🧵1/There is a large, multilingual astroturfing effort around #Cop28 on Twitter right now involving at least 100 fake accounts. The accounts in question are promoting UAE foreign policy, bashing UAE's enemies, and burnishing the UAE's environmental record #deception#greenwashing
2/ Many use stolen photos - either stock photos or those found on the web. They have fully fleshed out bios, including location (usually somewhere in the UAE). Another common tactic is to tag real accounts like @amnesty in the bio to give an air of credibility and plausibility.
3/ For example. Yael Fadel is a space scientist from Cyprus who erm, has tagged @NASA in her bio. I can only assume she works for NASA (hey guys can you confirm?) . When she's not also a stock photo model used by orthodontists, she's subtweeting the Muslim Brotherhood
4/ But Yael isn't the only Cypriot space scientist who also happens to have a mosque as a banner photo and tweets about the UAE, their green credentials, and occasionally the Muslim Broterhood. Meet Georgia Vasiliou. Oh yeah, and her account is verified....
5/ Ok one more Cypriot high-flyer living in Dubai with a verified account and a penchant for tweeting about the UAE and the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe I am ignorant, but I also didn't realise how diverse Cyprus was. Kudos!
6/ We get it guys, you hate the Muslim brotherhood, but can you use a different stock photo?
7/ There are a few more verified accounts too (Good job Musk). This is Sara Mohammed, she's from Iraq, loves maximising returns (I mean who doesn't) and tweets a lot about the climate. She's also a stock photo model who likes foliage.
8/ But my personal favourite is Viyan Mahmud who I presume works for @amnesty. Her image is obviously AI generated. How do we know? Well the odd earrings and composition are a giveaway
9/ but the clincher is the fact who ever created it forgot to completely remove the 'this person does not exist' watermark from the top.
(for those who don't know, this person does not exist is a site that generates AI photoquality faces)
10/ The network has devoted a lot of time tweeting in support of Sultan Al Jaber. Sultan AL Jaber is the Cop28 President and is controversial because he is also CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (adnoc)
11/ Yesterday the Guardian reported that Al Jaber's team had edited a Wikipedia entry to state he was '“precisely the kind of ally the climate movement needs". This quote was taken from a Bloomberg editorial theguardian.com/environment/20…
12/ Another terrifying development is the impossibly sultry, band of American environmental workers who are either AI-generated or from the same sci-fi novel. 2023: A Midjourney Odyssey?
13/ In addition to #COP28 many have been tweeting about Sudan recently. The general stance seems to be against Burhan, which puts them in line with UAE foreign policy. A lot of the content is just thanking UAE for aid to Sudan.
14/ The network is also tweeting in multiple languages, including Spanish, German and Arabic. There are also a lot of accounts that appear to be self-described as from Pakistan. The network has produced around 30000 tweets since its inception.
15/ Will add more later but I don't know who runs the network. It has a lot of overlaps with one promoting the expo a while back. Looks likes some marketing or PR firm tasked with strategic messaging for an entity in the UAE - but this is just a logical assumption based on… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🧵1/ Thread on the Islamophobic and antisemitic disinformation about the #SydneyAttack . I downloaded X posts that wrongly stated that the attacker, Joel Cauchi, was either a Muslim or Jewish terrorist
2/ The size of the network was at least 140,000 posts (from X). This time series graph shows that initially, most of the disinformation (red bars) accused the attacker of being a Muslim or Islamist. At about 1700 UTC we see more and more disinfo about the attacker
3/ being Jewish (orange bars). This temporal analysis reflects the fact that there is a notable tendency when it comes to such attacks in Western countries to accuse, without evidence, the perpetrator of being Muslim. To accuse the attacker of being Jewish is less common
🧵1/ Just want to point out a few disturbing elements regarding misinformation in this article - "What's I've Heard From Gaza" published in the @TheAtlantic . I will focus on two specific references that are quite crucial in framing a broader argument about Hamas's actions #Gaza
2/ The article asserts with no equivocation that Hamas killed fleeing civilians on the Al Rashid coastal road in Nov 23. Not only is there no evidence for this, but the link is to an article in the Jerusalem Post, that relies on a tweet from known disinfluencer, @amjadt25
3/ Even if one wasn't to take an Occam's razor approach (i.e. it was probably the IDF since they have killed > 33000 people), then it would make sense to at least report this ambiguously. Reuters, for example, covered the strike, but did not even mention it could have been Hamas
🧵It is increasingly clear that ISGAP are operating in a capacity that has nothing to do with antisemitism, but rather malicious disinformation and a war on education. Their latest report is akin to saying ppl in Qatar shouldn't study *anything*, anywhere, lest they nuke us all
2) The highlight is perhaps how they use the third party aggregate edurank to "prove" that @tamuq and @QatarUniversity have "nuclear engineering programs". I don't even think a first year uni student would be this stupid. Neither uni has a nuclear engineering program, but I love
3) the idea that somehow the cunning foxes at Edurank managed to be party to this information that has been hidden from the public. The "report" then documents research projects at TAMUQ that could be "dual use". Below are some favourites. I kid you not, studying "sensors" is
🧵Although there is more pressure on right-wing and pro-Israel lobbies, most of the reporting on Texas A&M's recent decision to close its Qatar campus in four years cites a report by ISGAP - a pro -Israel think tank, which launched a disinformation campaign about nuclear secrets
It goes back to this press release on 4th Jan 2024, when ISGAP claimed absurdly that Qatar could exert control over nuclear weapons research. Make no mistake, it's a disinformation campaign. It is also evident that the only people who took it 'seriously' were right wing
think tank, or Israeli media - e.g. @i24NEWS_EN @Jerusalem_Post . The fact some of these articles were written by FDD-affiliated 'journalists' (& by that I mean people with a record of harassing people who aren't pro-Israel) simply highlights the fact they are not credible
🧵🚨Discovered hundreds of sock puppets promoting Israeli propaganda on X, Threads, FB & Insta. It also includes 'fake' websites. Recently, it has been spreading anti-UNRWA #disinformation, & trying to undermine solidarity between Palestinians & Black people. #Gaza
Analysis 👉
2/ A few people noticed that influential accounts writing about Gaza were getting replies with people linking a @WSJ article about an Israeli 'intelligence' report claiming 10% of UNRWA staff have links to Hamas. One of the authors of the WSJ was a former IDF soldier.
3/ You may have noticed that the wording of the tweets was very similar. All of them focused on the '10%' figure. All of them uncritically embraced the 10% figure of UNRWA employees being 'linked' to Hamas.
🧵1/ Analysis of why Israel's UNRWA 'dossier' smearing UNRWA is misleading propaganda.
Indeed, Israel's own statistics actually show that the alleged Hamas presence in UNRWA is significantly LOWER than elsewhere in #Gaza.
Read on for more >
2/ A number of outlets, including Reuters, Sky News, CNN and Forbes (to name but a few) have run stories about an intelligence dossier provided by Israel (solid source!) attempting to smear UNRWA. @EylonALevy even called UNRWA a 'front' for Hamas'
3/ First the claims.
Claim one: 190 UNRWA employees in Gaza are 'hardened militants'. The WSJ reported that the dossier noted that 23% of UNRWA male employees had ties to Hamas (whatever that means), a higher percentage than 15% for adult males in Gaza.