Thread by @EliotHiggins

A new fake Bellingcat story, from a fake video claiming to be from Fox News. What's interesting about this one is I viewed the tweet 10 minutes ago, and it had 5 views, and suddenly it jumped to 12.5k, then 16.2k views in less than 5 minutes, with zero retweets or likes.

To me this suggests there's a bot network being used to boost views of tweets used in this disinformation campaign.

In 90 seconds this tweet just gained 154 retweets, another sign of bot activity.

The accounts retweeting the post are all clearly part of a bot network, probably one hired to do the task, rather than it being run by some Russian state proxy.

You can look at the other posts from the bots, and find more examples of disinformation videos being retweeted. This example has a Trump video where anti-Ukrainian images and captions have been added to the original video where Trump doesn't mention Ukraine.

The tweet featuring the video has a similar number of views and retweet (and 0 likes) as the first video in this thread, and uses a "Verifie" QR code like other videos featured in the recent posts of the disinformation campaign.

Another example from the same bot network, using a fake verified QR Code. If it's so easy for me to find this bot network, clearly attempting to influence the US election, then why is @elonmusk and his team unable to do anything about it?

Here's another one being pushed by the network, with another fake verification QR code. Note, these are all from the last 48 hours, so it's not just one or two videos here or there, but multiple videos a day.

Another fake video from the Russian disinformation network from September 18th, where @jamieoliver is recommended European chefs learn to cook from radioactive ash. Note the similar number of views and retweets.

I'm also noticing a lot of these bots retweeting other political tweets, like this one that was retweeted by multiple bots in the network.

Here's another one from the network, from yesterday. There's basically overlapping groups of bots, so if you find one disinformation tweet and start looking through the list of who retweeted it you'll eventually find a new video, where you can start the process again.

Here's another one, again from the last 24 hours. The guy who thought up the idea of putting a "verified" QR code on these posts probably didn't think it would just make it easier to spot them.

More fake news posts from bots this morning, guess someone processed that purchase order.

I've had a quick look at the accounts retweeting this video, which led to another fake video, the retweets of which led to another, and then a fourth. There's probably more, and today's themes are P.Diddy, Joe Biden sleeping with Brooke Shields, and the collapse of the USA.

There appears to be waves of these videos being produced. I guess that's when whoever is running the bot network their hiring processes their order. It's really blatant, the only reason it's not more visible is that pretty much all the retweets are from other bots, who only follow each other.

Before @elonmusk took over Twitter there was a lot more accessibility to the Twitter API, so researchers had less barriers to map these networks out, but since he took over that's gone away, so it allows these networks to continue to operate freely.

@elonmusk Twitter also was a lot more responsive to those organisations and individuals who identified bot networks, but that also went away with Musk's takeover, so it's just a lot harder to deal with these networks now, all thanks to Musk terrible decision making.

@elonmusk I'm sure there's many more posts like this, and they could be mapped out, but it's pretty apparent Twitter currently has neither the interest or ability to do that, given it's so blatant.

These posts are primarily about election interference, and while they're having no impact, it still requires a response and is evidence that foreign actors are trying to influence the US election. If @elonmusk was serious about fighting bots on this website it's a pretty easy place to start.

I have to also wonder if this bot engagement is more about boosting stats that that can be reported back to their paymasters as a reflection of successful campaign, rather than trying to create authentic engagement, because they're clearly failing at that. It's all about KPIs.

Something else I've picked on looking at all these bots, there's certain posts that seem to appear more often across the whole network, suggesting whoever is selling the use of the bot network has different tiers of bot engagement depending on how much you pay.

Russian bots sharing fake videos about the US election are now using a completely made up Bellingcat Verified QR Code.