Thread by @marcowenjones

1/ Analysis of over around 120,000 thousand tweets on the hashtag #15minutecities and '15 minute cities' highlights clear polarisation on the topic with little 'mixing'. As others have pointed out, a fairly obvious right-wing and conspiracy orientated cluster are promoting it

2/ As you can see on the left, the amount of people promoting the conspiracy is huge. There is little interaction between those people and those debunking the conspiracy. The density of the cluster on the left indicates a fairly intense filter bubble

3/ Top tweets. The largest promoters of the conspiracy theory are dubious. The most retweeted was @ChildrensHD , an anti-vaccine propaganda outfit who have previously been accused of targeting black Americans with disinfo to promote vaccine hesitancy > npr.org/sections/healt…

4/ The second most retweeted (promoting the same video) was @hugh_mankind - another Twitter Blue subscriber and anti-globalist disinfo/propaganda account. Ostensibly Canadian, certainly sketch. The third most retweeted was a 100% real person @davidkurten - a British politician

5/ and anti globalist. Disinfluencer (regular spreader of disinfo) and scaremonger @LozzaFox was also a popular retweeter of 15 minute city alarmism. Of course @jordanbpeterson has opportunistically jumped on the bandwagon to talk about the 'globalist agenda'.

6/ Analysis of the bios of the accounts reveals one of the most common words is 'anti' - (common in these kind of polarisation-style 'far left or right' and/or agitprop accounts). 'Anti-woke' is a very common phrase, as is 'anti-World Economic Forum' and anti globalist

7/ Again the bios indicate a conservative, Christian, nationalistic bent to those promoting the conspiracies and disinfo about 15 minute cities. I was surprised to see how many people had 'No DMs' in their bio > at least 263

8/ An oddity. An analysis of account creation date shows some strange anomalies in Oct and April 2022 when a seemingly large number of accounts were created in a very short time span (over 1600 in just 4 days). (average accounts created per day is just 12).

9/ These anomalies become more clear if you redraw the graph by day instead of month. It's quite a striking finding. Interestingly, I have seen a number of these accounts also spreading disinfo about the #TurkeySyriaEarthquake

10/ That's enough for tonight, but here are some good reads about what exactly the 15minutecities conspiracies are all about opendemocracy.net/en/oxford-15-m… and wired.co.uk/article/15-min…

11/ My sense is that while there are clearly many real people who believe and share these conspiracies, there's a world of sketchy accounts who seem to want to promote division and polarisation. Before it was brexit, then vaccines, and why not 15 minute cities now...

12/ Should there are dozens of top influencers on this. I just pulled up some of the most retweeted but happy to answer questions