Marc Owen Jones Profile picture
Aug 2, 2024 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
1/ 🧵There is another anti-immigrant, racist and unsubstantiated rumour being circulated online about the tragic stabbing of a woman in #Brantham, UK. I just wanted to provide some analysis of the emergence of this rumour, and the protagonists and sequence of the story. #SouthportImage
2/ The known facts. A woman called Anita Rose was tragically stabbed and killed as as she walked her dog on Wednesday 24th July. A number of people have been arrested in the course of the investigations. Apart from age and sex, no other information has been publicly shared. Image
3/ Cue a pro-Trump account on Jul 30 says without basis that a 'Somali' man was arrested. She links to an @Daily_Express article about the murder but the article does not mention the ethnicity of the murderer. Image
4/ Then lots of anonymous accounts start also saying that they 'heard' the attacker was Somali - none providing evidence. These rumours quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of impressions. Again, no one providing any links, buts lots of 'I saw it somewhere' Image
5/ Then the 'influencers' picked up and spread the rumours. Many of those people are the exact same people who spread the false rumours about the #Southport stabbings, including @DaveAtherton20 , @europeinvasionn and @AshleaSimonBF . Again, none of them provided evidence. Image
6/ Indeed, @daveatherton20, who apologised recently for spreading false news, admits that his source for the 'Somali' conjecture are 'two followers'. Always a reliable source - two anonymous and unnamed Twitter accounts. Image
7/ Another influential account with almost 200k impressions is @europeinvasionn, which as I have mentioned several times, is a hijacked (cuckoo'd) account use to spread xenophobic & anti-Muslim hate speech. It has an absurdly amount high amount of engagement for a *new* account Image
8/ Politics-wise the head of Britain First is once again spreading the rumour (She did the same for #Southport) - again, absolutely no sources provided Image
9) The unfortunately unfamiliar strategy here seems to be someone making a claim, then using a poor excuse of a 'source' (in this case what looks like an email). The poster then posts another screenshot to highlight that she is right but it actually contains no mention of Somali

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10) So rumours spread by dodgy accounts on X, then spread up a hierarchy through receptive xenophobes, right wing politicians, and anonymous accounts that appear to be part of a larger influence operation.
11) That this is happening as Sunderland burns due in part to racist disinfo in the wake of the tragic #Southport murders is an indictment that whatever Starmer says, this problem of disinfo and hate speech isn't going away over night.
12) Weirdly there's a few false claims particularly related to attackers in the UK being Somali (not quite sure why but possibly because it ticks the African and Muslim hate speech box). Here's another false but widely shared claim
Correction: I said stabbed when the cause of death is not clear
See here for a BBC article on the post mortem

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More from @marcowenjones

May 22
🤖 1/ Ok this is pretty wild. I saw some sus pro-Israel astroturfing activity on a BBCNews Facebook post about aid arriving in Gaza. Lots of Hasbara comments like "Hamas will take the aid". The following 2 identical posts were side by side so I looked into it. #disinformation Image
2/ Specifically I looked at Dean O' Connor. Firstly up, there were two almost identical Dean O'connor pages, both created on consecutive days last week (15 + 16 May). The one that posted is the one on the right. Image
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3/ When I reverse image searched the picture I was inundated with dozens of pages from forums about romance scams asking about people using this same picture. A lot of people scammed out of thousands. Someone even asked on Quora about O'Connor! Image
Read 7 tweets
May 15
Macron Cocaine Thread/ - The first 10 hours of the @EmmanuelMacron @Keir_Starmer @ZelenskyyUa Cocaine disinformation.

Seemed to be promoted initially by a few dubious accounts like @Veritiste @SitgesFranck @99percentyouth @SilentlySirs @goddeketal

#disinformation Image
2/ Before being boosted by the right-wing ecosystem and conspiracy accounts e.g. @DineshDSouza @RealAlexJones @CollinRugg. No serious journalists reported this story (because it's absurd). Nonetheless, those tweeting in the first 10 hours generated over 103 million views on X! Image
3/ The boosting of the info by Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev was via Alex Jones, who as the above timeline shows - wasn't the first to put it out on X - but the most widely viewed. Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 29
🚨1/ Fake News Alert: A number of accounts are spreading false information that a church in #Wales was burned down by two Pakistan migrants/muslims. There are other narratives, but this is the dominant one. It is false but has obtained millions of views. some data> #disinfo Image
2/ It is true that a church did burn down. It was set alight by two local teenagers. The South Wales police have tweeted that other rumours circulating are false - they are of course talking about the false info about the ethnicity of the attackers (right). Image
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3/ The most shared claim comes from 'RadioEuropes'. This is a 'Dysinfluencer' account - an account that repeatedly spreads false and malicious information - in this case xenophobic and anti-Muslim content. You can see its false tweet garnered over 3.6 million views Image
Read 12 tweets
Jan 8
1/ THREAD: On populist gaslighting and the war on truth-tellers 🧵 Image
2/ Something concerning is happening in our information ecosystem: populists aren't just spreading misinfo, they're systematically trying to undermine the very concept of verifiable truth
3/ When fact-checkers or experts present evidence contradicting false claims, they get labeled as "elitist manipulators" or 'censors' - effectively inverting reality
Read 8 tweets
Jan 7
🧵 THREAD: Meta's disturbing new "free speech" announcement is a masterclass in how platforms enable digital harm under the guise of freedom 1/9 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Meta announces it's getting rid of factcheckers & "restrictions" on gender/immigration content. This isn't about free speech - it's about platforming hate & disinformation under the guise of "mainstream discourse" 2/9
Key red flags: ❗️❗️❗️

Moving content teams to Texas "for less bias" (read: political motivation)

Replacing factcheckers with "community notes"

Framing basic content moderation as "censorship" 3/9
Read 10 tweets
Dec 21, 2024
1/ 🧵This graph shows X posts by impressions in the first six hours after the Magdeburg attack. Specifically these are posts falsely attributing the attack to an Islamist terror attack or a Syrian, or using it as an opportunity to attack immigration or muslims #disinformation Image
2/ The usual suspects are there - that is, the anti-Islam disinfluencers (routine spreaders of disinformation). As you can see, one of the most widely viewed is @visegrad24 - who shared at least 6 posts falsely claiming the attacker was an Islamist Image
3/ The posts falsely claiming that the attacker was a Muslim or Islamist gained at least 38,000,000 views. False claims that he was Syrian resulted in around 8.4million views (remember this is just an approx 6 hour period). Image
Read 8 tweets

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