2020results
3/ A little juicier. This copypasta crew are explicitly repeating the claim that the election was rigged, which again is false and misleading #Election2020results
[thread] 1/ Strange digital #deception going on about UK hospitals trying to create idea covid19 isn't serious or stressing the NHS. It all started when @Intuitive1966 asked a question about whether hospitals were full. In steps @madogs93 - who claims to be a 'ward sister'
2/ in a '1600 bedder'. For those of us who have never heard this expression before (and that's all of us), this refers to the number of beds in the hospital. The tweet, designed to irresponsibly downplay severity of the pandemic, got 1600 retweets (one RT per bed). As many of you
3/ have noted, there was also much copypasta, with lots of people copy and pasting the tweet content. Many tweeps have raised concerns about whether madogs93 is lying, largely provoked by the odd turn of phrase '1600 bedder'. Let's look at some other inconsistencies though...
I am kind of fascinated by boycotts, or rather, why people choose to boycott at specific times and not others, especially living in a country that has been boycotted. Recently I've been thinking about Yemen, thousands of Yemenis killed by US and British made weapons,
yet no boycott of US or UK. No substantial boycott of China despite internment of millions of Uighur Muslims. Remember that boycott of GAP, but not particularly other brands equally culpable in sweatshop labour? Trump's de facto boycott of Muslim countries, done as a policy
instrument, yet no boycott of US goods. Every boycott, or potential boycott is different, but the egregiousness of the original act certainly does not seem to be the soul component in allowing something to cross the boycott threshold. I think what's theoretically interesting,
[Thread] 1/ Thought it would be useful to examine e-bile/digital misogyny on Twitter, so I looked at how many people had called Congresswoman @IlhanMN four common gendered pejoratives "sl*t, b*tch, c*nt, and wh*re" between now and November 2018. The results are shocking.
2/ The scraping of tweets resulted in around 3,089 individual tweets containing insults. Bitch was the most common slur, representing around 82% of the tweets, followed by wh*re (7%), c*nt (6%) and sl*t (4%).
3/ the time series graph below shows that every month there is a variation in the amount of abuse. Presumably this volatility reflects certain political events. It is interesting to note that the distribution of insults changes temporarily in August, Sept and October 2019..
[Thread] 1 Here are some of the biggest verified tweeters on the "Hillary Emails" trend yesterday, where some entity thought they'd create a buzz around five year old legitimate data dump immediately following Pompeo's announcement that all Hillary emails would be leaked. Some of
2/ the usual superspreaders are here, namely @alshaikh2 and @monther72@halgawi etc. (previous graph is by the people who generally tweeted a lot on the hashtag). Below nodes sized by most retweeted. @Forsan_UAE making a strong show. Definitely a joint Emirate/Saudi effort here
3/ This is just a brief visualisation for my own notes. Starting to wonder if there should be a new category for fake news - "old news repurposed and reimagined as a new scoop with frequent misrepresentation of facts" #disinformation