📽🧑‍💻🗳🕵️ THIS JUST HAPPENED!!!
A most curious phenomenon observed on #YouTube: numerous channels, mostly "reaction video", mostly by young minority men, pivoting, sometimes hard, from apolitical entertainment/sports/etc content to MAGA or other right-wing content. 🧵 🧵 We've seen the Tenet Media scandal expose how influence operations can make use of target-located influencers to push a narrative.
What might slip under the radar is the "long tail" of content creators, who rely primarily on crowdfunding and "patronage". 🧵

🆕🕵️🧑‍💻📑 @Meta published its 2024 Q2 adversarial threat report, including on the Vietnam-proxied UK-/EU-/US-/…-targeted influence operation I and @marcowenjones investigated as "The Qatar Plot", painting it even bigger than we estimated – and disappointing in what's left out. 🧵 🧵 Meta's report generally aligns with what we discovered on the Facebook platform — the use of the Vietnamese proxy and currency, the geo-targeted areas, the cross-platform and IRL presence, and *much* of the messaging on the hostage, secularism, and war issues. That's good. 🧵

Excellent investigation by @mariannaspring, into the #Southport misinfo "patient zero" X account, and the Potemkin news site that gave the misinfo a veneer of citable legitimacy, used by the far Right to direct the vitriol and riots at UK Muslims.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… I should point out that said news site is still very much monetized on the ad exchanges.
You can visit it and see the ads to confirm, but here's the full ad scan:
@CheckMyAdsHQwell-known.dev/resources/ads_…

The fake restaurant pages on food delivery platforms, decked with slick pictures and flowery language, taking your order and relaying it to an actual area restaurant after skimming off their markup, are doing the exact same thing as are #dropshippers.

#enshittification Actually, even worse, because you may be specifically avoiding ordering from an area restaurant with which you've had a bad experience, but will end up ordering from them again, because #dropdashers relayed your order – to what you thought was a newer/nicer place – over to them.

So, per this "Disinfo Lab" outfit, @pranshuverma_ was 'qoofed by @raqib_naik into incorrectly reporting in the WaPo that @HindutvaWatchIn was founded in April 2021. Sounds serious. Let's look into it, shall we? 🤨🔍
#OSINT
archive.ph/443vv

https://twitter.com/DisinfoLab/status/1708108427984281699

First of all, yes, the domain was last registered in 2019. The article already acknowledges this. 📰🧐
archive.ph/P1YSI