[Thread] 1/ Good evening, afternoon, or morning all! Tonight's thread is on #Turkey, and it will be a big one. Many have commented on the massive hashtag "Help Turkey" that rapidly reached 2.5 million tweets today. Read on for an in depth Twitter analysis > #Disinformation
2/ 1st, some brief context. The hashtag "help turkey" involved people calling for international help to combat Turkey's wildfires. Images like the one below were common. The tweet storm prompted reactionary nationalistic hashtags including "Strong Turkey" & "We Dont Need Help"
3/ Some felt the message being generated on the hashtag was designed to make Turkey look weak, incompetent and desperate. This, coupled with the scale of the campaign, suggested a possible influence operation. To be clear though. The hashtag had many real users. See below.
4/ In addition to this, many real people using the hashtag probably do so in good faith, simply because it is quite understandable that one would expect to ask for help during a crisis. Also, the popularity of the hashtag naturally meant others used it to discuss the hashtag
5/ Caveats aside for now. My initial analysis included several stages. Firstly, a network analysis of around 160,000 interactions from around 46000 unique Twitter accounts. The graph below shows how massive the sample was. I will now highlight some likely #manipulation
6/ Pay attention to the circled area. This community in green is interesting for a number of reasons. I resized the nodes (individual accounts) by how much they tweeted on the hashtag. I.e. the more they tweeted, the bigger the node. This is a useful measure because it it shows
7/ those entities that are really passionate about promoting the hashtag. In usual circumstances this could be passionate parties who feel strongly about an issue, or other parties attempting to influence a conversation for whatever purposes. Ordinarily, you'd expect these large
8/ nodes to be more evenly distributed across the network, but this green community is a community with a significant number of nodes using the hashtag a lot. A really interesting finding is that the most active node in the sample, the busiest, if you will, is/was @ege20281770
9/ Now what you'll notice about @ege20281770 is that it has no tweets, even though it was created today (02/08/2021) and tweeted a lot on the 'help turkey' hashtag. Twitter says there is still one tweet, but there are none, meaning the tweets were deleted
10) Now we know from past EPFL research that influence operations in Turkey often use this tactic of deleting tweets after writing on a hashtag. Here the Twitter algorithm reportedly registers the trend, but the account deletes tweets to avoid detection/be repurposed.
11/ With this in mind, if we look deeper into the green community that had a lot of highly active accounts in, we find more unusual things. One of these tactics is handle switching, where users change their Twitter handle. Let's look at Badboy2147. He has a big 15k following...
12/ Watch this video. Badboy2147 actually no longer exists. If you look at the video below, you'll see that his old username is cached. When you click on the link to his account it says 'this account doesn't exist'. Actually it does exist, but it has changed to Badboy353435 🤯
13/ What's more, the old badboy seems to have deleted his tweets about help turkey. This can be seen by trying to look at replies to his account. Also, if you check new badboy's timeline, there are no more 'help turkey' tweets, which presumably have been deleted. #deception
14/ Just to give you another example, here you can see how an account toprakofficial5 changed to jokerqueenn_ . Now within the suspicious green community of around 7400 accounts at least 70 have changed their name or been deleted, and it's still very early on. I'd expect
15/ more to change or be deleted. We've seen this tactic of handle switching elsewhere in the world, including the Gulf. See the linked report for more details. But in the meantime let's move to the next interesting aspect of this. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/februa…
16/ A massive aspect of this was the copy pasta. Thousands of accounts tweeting the identical tweet (I won't write it here because it will add to the trend, but you can see it in the video) below.... #Turkey
17/ Now I am not certain of the origins of this tweet, but it was tweeted by what I believe are a lot of Turkish celebrities (see image). As I said before, a lot of the accounts tweeting this message are likely real ppl, inspired by celebrities and others, although what's
18/ not clear is who is telling people to copy and paste the English content as opposed to just retweeting it? Is it possible that people just know to do that? It is also odd that I tracked at least 105,000 instances of these English tweets, including retweets. I managed to
19/ scrape around 35,000 unique instances of this copy and pasted English tweet. In addition to this sheer volume of copy pasta, the peak activity occurred past midnight Turkish time. As you can see from the graph, most activity occurred at around 00.16 - which seems pretty late
20/ Another bizarre aspect of the trend was the copy and pasted multilingual calls translating as "turkey is on fire and needs help". Look at the video below. I managed to scrape thousands of these instances. Again many are replies to other accounts to generate engagement.
21/ Also like so many weird, seemingly manipulated trends, loads of BTS and K Pop fans retweeting this message. I counted around 200 who actually retweeted it. I can't imagine a lot of these are genuine, despite the popularity of Kpop...
22/ Also let's not forget precious nijiko!
23/ Anyway that's enough for today, probably time to go to bed. In sum, there is clearly a lot of manipulation going on 'help turkey'. In addition to being boosted by real people and celebrities, it is being artificially manipulated by what is likely to be thousands of sock
24/ puppet accounts. Exact numbers are hard to determine at the moment but I will try to over the next few days. I will also try and see what's going on on Strong Turkiye as a counter hashtag. Thanks for tuning in everyone. Good night and peace #deception
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1/ 🧵This graph shows X posts by impressions in the first six hours after the Magdeburg attack. Specifically these are posts falsely attributing the attack to an Islamist terror attack or a Syrian, or using it as an opportunity to attack immigration or muslims #disinformation
2/ The usual suspects are there - that is, the anti-Islam disinfluencers (routine spreaders of disinformation). As you can see, one of the most widely viewed is @visegrad24 - who shared at least 6 posts falsely claiming the attacker was an Islamist
3/ The posts falsely claiming that the attacker was a Muslim or Islamist gained at least 38,000,000 views. False claims that he was Syrian resulted in around 8.4million views (remember this is just an approx 6 hour period).
🧵1/ I analysed the headline and lead paragraph of 536 English news articles including the terms "Maccabi" + "Amsterdam" and classified them using Claude 3.5 Sonnet to determine how many framed Israelis as victims or non-Israelis as primary victims (as well as both).
2/ The results are fairly striking. 65% of articles frame Israelis as the victim, while only 5% frame Non-Israelis as victims. 24% are neutral while 9% framed both groups as victims. Quite clear the media emphasised violence as anti-Israeli and antisemitic, especially early on
3/ There isn't much evidence too of corrective framing at this point, although a small increase in neutral framing a week after the incident. Israeli victimhood was categorised as emphasis of violence initiated by non-Israelis, and focus on anti-Israeli or antisemitic violence
🧵 1/ Part of understanding what is going on in Amsterdam is also to understand the coordinated anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant campaigns run with huge amounts of money targeting Europe. Here's a short private Eye article about an investigation I did with @SohanDsouza
2/ Here's a write-up by @karamballes on the campaign in @BylineTimes "Disinformation Campaign on Social Media Reached More Than 40 Million People – but Meta ‘Alarmingly’ Hasn't Revealed the Culprits' bylinetimes.com/2024/08/30/qat…
@karamballes @BylineTimes 3/ ...How a covert influence campaign helped Europe’s far right
Our findings about the shadowy multi-platform operation attacking Qatar and stoking Islamophobia to further its far-right agenda in Europe and beyond call for immediate action. aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/…
🧵🚨1/ This is nuts. After mysteriously deleting a package covering the Amsterdam protests, Sky News have put up a new version. The new version completely changes the thrust to emphasise that the violence was antisemitic. See the opening screenshot change below
2/Even the tweet accompanying the video has changed. It has explicitly shifted from mentioning anti-Arab slogans to removing the phrase "anti-Arab" and using antisemitism. It also removes mention of vandalism by Israeli fans. An extremely clear editorial shift!
3/ They have also inserted into the video, right after the opening footage of Dutch Prime Minister condemning antisemitsm. This was not in the original video.
1/ If you break down the BBC's live reporting of what happened in Amsterdam, you can see the disproportionate attention it pays to Maccabi fans and Israelis as victims, with far less attention paid to the actions of Maccabi fans. Here are the sources interviewed.
2/ In terms of mentions of Arab, Dutch or other Ajax fans, there is very little emphasis on Arab safety, with the majority of coverage focused on Maccabi fans as victims. There are vox pops with fans, but very little interaction with non-Maccabi people.
3/ The language used to describe the attacks on the Maccabi fans is also much stronger, ranging from pogroms to brutal and shocking. Similar terms aren't use for the anti-Arab racism.
🚨1/ This New York Times piece is wild. Let's go through it.
Firstly, the lede is an emphasis that attacks in Amsterdam were based on antisemitism, yet it cites no evidence of this, but DOES cite evidence of anti-Arab chants.
2/ The claims of antisemitism are based primarily on the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who tweeted that the attacks were antisemitic. Note - the Dutch Prime Minister didn't call out anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian racism from Maccabi fans.
3/ The piece links to an Amsterdam police statement to talk about the violence - although the police statement doesn't mention anything about antisemitism.