Thread by @marcowenjones

🧵1/ Here's an intriguing thread showing overlap between Gulf and British politics. In particular, it shows how the @LaylaMoran and @CrispinBlunt issue is being used as a means by social media accounts as propaganda attack the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar . #disinformation

2/ First, context. @LaylaMoran & @CrispinBlunt recently admitted that they did paid non-MP related work from their official offices. The Saudi connection, the work involved attending a zoom panel arranged by Bindmans LLP about political prisoners in Saudi. bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

3/ This is technically a breach of House of Common rules. Anyway, the fact the panel raised issued of human rights violations in Saudi has prompted a predictable nationalist backlash on Twitter. However, some are using it as an opportunity for propaganda and disinformation >

4/ Firstly, I downloaded tweets and hashtags mentioning Layla Moran in Arabic. This amounted to around 16000 tweets, retweets, replies, mentions etc, posted between 16-22nd November. The first thing to noticed that the third most common hashtag in the graph was 'qatar'.

5/ The eighth most common phrase was 'brotherhood'. First this is interesting because most of the English language press on this issue do not mention Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood as they are not relevant. The MB connection relates to the fact a Bindhams lawyer has represented

6/ the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not secret or illegal of course. It's mentioned clearly on their website. The Qatar is connection is even more tenuous, and perhaps relates to the propaganda trope that paints Qatar and Turkey as the key supporters of MB bindmans.com/our-people/pro…

7/ Anyway, As you can see from the graph. The accounts mentioning @LaylaMoran tended to focus on either the Qatar or Brotherhood trope. The graph below shows those tweets that mention the Brotherhood (green) or Qatar (orange). Purple are accounts that mention neither.

8/ Around 58% of the accounts tweet or retweet an account mentioning Qatar or the Brotherhood. Saudi journalist halgawi was the most influential, he wrote a fairly uncontroversial tweet that simply connected the law firm to the MB via previous work

9/ More interesting are some of the unverified sketchy news sites promoting the story, such as @TheSaudi_post, which outright accuses @LaylaMoran of receiving Qatari money - retweeted over a thousand times. @TheSaudi_post doesn't have a website, just a FB page

9/ There's also @QLeaks2 - another site of unknown provenance that posts questionable news about Qatar. In this case they went for the patently false headline 'Qatar bribes British parliamentarians to attack Saudi Arabia'. #disinformation

10/ There are plenty more accounts so I won't go on. But safe to say the scandal is being used to attack the brotherhood, Qatar, and also @LaylaMoran . There are also some bots, but I won't go into now!