[Thread] 1/ I did another Twitter analysis. This time I searched for tweets using the term 'Tunis' (in Arabic). This is somewhat agnostic, so anyone mentioning '#Tunisia' will be analysed. The results are striking, & you give a clear image of polarisation. Will explain more
2/ What this image shows is to distinct clusters (the pink one, and the green one). Each cluster represents a community, a group of accounts that tend to interact more with each other. The fact they are separate indicates there is little interaction between the communities >
3/ What is evident is that the green community is essentially 4-5 Saudi nationalists (halgawi, s_hm2030, monther72, cressfiles) & their retweeters, while the pink cluster is mostly 2 Mauritanian/Qatar - (mshinqiti. Turkialshoub commentators/journalists and those retweeting them.
4/ Because 70% of the content is retweets (pretty common on Twitter), we are not actually looking at lots of unique content. (See work by @AndrewMLeber and @abulkhaezuran for more on elite-driven twitter discourse). What that means is we can quickly see the position of the two
5/ 'camps' by just seeing what tweets from these influencers is being retweeting. It's clear the pink (Qatar/Mauritanian) community oppose the coup, while the green (Saudi) community support it. That's presumably what everyone expected from this. In terms of most influential
6/ accounts in the sample, it's dominated by Saudi accounts. The top ten influential accounts are based in Saudi, the UAE, Egypt, and one in the UK (Bahraini-British amjad taha). This is quite similar to what we saw from the hashtags 'Tunisians revolt against the brotherhood'
7/ In terms of where users report themselves to be, Saudi is top, followed by Egypt, and then Tunisia, with UAE in fourth place. This kind of makes sense re UAE as its population is smallish but it has a core group of high profile influencers.
8/ So the interesting thing about this visualisation shows a number of things
a) Twitter discussions about Tunisia within the timeframe of the analysis are dominated by influencers from Saudi, Egypt, and the UAE
b) the majority of those active describe
9/ themselves as being based in Saudi
c) There is a clear geopolitical split between Saud/UAE/Egypt accounts and those perceived to be sympathetic to Islamism, Qatar-based or Saudi opposition. The former support the coup while the latter oppose it
d) Twitter narratives about
10/ non Gulf-countries are dominated by Gulf countries, with information availability favouring the Saudi/UAE/Egypt nexus..
e) the narrative that portray the coup as a popular revolt against the Muslim Brotherhood is ascendant as a result of this
11/ It's depressing seeing how these events activate latent tropes that contribute to polarisation. As the image demonstrates, there is not so much as a debate as entrenching of opinions and megaphoning of those one agrees with.
12/ Some notes about sample - unique accounts, 11,000 - individual interactions - 17000, timeframe '7.20 am - 12pm UTC 28th July. Anyway, I think that's it for now.
Now go forth and speak (nicely) to someone you disagree with! Remember to listen - unless they're a bot of course
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On 13/08, a fake quote attributed to Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya circulated on X:
“The countdown to the next massacre has begun. Next time we will slaughter all the Jews"
It was debunked, but Gemini later stated it as fact >
2/ Firstly, this super sus account was the first I could find spreading the rumour on X (7.49 am UK time 13/08). @RonanMark572778 - whoever this 'pilot and physician' is has sent >113k tweets since July 2023. He also has a verified account (rememeber verification = algo boost).
3/ The narrative then was picked up on X by other accounts and influencers, changing ever so slightly. Accounts like @FleurHassanN @thevoicetruth1 (lol) got a lot of engagement and 'legitimised' the rumour.
NOTE: Not one of these accounts is providing a source to the quote.
🧵🚨1/ This verified X account posing as an American doctor has been spreading pro-Israel propaganda, justifying the killing of journalists, and posting predominantly anti–Sudanese Armed Forces content. The account is fake.>
#disinformation #gazagenocide #Sudan
2/ The first clear red flags are the tweets versus creation date ratio.
The account was created in 2009, but has only tweeted 1090 times, and the first of those was on April 2025. This means the account has been appropriated/hacked/bought and its old tweets scrubbed.
3/ I located the unique user id of the account. I ran this user id via the botometer archive of bots and it tells me that in February 2023 the account was called 'sitaramks', not 'nate_jone'
1/ Propaganda botnet alert! About 50 accounts, tweeting in English & Arabic, have pushed out thousands of posts about #Sudan’s war over the past few months. Almost all certainly using genAI, all pushing a pro-UAE, anti-SAF & anti Muslim (Brotherhood) narrative. #disinformation
2/ They all follow the same script:
> Blame Burhan, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Muslim Brotherhood for Sudan’s suffering.
> Praise the UAE for “stability” and “humanitarian aid.”
> Wrap it all in moral language about peace, tolerance, and unity.
3/ Much of the phrasing is synthetic: with odd, weird idioms, and em dashes. Classic traces of Chat GPT or another LLM agent. The slogans repeat across accounts:
e.g. “Brotherhood’s Butler”, “Brotherhood in Uniform”, “Ministry of Brotherhood Enforcement”, "Sudan bleeds"
🤖 1/ Ok this is pretty wild. I saw some sus pro-Israel astroturfing activity on a BBCNews Facebook post about aid arriving in Gaza. Lots of Hasbara comments like "Hamas will take the aid". The following 2 identical posts were side by side so I looked into it. #disinformation
2/ Specifically I looked at Dean O' Connor. Firstly up, there were two almost identical Dean O'connor pages, both created on consecutive days last week (15 + 16 May). The one that posted is the one on the right.
3/ When I reverse image searched the picture I was inundated with dozens of pages from forums about romance scams asking about people using this same picture. A lot of people scammed out of thousands. Someone even asked on Quora about O'Connor!
Macron Cocaine Thread/ - The first 10 hours of the @EmmanuelMacron @Keir_Starmer @ZelenskyyUa Cocaine disinformation.
Seemed to be promoted initially by a few dubious accounts like @Veritiste @SitgesFranck @99percentyouth @SilentlySirs @goddeketal
#disinformation
2/ Before being boosted by the right-wing ecosystem and conspiracy accounts e.g. @DineshDSouza @RealAlexJones @CollinRugg. No serious journalists reported this story (because it's absurd). Nonetheless, those tweeting in the first 10 hours generated over 103 million views on X!
3/ The boosting of the info by Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev was via Alex Jones, who as the above timeline shows - wasn't the first to put it out on X - but the most widely viewed.
🚨1/ Fake News Alert: A number of accounts are spreading false information that a church in #Wales was burned down by two Pakistan migrants/muslims. There are other narratives, but this is the dominant one. It is false but has obtained millions of views. some data> #disinfo
2/ It is true that a church did burn down. It was set alight by two local teenagers. The South Wales police have tweeted that other rumours circulating are false - they are of course talking about the false info about the ethnicity of the attackers (right).
3/ The most shared claim comes from 'RadioEuropes'. This is a 'Dysinfluencer' account - an account that repeatedly spreads false and malicious information - in this case xenophobic and anti-Muslim content. You can see its false tweet garnered over 3.6 million views