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
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
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
🧵1. This is an analysis of 30,000 tweets spreading disinformation about the #TurkeySyriaEarthquake . The #disinformation in question is the false story that 8-10 Western countries withdrew their ambassadors before the earthquake. The analysis indicates manipulation
2/ Dozens of identical tweets (see vid) were shared and retweeted thousands of times. They took aim at Canada, USA, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Holland and France. Not quite sure what the reason for this selection was. It may relate to the fact at least some of those
3/ countries had envoys summoned by Turkey after they temporarily shut embassies & issued security warnings following Koran-burnings in Europe. Anyway this was days before the Earthquake. The countries are in NATO, and all contribute a lot of assistance to Ukraine
Amazing reporting from @FbdnStories and @KarinePfenniger 'In 2020, digital influencers in the US targeted a Gulf-based journalist online. One of them, currently under investigation by the FBI, was likely paid by a Saudi prince for her tweets' forbiddenstories.org/story-killers/…
The investigation highlights how Sharon Van Rider, an American citizen who was part of a clique of Trump supporters, was paid > $10,000 by intermediary Jerry Maher on behalf of Saudi Shaikh Sattam Al Saud - as part of a 'media project' that seemed to be to attack Saudi critics
Talk about cinematic. Part of the plot to attack Oueiss appears to have been concocted in a Dubai nightclub with Russian strippers, Saud al Qahtani (lord of the flies), Employees of Dark matter, Sattam Al Saud. #disinformation
"Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube."theguardian.com/world/2023/feb…
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads.
The Guardian and its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity across the internet. It was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and UAE
🧵1) I downloaded all tweets since 6th February containing the word HAARP. It was way larger than I expected and I ended up without around 300k tweets across dozens of languages involving over 130k unique accounts! Read on for more #TurkeySyriaEarthquake#Disinformation
2) Firstly, why HAARP. Well, there's a conspiracy going around that HAARP - High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) (a former US program designed to investigate the ionosphere) is being used to weaponize weather, and even create earthquakes. Sound absurd right?
3) Nonetheless, tens of thousands have shared it on Twitter in dozens of languages, but mostly English, Turkish, Spanish, and French. Not everyone sharing it is agreeing with it, but the most shared tweets containing 'HAARP' support the conspiracy
🧵1/ Musk is making Twitter much less transparent, much less accountable, & thus more vulnerable to manipulation. Many of the often poorly resourced activists & academics using the API to tackle foreign influence ops will no longer be able to. Governments should worry #TwitterAPI
2/ Musk is completely stripping Twitter of the resources required to tackle manipulation. The huge loss of human capital, the commodified verification system, the edgelordism, the drive for users to appease advertisers - all are creating a febrile atmosphere for info manipulation
3/ Twitter's immune system was never great, but it is being thoroughly compromised by Musk. The tacit public-private partnership that allowed researchers API access was a small contribution to innoculation against information warfare. #twitterapi
Welcome to botception: Here you can see over 4k accounts liking a tweet by an account called @usviolations - in this case a tweet about Assange. Despite this, if you click on "likes" or "retweets" you won't see anything. It's possible that this is because most of the accounts
are brand new and/or of low quality so they don't appear due to algorithmic ranking - or perhaps it's indexing. The fake accounts can be seen individually (I found them as some people have reported being mass followed by sketchy accounts so i accessed them via viewing followers)
I don't think "quality" makes much difference. If you look at this other tweet from @usviolations you will see most of the retweets seem to be from fake accounts with strange handles, barely any followers, and erm, Korean bios.