🧵1/ This is an analysis of all accounts using the terms '#Ukraine' and 'bio labs'. I wanted to see which accounts were pushing this narrative the most, & which were the most influential. This is an analysis of around 20k Twitter interactions from approx 17k unique accounts
2/ Broadly speaking there are two communities. Cluster 1 are those generally promoting the existence of 'biolabs', mostly with nefarious undertones. Cluster 2 are accounts reporting on the US rejection of biolabs conspiracies, e.g. @washingtonpost
3/ Within group one there are a few tight clusters mentioning biolabs, and seemingly helping push the conspiratorial narrative including numerous Americans, such as @JackPosobiec@ChuckCallesto@bennyjohnson
4/ Some of their conspiratorial insinuations come from conflating US diplomat Victoria Nuland's mention of biological research labs with offensive biolabs, which the Kremlin are framing as some sort of bioweaponry nerve/covid/ethnicity based agent production facility #Ukraine
5/ There's also a trope of evidence being 'deleted' re these biolabs, obviously to bolster the conspiracy. It's being pushed by blue ticks, and Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, - but it's false
6/ Dilyana is falsely claiming that the US Embassy in Kyiv is deleting documents pertaining to its biological threat reduction program. This is not true, the documents are still there, and Dilyana's 'site can't be reached' screenshot contains a different URL from embassy website
7/ Interestingly, Dilyana's tweet, which remember is incorrect, was then retweeted by the Chinese Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, who asked her 1.1 million followers what the US was hiding? #Ukraine#UkraineWar
8/ Of course Tucker Carlson content features heavily on the hashtag... He's obviously using it, like many republicans, as a stick to beat Biden with. #Ukraine#misinformation
9/ The most influential account spreading the disinformation, which I managed to collect just in time, was @ASBMilitary - a very active Twitter account that has been spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. An hour ago, it was suspended, this was one of its most recent tweets #ukraine
10/As @ThePlumLineGS and others such as @Shayan86 have pointed out, the biological labs are no secret, and officials were even debunking this during the Trump administration. Read here for more >
11/ There's a lot more highly followed accounts also spreading the outrage and fear, @PeoplesParty_US right wing social media apps like @getongab - but I'll leave it there for now.
13/ I just analysed the biographies of the accounts spreading the biolabs disinfo. The second most common word is MAGA, followed by Trump, god and conservative. MAGA appeared 655 times, so in around 6% of the sample with available bio data #Ukraine#UkraineRussiaWar
14/ Going to end with this meme I made
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🤖 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
1/ THREAD: On populist gaslighting and the war on truth-tellers 🧵
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
🧵 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
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).