🧵1/ Ready for a sockpuppet odyssey that goes from Twitter to Medium? Meet Rebecca Klein. She's an 'Israel' based in Dubai, has a fantastic set of chompers, & a verified account. She also loves the UAE, and by the looks of things, spaghetti junctions. #deception#disinformation
2/ Klein was part of a network promoting Cop28 in UAE. Following my thread, the network took evasive action, changing their usernames (this is called handle switching). As you can see, Klein became Samantha Ali.
Also, 'Forgetting Rebecca Klein' is a great movie title.
3/ Some of you may know that everyone has a unique Twitter ID. This ID remains the same even if you change your username. So if you know the unique ID, you know the new username
Amazingly, Samantha Ali has already got her verification back. Her bio has changed slightly though.
4/ It includes the pleasing phrase "balancing Quills and Diplomatic Skills'. I thought this quite witty for a sockpuppet so decided to Google it, to see if it was a quote. It wasn't, but took me to the medium blog of Samantha Ali, with 6k followers!
5/ Some of you may be thinking that whoever runs the Rebecca Klein account simply copied the profile of a real Samantha Ali?
No. There's a lot of deception involved. First up, the image is a stock photo, that was even used on the @ilo website
6/ The medium URL actually uses the name 'joiecooper2', not Samantha Ali, or Rebecca Klein. A Waybacksearch reveals the Medium account also changed name, bio and image from Joie Cooper to Samantha Ali. This is the previous image and bio
7/ Samantha Ali/JoieCooper's account was deleted following the publication of the @dpcarrington article in the Guardian But there are many records of her publications on the Waybackmachine. She posted every 2-3 days since 2021. Topics seem to reflect UAE foreign policy but also
8/ are very pro-Israel anti Muslim Brotherhood. Also anti-Qatar, which is interesting as much of this content was occurring after the Al Ula summit in 2021.
9/ But it's not just Samantha Ali doing tireless reporting on the Middle East . There are dozens of fake Medium accounts posting similar content about Mid East Politics. Look at these characters, all with thousands of followers and stock photos.
10/ This post defending Sultan Al Jaber by Samantha Ali has 335 hand claps and two comments. But the comments are also from fake accounts. Classic Astrotufring
11/ So there you have, some agency is running a large, incredibly juicy astroturfing campaign across Twitter and Medium. What's more, Twitter's verification system is so broken that an obvious sock puppet can change their entire personality and body and still get verified.
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🚨🧵1/ Graph showing people on X sharing the 'Haitians' or 'Immigrants' are eating pets xenophobic and/or racist disinfo. @elonmusk gets the most engagement by far on the topic, but @jdvance @stillgray @Surabees @tedcruz @charliekirk11 @endwokeness & @bennyjohnson get a lot
2/ Here's a list of the accounts who got the most impressions. I counted a minimum of 399,984, 065 impressions - and I was only downloading tweets with a minimum engagement of 50 retweets - so the real figure is higher.
3/ Another horrible outcome of this is that we now have to endure disturbing and racist memes of Trump abducting kittens (presumably to eat). Even Musk shared one, along with several tweets on the topic - supercharging the disinfo
🧵1/ Thought I'd zoom in on the data from the Southport riots, especially given the recent arrest of a man in Pakistan - which has prompted some commentators & news outlets to use it as an opportunity to target people of colour once again. Let's look at what happened
2/ A man in Pakistan, Farhan Asif, who ran Channel3NowNews, was just arrested for spreading misinfo. Channel3NowNews used the made-up name "Ali Al Shakati," However, contrary to some right-wing i/allusions, Channel3NowNews was NOT the first to tweet this name, or be arrested
3/ The first known person to post the name "Ali Al Shakati" on X was actually Artemisfornow, aka Bernie Spofforth, a wealthy woman from Cheshire. She tweeted the name over an hour before Channel3NowNews. She was arrested over a week ago, and released on bail.
🚨Important thread highlights how X under Musk is putting people at risk
1) This account impersonating a man who helped stop a knife attack in London is still live, & has accumulated well over 1 million impressions.
2) It's history indicates it is a pro-Putin "bot" connected
possibly to Pakistan. However, it also has pro-Ismail Haniyeh & Hamas content
3) Regardless of what you think of Hamas, this is far right rocket fuel. Tommy Robinson already tweeted out the fake account, wrongly accusing him of supporting an "islamist genocidal regime"
4) Despite Musk claiming he would clamp down on impersonator accounts this account has not been suspended yet. This is happening amidst a wave of anti -immigrant and anti-muslim violence in the UK.
🧵🚨This account @abdullahfromuk is impersonating a man who stopped a knife attack in London's Leicester Square. His original account handle was ZartashaPti and he has been tweeting pro-Imran Khan content in Urdu and English for most of his account history.
It has also tweeted content that would suggest it's pro-Vladimir Putin (although not in any particularly sophisticated way). The account is in the process of deleting its tweets, and it looks like a classic sockpuppet farm, for-hire type account.
@jneill has already highlighted some other content from the account, which again includes some Putin apologism
🧵🚨New analysis showing ALL tweets mentioning both "Muslim" & "UK" with over 500 retweets since 29 Jul. Graph shows which accounts got most impressions over time. Red/pink dots show anti-Muslim &/or anti-immigrant tweets, brown=neutral, green=tweets defending Muslims #UKRiots
2/ I grouped the tweets into the following three categories, 'anti', 'in defense of', and 'neutral'. Sadly the impressions gained by the number of 'anti' tweets was over 155 million (65%) while those 'in defense of' around 31 million. Neutral tweets were about 50 million.
3/ Parsing them finer we see that that the majority of the tweets were anti-Muslim, with half as many being both anti immigrant and both anti-Muslim. Some were solely anti-immigrant. #UKRiots
🧵🚨1/Somewhat depressing graph. I calculated whether all X posts with over 500 retweets mentioning the words "Muslim" and "UK" sent since 29th July were anti-muslim, anti-immigrant (red), neutral (blue), or in defense of muslims and/or immigration (green). #Ukriots #hatespeech
2/ I grouped the tweets into the following three categories, 'anti', 'in defense of', and 'neutral'. Sadly, the impressions gained by the number of 'Anti' tweets was over 159 million (67%), while those in defense of around 28 million. Neutral tweets were about 50 million
3/ Some of the most xenophobic and anti-muslim accounts include. @radiogenoa @goldingbf @tpointuk @jimfergusonuk @ashleasimonbf @europeinvasionn The degree of hate varies, from outright conspiracy theories, to suggestions that Muslims enjoy special treatment by the police.