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Nov 6 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
1/ Yesterday a couple of news channels, including @ESPNFC reported on a #Bundesliga game where people unfurled a flag in protest of the Qatar World Cup. It said '15,000 deaths for 5,760 minutes of football - shame on you”. This is a history of where that 15000 figure came from
2/ Firstly, the 15,000 figure comes from Amnesty. It's the total number of deaths of all non-Qataris of all ages and all causes between 2010 and 2019 - not excess deaths. This mortality rate actually is quite low. See this thread >
3/ The 15,000 number originated in around August 2021, in this important report about poor death reporting and failing to investigate unexplained deaths. amnesty.org/en/latest/news…
4/ It was only in December 2021 that the figure was picked up, by German outlet @sportstudio , but it was periodically resurrected, getting highly retweeted in March 2022 and August 2022. Yesterday, it went viral again partly thanks to @ESPNFC . What's interesting is
5/ the trend was originally mostly confined to German. As the graph below shows, most of tweets using the figure in European languages were German (orange). Only yesterday did it seem to break out into Spanish and English (green)
6/ Of course, while the figure is itself misleading, it was also re-interpreted as 15,000 people dying while building the stadiums, or simply as an excess death statistic - which it is not. See below for example >
7/ Below, some of the most influential accounts spreading this misleading and sensationalist news story are well-established sporting news outlets including @ESPNFC and @sportstudio
8/ I did a similar thread about another misleading figure (6,500 deaths) that you can see here. While the '15,000' appears to be less widespread, it has persisted over the past year and is now breaking out beyond the German press
9/ So while a lot of European media continues its inexplicably poor reporting, I'd recommend reading this by @vanish_forever - an incredible (and sobering) review of the past ten years migrant-rights.org/2022/11/worker… .
10/ Poor death reporting in Qatar and confusing statistics make occupational death numbers difficult to come by, but the ILO so far have perhaps the most accurate analysis ilo.org/global/about-t…

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Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Nov 6
1/ More misleading statistics. The 15000 deaths figure comes from an Amnesty International Report. The Amnesty report clearly states the number of deaths of all non-Qataris of all ages and occupations, between 2019 and 2020. 15000 deaths over a nine year period from a population
2/ of approximately 2.3 million (non Qataris) equates to a death rate of 1 per 1000 per year (15,000/9/ pop x 1000 of each year since 2010 - which ranges from 1.7 mill in 2010 to 2.9 mill in 2019). For comparison, death rate in EU is 12 per 1000, India is 7 (see screenshots)
3/ This, paradoxically, makes 15,000 one of the lowest death rates in the world. The original Amnesty International report was focusing on the vital issue of 'unexplained deaths' and poor death reporting which makes accurate cause of death hard to determine. So while better death
Read 8 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Nov 1
My latest for @The_NewArab "How Western press coverage of Qatar World Cup 2022 descended into hypocrisy and orientalist caricatures". In it I compare British representations of the Russian World Cup with that of Qatar' english.alaraby.co.uk/opinion/uk-pre…
"Since winning the #WorldCup bid in 2010, the UK newspapers The Guardian, The Times, Daily Express, The Sun, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and Metro UK named Qatar approximately 1,735 times in their headlines. 40% (685) of those articles about Qatar are about the World Cup".
"Coverage is overwhelmingly negative. Of the approximately 685 articles about the World Cup in the British press, 66% (454) were critical, 29% (201) were neutral and about 5% (33) were positive."
Read 12 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Oct 29
🧵1/ An interesting note on the #مهسا_اميني hashtag and 'Op Iran' is the use of platform manipulation techniques. One technique has been the spelling out of numbers in Persian. This behaviour has resulted in at least 3.4 million tweets since 15th Sept 2022
2/ I downloaded a 140,000 sample of tweets on #مهسا_اميني along with a limited permutation of Persian numbers (20 and, 30 and, 40 and etc). The total number of tweets containing these numbers was around 3.4 million. Of course these aren't all possible number permutations Image
3/ so the real number will be much higher. Many of the tweets are replies to tweets asking for engagement on the hashtag, some saying to do so because Iranian internet is down. A lot of the tweets making the requests get a lot of engagement too. ImageImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Oct 28
1) A little known fact about Cambridge Analytica's sister company, SCL Social, was this it actually worked with the UAE Supreme Council via British PR firm Project Associates to launch an adversarial ad campaign targeting Qatar, and to some extent, the World Cup
2) The contract, worth $330,000 dollars, was a 'global social media' campaign that targeted journalists, foreign reporters and diplomats in New York at the time of the UN General Assembly in 2017 efile.fara.gov/docs/6473-Supp…
3) A really interesting aspect of this filing it's one of the few smoking guns where we see some detail about the nature of operations undertaken. This list of money spent on ads is curious, but not as curious as the screenshots.
Read 13 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Oct 27
🧵1/ This is a thread on the #MahsaAmini hashtag. To date, there are 66 million tweets on the hashtag, and 350 million on #مهسا_امینی . These numbers are unprecedented on Iran-related hashtags, and phenomenal in general (For comparison, #BlackLivesMatter was 63 million)
2/ I analysed 623,777 tweets from 84,199 unique accounts over 24 hours. Some highlights: 23.7% of all accounts in the sample (around 19,980) were created in September and October 2022. In fact, 15% of all accounts were created in a consecutive 10 day period in Sept 2022
3/ As you can see below, if we zoom in on September and October we can see account creation increased to a peak on September 23rd, and slowly decreased afterwards. Of course the increase began after the death of Mahsa Amini. We'd expect numbers to increase as new people
Read 12 tweets
Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Oct 25
So basically, Peter Tatchell and his team came to Qatar to protest, misled everyone about being arrested, lied about being disappeared and 'seized' by police, and then generated all the following news coverage in the mainstream press (who probably won't report that it was false)
I can't imagine how this would be reported if someone went to the UK to protest something and faked being disappeared by the police. But most importantly, how are such stunts supposed to actually supposed to benefit the LGBTQ+ community or their allies?
Some important notes: Tatchell was not arrested, but spoken to by police at the kerbside. He even admits to 'not being removed from the curbside”. Arrest and being spoken to by police are not the same dohanews.co/british-lgbtq-… OR reuters.com/world/middle-e…
Read 9 tweets

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