Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Aug 10, 2021 14 tweets 9 min read Read on X
[Thread] 1/ This thread is on Qatar's long-awaited upcoming Shura elections, and manipulation on the hashtag 'elections for the Shura council'. I analyzed around 18000 interactions involving around 8600 unique accounts. #disinformation #deception
2/ The sample is from the last two days, and generally encompasses the majority of activity on the hashtag. (Of course the presence of manipulation doesn't discount any of the important issues being raised about electoral fairness and inclusion, but I am focusing on manipulation)
3/ Firstly. There is clear, unequivocal manipulation going on. If you look at the network graph below, it shows a large hub of accounts (green block), along with a separate pinkish constellation. The pinkish constellation shows an account being retweeted hundreds of times. Now..
4/ that is not unusual in of itself. But you'll notice 2 things.

1) The constellation is separate, meaning it's not well integrated with the more interactive community

2) I coloured edges by what app those accounts are using to tweet. In this case all those already separate
5/ accounts are tweeting using the same application, in this case, Twitter Web App, or the browser application, which is more often used for manipulation than say Android or iPhone. Once you look at the accounts too, you realise they are sockpuppets. Some examples coming up>
6/ Here is an Iraqi Westlife fan based in KSA.Only she's not, the account probably belonged to a British girl. Indeed the account was not scrubbed properly and the previous owner even posted a photo from 2014 of a surprise bday for a friend at Alton Towers (theme park in England)
7/ Also there's @billybumcrack ! aka, Fatima AlShaybani. He thinks Beady Eye are 'wank' but liked Oasis when Liam Gallagher was in the band. He's also really into the Shura Council elections. Guessing he is British. #disinformation #Qatar
8/ I could go on. You know how many of these sockpuppet accounts are in this cluster alone. Around 925! That's a lot. Whoever runs them has put their location as 'KSA', presumably as that's the target market/region. So who are they retweeting in this case? #disinformation
9/ Well they were retweeting Mubarak Al Yafei, an Emirates based media persona, a verified account, although the link in the bio goes to a suspended webpage - suspended due a lack of verification (so far). The tweet in question has since been deleted but you can see text below
10/ There are other suspicious clusters too. If you see below. Another account is boosting the elections hashtag, but as you can see it as a marketing/spam account. However, the tweet has around 630 retweets, almost all from fake accounts or hacked accounts. #disinformation
11/ It is also important to note that the aforementioned Mubarak Al Yafei is statistically the most influential tweeter in the network folowed by Qattar_Affairs, Kuwarimud and others. Interesting that Turkey affairs is also in there - Turkey Affairs is a sort of anti Erdogan
12/ anti-Qatar current regime account. I am not sure about Qattar Affairs - but it could be related? Anyway the dominant influential accounts are pushing a critical narrative about Qatar's elections, most notably about the exclusion of certain members of the Al Marra tribe.
13/ Many of the accounts appear to be UAE influencers or purportedly Saudi-based sock puppet accounts. Some are unattributed opposition accounts. Either way, at least 14% of the accounts active on the hashtag 'Elections for Shura Council" are sockpuppets/fake accounts #disinfo
14/ Anyway, that's it for now. What we are seeing is clearly external accounts jumping on and artificially amplifying a legitimate issue in order to distort and dominate the narrative, muddying the waters of facts and productive discussion. Classic Gulf Twitter #disinformation

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More from @marcowenjones

Oct 15
🧵1/🚨AI is learning Israel's disinformation.

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 > Image
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). Image
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. Image
Read 15 tweets
Oct 6
🧵🚨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 Image
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. Image
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' Image
Read 15 tweets
Oct 6
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 Image
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. Image
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" Image
Read 14 tweets
May 22
🤖 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 Image
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. Image
Image
Image
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! Image
Read 7 tweets
May 15
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 Image
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! Image
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. Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 29
🚨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 Image
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). Image
Image
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 Image
Read 12 tweets

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