Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Aug 11, 2021 8 tweets 6 min read Read on X
🧵1/ Good morning! I gathered more data over night on the hashtag 'Qatar Revolts', which is exaggerating the scale of protests in Qatar. Approx 1040 of 10500 accounts in the sample are probably fake. There is also at least one other hacked verified account #disinformation
2/ The network graph shows a fairly independent community in the top right quadrant. If you zoom in you'll see a lot of the accounts boosting the hashtag are retweets of the account @JesseCsincsak .... #cybersecurity #disinformation
3/ Now at first glance @JesseCsincsak is a company called JCK - even the name seems to kind of match the handle. Clever. But that's a ruse, the account actually promotes almalka_store. The account is hacked, and belongs to Jesse Csinscak a pro snowboarder &ABC Bachorlette winner!
4/ As you can see JCK/Jesse is spamming numerous hashtags with content, and being retweeted by hundreds of accounts. Most of these retweeting accounts are fake. #disinformation
5/ Other accounts in the community seem quite spammy , retweeting adverts for various companies among other things. Now all those retweeting in this community amount to around 1000, although of course some will be real, but many are just fluffer accounts, au RT'ing
6/ Again, these manipulated and hacked accounts are statistically some of the most influential on t he hashtag. The most influential in this case is @TurkeyAffairs - a dodgy anti Erdogan account that also spends a lot of time writing about Qatar. I say dodgy because its
7/ links to its blogspot and Facebook account are broken (taken down?). Hardly the measure of a sophisticated or well maintained news outlet, despite some of the polish of the videos...Anyone smell a PR company? #disinformation
8/ So that's it for now. Will keep looking at the data. But it's interesting to see the extent of manipulation on these hashtags targeting Qatar. Particularly interesting to see the mysterious @TurkeyAffairs account playing such a large role in it too 🤔 #disinformation

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More from @marcowenjones

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
Jan 8
1/ THREAD: On populist gaslighting and the war on truth-tellers 🧵 Image
2/ Something concerning is happening in our information ecosystem: populists aren't just spreading misinfo, they're systematically trying to undermine the very concept of verifiable truth
3/ When fact-checkers or experts present evidence contradicting false claims, they get labeled as "elitist manipulators" or 'censors' - effectively inverting reality
Read 8 tweets
Jan 7
🧵 THREAD: Meta's disturbing new "free speech" announcement is a masterclass in how platforms enable digital harm under the guise of freedom 1/9 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Meta announces it's getting rid of factcheckers & "restrictions" on gender/immigration content. This isn't about free speech - it's about platforming hate & disinformation under the guise of "mainstream discourse" 2/9
Key red flags: ❗️❗️❗️

Moving content teams to Texas "for less bias" (read: political motivation)

Replacing factcheckers with "community notes"

Framing basic content moderation as "censorship" 3/9
Read 10 tweets
Dec 21, 2024
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 Image
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 Image
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). Image
Read 8 tweets
Nov 20, 2024
🧵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). Image
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 Image
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
Read 4 tweets

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