Pro-Russian accounts and 'fake news' sites are trying to claim that satellite imagery from @Maxar, posted by @nytimes, showing bodies on the streets of Ukraine's Bucha are fake, but in this thread, you're going to see how silly pro-Russian disinformation attempts can be 🧵👇
Many accounts have posted these claims that Maxar didn't have satellites running over Bucha on March 19.
This is the imagery that has been at the centre of the attempted 'debunking' by pro-Russian accounts.
This pro-Kremlin 'fact checking' site WarOnFakes appears to be the source of much of the attempts to raise doubt, and promote pro-Russian narratives. The site published an article claiming Maxar had no satellite coverage of Bucha at that time. waronfakes.com/lies-about-buc…
And they're right. It doesn't show March 19 imagery there. Why? Because they have failed to select the filter option of the range of nadir to show all available imagery.
One clear look at the source site of @Maxar's archive (where they got their screenshot) shows that there is indeed March 19 imagery.
So how did they make this mistake? When you open up the search filters, by default the library only shows imagery at 30% off nadir (the angle in which the satellite is at when it takes the image, basically).
They forgot to open up that range.
The results differ quite a lot between low and high nadir ranges, as you can see. This fundamental flaw by WarOnFakes comes down to very basic things.
The 'proof' that WarOnFakes, and all of the other pro-Russian accounts are using, is proof that they cannot use simple tools.
Despite the efforts in this thread to squash this disinformation denying events in Bucha, the WarOnFakes reports are still being amplified by impactful accounts. For example, this Hollywood director.
Many asked for this 'debunking' and context around Bucha in a report, so we've written it up and have also addressed claims that the shadows were wrong in the satellite imagery and show how these narratives were amplified by the Russian Government info-res.org/post/disinform…
We've also obtained satellite imagery from @planet dated March 21 that matches the location of the bodies seen in the @Maxar imagery over Bucha. As extra proof, we now also have drone footage of the site from March 25 seen in the linked tweet
It's clear that this isn't the only time WarOnFakes has amplified propaganda about Bucha, and there's clear signs that the Russian Government supports those narratives. More seen in our report: info-res.org/post/disinform… and @DeutscheWelledw.com/en/ukraine-war…
This video, reportedly showing an Israeli woman kidnapped, beaten and taken into Gaza, was filmed from Al Shuja-iyyah St in Gaza at about 10am this morning.
Verification of the location can be confirmed through the location of the minaret in the background, white dome in the near ground, and then the angle of the orange roof in comparison to the street.
Location: 31.503462, 34.466569.
Shadows seen in the footage, indicate that the sun had to have been at a position to cast those shadows in line, or just off, the same angle as the street at 10am, or just before 10am.
Lots of smoke rising over the skyline of Khartoum today as clashes continue between RSF and SAF forces in different areas of the city.
People in Sudan have shared these flyers in a plea for help over what's happening with a water purification plant that services a lot of Khartoum with clean water.
It has been badly damaged and safe access needs to be granted to allow for repairs to be made to the plant.
The water treatment plant in Bahri appears to have been damaged in the initial wave of bombings in Khartoum. In satellite imagery on Google Earth from April 15 we can see a fire in the area, imagery from @planet on April 19 published by @hrw at least one building damaged.
The findings are based on data collected from Twitter and Telegram, looking at more than 1585 accounts and 480 channels and running follow up searches on numerous platforms.
Data was collected using keywords: Khokhols, Hohols and iterations used as anti-Ukrainian national slurs
The terms were selected given their prominence in Google Search trends. For example, the screenshot below shows the increase in the search of the term Khokhol which surged significantly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Last week I spoke at @journalismfest on how open-source intelligence is used to combat propaganda and uncover new information during Russia's war on Ukraine. Thank you for having me.
I promised to share a list of links to tools and sources. Here it is (I hope it helps) 👇
I often share digital investigation skills, cases and sources at events to help remotely answer core questions such as:
WHERE & WHEN did it happen?
WHAT happened?
WHO is responsible?
And HOW can it be visualised?
So let's start with the case studies.
1: EyesonRussia.org - our community effort to document, verify and map Russia's invasion of Ukraine and share this info with the world.
This is a running thread of satellite imagery showing the destruction seen in Turkey and Syria in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes. #turkeyearthquake2023
In a few hours I pulled 3000+ tweets using China location tags #北京, #杭州 & #重庆. These tags are dens of spam.
Red lines indicate interactions between accounts (generally normal activity). Orange nodes are lone accounts, almost all of which spam the tags with dating ads.
A quick summary on the accounts created seen in the network graph above.
- 555 of the accounts were made in Nov
- 463 made in Oct
- many have zero or few followers
- many mention "high end silk" ads in different ways.
That's just out of the 3000 I collected. But so many more
Here is what that spammy content looks like, over and over again.
For journalists or researchers looking up what's happening in China at specific locations. This is what they're wading through.
Happy to share the data with legitimate researchers online activity.