Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Mar 22, 2022 17 tweets 8 min read Read on X
🧵1/I have done an analysis of those responding to #NazaninZaghariRatcliffe's interview, specifically focusing on those calling her an 'ungrateful cow' for not showing enough deference or gratitude to the UK government. The Brexit partisanship on the topic is startling. Read on!
2/ First up. Accusations that Nazanin was 'ungrateful' started surfacing following her press conference that went viral on Twitter yesterday. She was calm and assertive, as was her husband Richard. Watch the video here #NazaninZaghariRatcliffe
3/ I analysed around 14,000 tweets involving around 8600 unique accounts. I downloaded tweets that included the hashtag "send her back" and "ungrateful cow" and the keywords "Nazanin and ungrateful". (horrendous I know). The below network graph of tweets was generated
4/ Now bear in mind such searches return tweets hating on Nazanin as well as those supporting her/ criticizing the haters. As the graph below shows, there are two distinct clusters, 1 and 2.

Cluster 1 are those defending Nazanin
Cluster 2 are those criticizing Nazanin
5/ Now what can we say about each group. Well, if we analyse the bios of group 2, the haters, we find that the third most common descriptor is Brexit. If we check the concordance, they are pro-Brexit. Woke comes in 6th! (as in, anti-woke) EU is mentioned in 12, (as in anti-EU).
6/ Brexiteer and conservative come in 11th and 12. Back Boris is also in 15th. So a very distinctly pro-Brexit and conservative community are generally the ones labelling Nazanin as ungrateful on Twitter.

What about group 1? Well let's see...
7/ FBPE (Follow back pro EU) is in 4th place, with 'socialist' in 5th. Brexit is 6th, but concordance shows it's all pro-EU. 'Johnson Out' is in 7th place. So those defending Nazanin are indeed, more likely to to be pro-EU and left-leaning!
8/ As for the 'ungrateful cow' crowd. Here are a few of the most influential people on the hashtag accusing Nazanin of being an 'ungrateful cow'. Note the gratuitous use of caps, misogyny, and general unpleasantness. #NazaninZaghariRatcliffe
9/ So there you have it, proof that hating on a newly released hostage of the Iranian regime - who also happens to be a female person of colour, who has missed 6 years of their life and daughter growing up & endured hellish jail conditions - is more a right-wing Twitter past time
10/ Also proof that those who are pro-EU and left-leaning tend to be the ones exhibiting more empathy in the case of Nazanin. How many of those people are real is a different question, & one that I will not try to answer right now. Twitter is awash with anonymous generic accounts
11/ Some may ask about the cluster in the middle - well it's @JuliaHB1 - who actually features in the middle of the map between the two communities. While saying that Nazanin 'moaned', Julia also did say she would have punched someone if she was Nazanin.
special thanks to @rosieniven for bringing this issue to my attention!
12/ I will update keywords later but interesting to see who else is involved. Brexit campaign-funder and Putin apologist @Arron_banks has been joining the pile on casting aspersions on #NazaninZaghariRatcliffe - and getting a lot of engagement
13/ Update: Dunno if it's because of this thread but one of the largest infuencers of the anti Nazanin discourse was suspended in the past few hours #NazaninZaghariRatcliffe
14/ For those asking how I did this analysis. I downloaded the tweets using import function on NodeXL, exported that to a GEXF file, and then visualised it using Gephi. AntConc was used for corpus analysis. Of course there is a little more to it but they're the main bases.
15/ For anyone asking about clusters and communities (colours). The algorithm sorts out clusters based on connected edges (the lines, which represent tweets,RTs, replies etc). So what this graph indicates is polarisation, a lack of interaction across opposing communities on the
topic. Essentially it reflects how Twitter interactions across this particular issue reflect partisan echo Chambers. it's also important to bear in mind most twitter discussions consist of RTs. So most interactions within a sample are retweets

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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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