🧵1/10 "The killing of Abu Akleh prompted a flood of disinformation and propaganda from the Israeli state, which has sought to undermine and steer criticism of Israel by casting doubt on who was responsible for her death. " #ShireenAbuAqlaenglish.alaraby.co.uk/analysis/shire…
2/10 "These practices often exploit professional media standards, as well as Western media and political fears of being labelled anti-Semitic. This is no accident but rather the result of a common propaganda playbook, which works as follows." #ShireenAbuAqla
3/10 "First. Have your propaganda ready as soon as possible. When news broke of Shireen’s killing, the Israeli state narrative was already ready, muddying the waters of the event....."
4/10 "Second. Minimise objective or plausible reality by creating false parity and equal probability between two sets of events, despite the presence of journalist eyewitnesses who contradict this..."
5/10 "Third. Discredit Palestinians. Israeli PM Naftali Bennet accused Palestinians of initiating the violence, a tactic designed to reduce their credibility in the eyes of the public by framing them as uncivilised, while at the same time, presenting Israeli forces as civilised."
6/10 "Four. Insert clear falsehoods into the information space. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a video allegedly showing Palestinian gunmen firing relatively blindly into an alley."
7/10 "Fifth. Call for an investigation, but make sure you hold all the cards. By doing this, it gives the illusion of compassion and a regard for truth."
8/10 "In other words, disingenuous calls for investigations are a means of trying to censor outrage by deferring immediate grief to a later date, when it has subsided and is less likely to be politically volatile and harmful to the Israeli state."
9/10 "The killing of Abu Akleh, and subsequent obfuscation of truth, are eerily reminiscent of the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah in 2000.A lesson was clearly learned by Israel. Blame Palestinians first, and attempt to prove it later if you want to keep the media on your side."
10/10 "...After all, a chief success of propaganda in many ways is agonising over the proximate cause of Shireen’s death, i.e. who fired the bullet.
Thread/1 I wanted to compare in this case the @guardian reporting of the murder of Brent Renaud and the murder of #ShireenAbuAkleh . I will stick to the headline. Caveats at the end, but I just wanted to highlight a few obvious biases.
2/ The best way to do this would be to re-write the Brent Renaud headline in the style of the #ShireenAbuAqla piece to highlight differences.
a) The killing of Brent Renaud is now an accusation by a Kyiv Police Chief (creates doubt). This opens the door to 'he said she said'
3/
b) Renaud's name is removed from the main headline (impersonal and cold)
c) The subheading in the #ShireenAbuAqla is clear to present Israeli narrative so this has been done to the Renaud article. I sourced it from Russia Today, which is state-controlled, and suggests that
"Musk’s hyper-libertarian support of freedom of speech prompted fears that Twitter would degenerate further into a toxic, anything-goes playground."
"If anything, the libertarian view espoused by Musk will be worrying for minorities, such as Muslims in Europe and the US, who frequently bear the brunt of the kind of vitriol that many racists roll under the pretext of free speech. "
1/ On today's episode of why it's embarrassing to be British we will be looking at viral misogyny and hashtag 'growler gate'. I will explain why such a hashtag trended in UK, and why/who was promoting it. #angelarayner
2/ 'Growler' is a British vulgar slang term for vagina. The hashtag in question is a reference to @AngelaRayner. It relates to an ongoing smear campaign by the Daily Mail, where they claimed Labour MP Angela Rayner engaged in Basic Instinct like-tactics to distract Boris Johnson
3/ The Daily Mail reported that Rayner used the term *ginger growler* herself, and joked about using it to distract Boris Johnson in private remarks she made to four unnamed Tory MPs. Labour described this as a smear.
1/ Yesterday I analyzed over a thousand fake followers bulk following pro-Palestinian organizations and activists. Twitter deleted over 1000. However, ppl reported that it was continuing. I analysed more followers, and found 600+ fakes @AliAbunimah@hzomlot & @NaeemJeenah
2/ As you can see, 332 were created on April 29, and 324 created today - April 30. These are accounts that have NOT been deleted, so remember that the total number before Twitter suspended accounts yesterday was much higher. #disinformation#Palestine
3/ The average account creation time is, at times, one per minute. That's a lot, but bear in mind again the actual number is much higher if we include deleted accounts. Yesterday it was over 3 accounts per minute! It seems to be a constant process over 24 hours, again suggesting
1/ A few people are reporting a sudden influx of suspicious followers today, including @abierkhatib . I crunched the numbers and yes, it's very anomalous, and very weird. Read on for some weird stats and possible explanations.
2/ Firstly, Abier has been followed by at least 438 accounts today. How do we know, well those were all created today - 29th April. If you see the below graph, you will see that the average number of accounts created per day among Abier's followers is 28.
3/ All these accounts have bizarre names. One of my favorites is Ashley Lascano, who has a great moustache and seems strangely proud of his driving license photo despite being into photography himself
🧵1/ Some have asked why 'Back Boris' is trending. The simple answer is, because it's a polarising topic of course! As you can see from this analysis of around 15000 tweets involving 9000 accounts, the hashtag brings out both supporters and detractors of Johnson
2/ 'Back Boris', along with 'Scum Media' tend to trend every time Boris does something stupid (which, let's face it, is quite often). Johnson and Sunak's recent fines for having a knees up when the rest of the country couldn't even see dying loved ones has irked a lot of people
3/ Criticism of Boris tends to bring out his supporters like those scary demons from the film Ghost. I recoloured edges here by the most popular tweets (Remember, most hashtags are RTs). We can see, bad graphic design, poor spelling (#hypocripes), & digs at BLM, reign supreme