Elise Thomas
@elisethoma5
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Senior OSINT Analyst at @ISDGlobal , investigator at @Cen4infoRes . Opinions, hot takes, mistakes all my own. Bluesky @elisethomas .bsky.social
Australia
Joined January 2015
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Pinned Tweet
I want to show you a truly incredible tweet. An amazing disinformation turducken. Here is Alex Jones, retweeting nonsense about Ukraine from Russia propaganda network RT. And that 'MAGA' account in the middle?
That's a CCP influence op.
Thread 1/
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For me, the striking thing about so many of these images of rioters in the Capitol is that what they're doing - all of them - is creating content for social media.
At least in their minds, the true seat of power is not actually in that building. It's online.
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I'm so glad that Twitter lasted long enough to let us see Greta Thunberg effortlessly crush Andrew Tate.
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They could have done anything in that building today. What they did, by and large, was take selfies and create social media content. That was what really mattered to them. Whatever higher motives they might claim, their actions suggest that was the real motive for many of them.
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@travis_view
@kognitobeatz
I mean, if I had $178 billion, I reckon I could get by on like $78 billion and give the rest away. It'd be rough, being only a $78-billionaire, but I could handle it.
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$70k to someone who posted child sexual abuse material.
We agree on one thing, I too think X's advertisers ought to be aware of this.
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I feel like you have to be an Australian to truly understand the full implications of Elon Musk getting on board with a speech by Malcolm Roberts.
Malcolm Roberts.
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Temperature check on late-stage capitalism: you can buy NFTs of AI-generated descriptions of imaginary girlfriends.
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It's no coincidence that the star and driving animus of this show is a man who has built his whole life and business around delivering compelling performances on broadcast and digital media.
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In news which will surprise no one, the ABS data said literally the opposite of what Rita Panahi has written and I guess no one at the Herald Sun bothered to check.
Some real kwality journalism going on there.
#auspol
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Politics is always performative, but the nature of the performance has changed dramatically in just a few years. What we saw today was the sudden, violent disruption of one performance, the certification of electoral college votes, for another, wilder show.
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On
#FranceRiots
hashtag, Twitter's top recommended tweet is misleading info from a far right British politician who was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to allow access to his phone after a visit to Moscow, sharing a video from a well-known Russian propaganda account.
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For at least seven years, the pro-CCP influence campaign known as Spamouflage (unless you're Google and insist on calling it Dragonbridge) has been infamous among researchers for two things: its enormous scale, and its almost complete ineffectiveness.
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@ULTRAGLOSS
@ellievhall
Possibly the greatest thing about the Twilight movies was how openly at least half the cast loathed everything about it. There are a lot of actors who hate their own movies, but usually they at least TRY to hide it. Not these guys.
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Does anyone else find it odd that the people holding umbrellas are getting less wet than the people who aren't and who refuse to admit that rain is a thing? Seems suspicious 🧐
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Users in conspiracy Facebook groups are telling each other how to actively block fact-checkers.
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@IwriteOK
That's true a lot of the time, but I'm not sure about it in this case. The scale of the ratio is phenomenal, and the two minute video Tate put out is painfully cringe (he DOES care). Making him look weak and uncool is damage to his brand, and she's clearly achieved that.
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Call me crazy, but I reckon the point at which the bike lane is too narrow to fit a drawing of a bike should be the point where the urban planners admit that the bike lane is, in fact, too narrow.
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I'm really glad that
@Milliganreports
and the
@4corners
team put the damage which QAnon does to lives & families front and centre in the episode, and to have played a small part in it myself. Conspiracy theories are a public health issue, and we should recognise them as such.
Just want to thank the Stewarts for their candour, their decency, their restraint.
#4Corners
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For years Spamouflage has run tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of accounts over the years across every social media platform you've ever heard of and many you haven't.
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I found a very small number of accounts which had pivoted from behaving like regular garden variety Spamo accounts to posing, convincingly, as American Trump fans. They're building real audiences through 'patriot follow trains' and generating real engagement...
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Singer at the
#MelbourneProtest
where Craig Kelly spoke earlier this morning just dedicated her performance to the "survivors of Satanic ritual abuse."
It's far too simplistic to call this a QAnon movement, but the QAnon elements really blast through very clearly on occasion.
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But while researching for my previous report on how Spamouflage is targeting the US elections, I came across something new. Something quite different, and quite concerning.
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This effort was massive but it was low quality. They never really nailed their content strategy or developed convincing, appealing personas which could generate engagement from authentic users, especially authentic American users.
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When I decided to go down the rabbit hole of digging into one of the websites spreading the supposedly hacked WHO/Gates Foundation/Wuhan lab data, I'm not sure where I thought it would go, but Danish Satanist biohackers was not it.
You guys. This was A TRIP.
Thread.
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There are a number of really important caveats which I've made in the report and want to make here as well.
Firstly, I have found a REALLY SMALL number of accounts doing this. They were difficult to find, and I only got them because the operators are lazy and sloppy.
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Something quite interesting seems to be happening in the QAnon (and QAnon-lite, QAnon adjacent etc.) conspiracy communities.
Having previously been furiously anti-China, it seems as though the
#UkraineRussianWar
is nudging at least some of them towards a pro-China position.
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"Novak Djokovic is fighting for all of us," says the speaker at
#Melbourneprotest
He's actually fighting to get himself exempted from rules which apply to all the rest of us so that he can be paid huge sums of money to hit a ball around, but whatever, go off.
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These tweets were one after the other in my timeline and I'm pretty sure it's a sign to never let anyone tell you your dreams are too stupid, impractical or may result in water damage
@amandadeibert
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And yes, yes the video is as funny as it sounds
Seems to have largely gotten lost in the Israel/Gaza news today but Russia tried a relatively large assault near Avdiivka and as far as I can tell succeeded in only driving off a bridge and getting one of their Su-25s shot down.
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It would not be hard at all to create these accounts in a way which would be effectively undetectable to independent researchers, although X's Trust and Safety people (if they still exist?) might still be able to see something on the back end.
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I've spent months investigating cryptocurrency schemes run by sanctioned individuals connected to the pro-Russian militia in Donetsk. At the time, I thought it might be hard to convince people it mattered.
Then the
#UkraineWar
started.
@Cen4infoRes
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This, in combination with the fact that we know Spamouflage likes to operate at massive scale, means that I personally am concerned that there may be a lot more of these accounts out there and we have no way of finding them
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Australian politics is batshit in an embarrassing drunk uncle at the wedding sort of way. US politics is batshit in a fall of Rome, Caligula's horse is a Senator now sort of way.
Alright internet, time to decide - which is more batshit?
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@tiffkhsu
@stevenleemyers
Just in case there is any doubt about whether our friend Liam here is a Spamouflage account, let me show you the archive which someone thoughtfully made two years ago () vs the one which I made today ()
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Secondly, all the activity I have found so far from these 'evolved' Spamo accounts has been pro-Trump, but this DOES NOT MEAN that we should assume Spamo is supporting Trump. It is 100% possible that similar activity is happening on the other side and just no one has found it yet
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Nonetheless I think this development is important and concerning, and something which people working on protecting against influence ops should be on the look out for. 'Alert but not alarmed' is what I'm going for.
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I've written a lot of weird stories, but this one with
@bellingcat
takes the cake. A loose thread turned into a tangled web, looping in Libyan money in Ghana, border-hopping in Montenegro, Russian lobbyists and some unexpected familiar faces
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Here's a piece from me on how Twitter is downranking expertise and boosting low quality sources, misinfo and propaganda - and is preventing us from even knowing how bad the problem is
@ISDglobal
But hey, it's X now, right? Everything is fine, so fine.
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If you're a prominent spreader of Covid-19 misinfo, QAnon or white nationalism who wants to reach an audience (and be paid by them) without pesky content moderation, where do you go?
Increasingly, the answer seems to be Substack. Here's me for
@ISDglobal
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FWIW, as someone who researches Chinese-linked influence operations, I've seen nothing to suggest the CCP has a strong partisan interest in our election. Every other researcher I've spoken to says the same, as did ASIO head Mike Burgess
#AusVotes2022
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I'm so glad that Twitter lasted long enough to let us see Greta Thunberg help get Andrew Tate arrested for human trafficking without even trying.
I'm so glad that Twitter lasted long enough to let us see Greta Thunberg effortlessly crush Andrew Tate.
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It is phenomenally weird how many adult people line up on a regular basis to shout at
@Leo_Puglisi6
. The point at which you're hurling abuse at a 14 year old because you didn't think his joke was funny is probably the point at which you should start questioning your life choices.
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I'm in Bourke Street mall and I can hear one guy trying to convince another that the sun actually revolves around the earth, and that "you've been lied to your whole life."
So, uh, yeah. That's where we're at, as a city. Burning Copernicus.
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Spotted this real retro graphic design on some MasterFoods jars in my grandparents' house (modern one on left for comparison).
Couldn't find a use by date to tell how old they are, but I did spot another clue.
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Signs the country has kind of had it with today: enough people have individually tweeted 'Oh FFS' that it's trending
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A mass shooting survivor has launched a pillow company to combat the pillow company of the ally of the former US president who has become a hero of a conspiracy cult which recently helped storm the Capitol during a global pandemic. Welcome to 2021, remember to take deep breaths.
We have announced the name of the company it's called
#GoodPillow
and you can sign up to be notified when preorder is available go to
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I get questions sometimes about how to identify GAN (AI-generated) faces. It's tricky, the AI is getting really good now!
But here's a useful real world example. This captain of courage has used a GAN face for their troll account. I've circled in red some of the tells.
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I wrote for
@WIRED
about how Qanon conspiracy theorists are using 'information warfare' tactics in an attempt to influence the US 2020 elections.
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The US DoJ has charged Alexander Ionov with conspiring to have US citizens work as illegal agents for the Russian government.
Last year I published an investigation with
@bellingcat
into a fake intl 'human rights' organisation linked to Ionov
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It is quite alarming that we as a generation grew up being told by our parents not to trust strangers on the internet, and now a significant proportion of our parents' generation trusts nobody except for strangers on the internet.
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Last week their leader talked on a livestream about how they were going to get weapons.
I assume Hood will be trying to keep that bit out of the soundbites.
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Russia's internet regulator Roskomnadzor appears to be cracking down on Wagner-affiliated social media accounts. Multiple VKontakte pages associated with Wagner recruiters have been blocked in the past 12 hours.
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Meanwhile, Apple is still hosting Absher, the Saudi Arabian wife-tracking app
Next time Apple tells us that "privacy is a human right" as justification for blocking cookies and other attacks on Google's ads business, it'll be good to remember how they acted when it was about actual human rights.
Business strategy as morality is 👎
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I have been continuing to piece together the timeline behind this 'Typhoon Investigations' Biden-China report.
TLDR; a persona posing as a North Asia specialist which promoted the report before it was published by
@baldingsworld
appears to be fabricated.
I have been looking into the timeline of the "Typhoon Investigations" report which makes a number of allegations about links between the Bidens and the Chinese Communist Party. I've found a few interesting things.
Thread.
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There's now a conspiracy theory accompanied by a fake screenshot circulating insinuating that Taylor Swift somehow knew about the
#nashvillebombing
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Twitter is allowing a Scientology account to run an ad (against Musk's own timeline) attacking journalist
@TonyOrtega94
who has written critically about Scientology and accusing him of promoting sex trafficking.
To repeat: Twitter is allowing attacks on journalists AS ADS.
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One of the groups which Hood (here talking about how Uhlmann advised him on how to do soundbites) is co-leading the protests with is Velvet Revolution. They're a Sovereign Citizen conspiracy theory group who think they're going to arrest all of the politicians.
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Not to let this lack of reading comprehension distract from the fact that Panahi is someone who thinks (a) if you carry an umbrella in the rain and don't get too wet, that means you didn't need the umbrella, and (b) if you're not perfectly healthy your death doesn't matter.
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Hello
@theheraldsun
@RitaPanahi
, I see this tweet is still up four hours later even though it is factually wrong. You might want to delete it and issue a correction.
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The Arizona Republican Party has responded to the
#TrumpTapes
by praising Trump for his 'strong, clear voice' - as he tried to bully his way into overturning the results of a democratic election.
Shame there wasn't video, I bet they'd have said his hair looked great too.
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We are days away from a headline about Hunter Biden, George Soros and Hillary Clinton plotting in a transgender bathroom to cancel Russia via a vaccine created in Ukraine biolabs which indoctrinates children with Critical Race Theory.
Then Tucker Carlson will do a segment on it
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There has been a lot of speculation about how generative AI will impact disinformation campaigns. This latest from me for
@ISDglobal
looks at an early real-world example of how this is playing out - and it doesn't bode well.
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@meghara
All of this is true but I feel like the big picture is that the elite in this society literally eat their subjects
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All else aside, I cannot comprehend how the IDF’s comms team thinks it’s a good strategy to publicly taunt the UN about the untold amounts of human suffering about to be inflicted
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People following Xinjiang related issues on Twitter recently may have seen a few tweets like this. On a hunch that Emma Stone might not be re-tweeting the Global Times’ denial of the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang,
@tomatospy
and I took a closer look.
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Australian neo-Nazis Jack Eltis and Tim Lutze are claiming they've had their bank accounts shut down. Eltis also says he was door-knocked by police and has had his gun license revoked.
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I find it bizarre how much international reporting about Australia's Covid restrictions skims over this. Paragraphs of hand-wringing over how tough the rules are, with a throwaway line at the end about potentially hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
When people say ‘all the sacrifices we did with lockdowns were for nothing’ ignores that hundreds of lives were saved during a wave with no vaccines available
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Just going to re-up this piece I wrote earlier in light of the talk around yesterday's
#MelbourneProtest
.
The anti-lockdown movement is a mishmash. There are far right and QAnon elements, but it's not accurate to say it as a whole is a far right movement
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I uncovered yet another attempt by Russian state media to covertly reach Western audiences.
So far, it's been a flop for them - but it's still interesting for us for what it tells us about their strategy leading up to 2024
@ISDglobal
🇷🇺 Russian state media's Resistor Newswire hasn't gained much traction online despite 18+ months of operation. It’s just the latest spin-off outlet to be uncovered by ISD. What does this tell us about Russian influence operation tactics? 🧵 below.
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The disinformation problem around the
#AustralianFires
is not primarily coming from bots. It's coming from members of the fringe right-wing media (with blue check Twitter accounts) spreading straight-up lies.
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If you'd asked an hour ago, Elise, where can I find one of the most cogent and interesting explanations of what Critical Race Theory is and isn't, I probably wouldn't have said from an American football journalist on a podcast about QAnon.
But here we are and you should listen.
lol I was on the
@QanonAnonymous
podcast to talk about the foundations of Critical Race Theory and its relationship to Critical Legal Studies (and incidentally some talk of how the term has been captured and morphed into the mainstream discussion)
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My
@ASPI_ICPC
colleagues
@tomatospy
@JakeWallis_ASPI
and I have spent the last week digging into the data released by Twitter in connection to a state-backed information operation targeting the Hong Kong protests. Here's what we found: THREAD
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In case you're wondering how the Australian conspiracy community is taking the Thin Blue Line flag allegedly worn by cops: weirdly.
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We should probably stop using terms like 'wolf warrior', which makes everything sound cooler than it is, for what is essentially just diplomatic trolling.
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Bob Katter continuing to make a mockery of financial interest disclosures. We ask for this kind of information for a reason - how is 'my wife doesn't tell me' an acceptable answer?
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This 'cyber analyst' was until a few weeks ago the admin of 8kun, formerly 8chan, also 2ch etc. His expertise is managing forums full of white supremacy and porn. He is not any kind of specialist in voting software. He read the manual, cherrypicked some bits and made the rest up.
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FYI for anyone wondering, Twitter determined that my tweet about Jacob Oakley, who used the same email address to apply to run for Congress as he did to sign up for neo-Nazi forum
#ironmarch
, was "violating our rules against posting private information".
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George Christensen is livestreaming with Dave Pellowe and others, complaining that the relaxation of vaccine mandates sapped the energy from the "freedom movement."
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Our team at
@ASPI_ICPC
have been digging into the data released by Twitter on the China-linked disinformation campaign targeting the
#HongKongProtests
. Here are five key takeaways (so far): THREAD
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This story started with one of the biggest double takes I've ever done. Scrolling through the site of a French human rights organisation, I came across 'Robert Comune', 'Pakolov Zbishik' and 'Wacław Kozakiewicz'.
#Auspol
Twitter users may also be double-taking right now.
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QAnon is not (to any significant degree) the work of "the Russians", it's not a psy-op, it's not Roger Stone working with Cambridge Analytica or whatever other theories are out there. It's a complex, difficult, primarily organic part of our societies which we need to face up to.
TL;DR: if your *way of thinking* about QAnon is close enough to the conspiracy theorists' worldview that they can go "Yeah, let me repurpose that!", it's ***because you are selling a conspiracy theory*** -- the emphasis is still on shadowy actors manipulating us from afar. 🤷
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Tough gig being a conspiracy group admin in these trying times. Everyone's always running after the latest flavour of the week.
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Realistically, it would probably do more to motivate the govt if all the
#strandedAussies
switched their voting enrollments to marginal seats ahead of the election than anything the UN might say
#auspol
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@Lana_Macondo
@peltzmadeline
@mmfa
Yes but climate change fire, which is the kind of fire Fox definitely does not want to talk about. Only protest fires for Fox.
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There is a nonsense claim that George Soros has been arrested for 'election interference', accompanied by a screenshot of a supposed indictment. Error level analysis of the image shows where someone has gone in (in Paint?) and erased the real name and typed in Soros's name.
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@byronkaye
They kept singing "you can stick your vaccine up your arse."
I assume they're calling for more research into delivery of the vaccine via suppositories rather than the traditional injection method.
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I've been keeping an eye on what appears to be a loosely coordinated trolling campaign targeting Western media in China. Based on patterns of engagement between accounts, it appears possible this activity is linked to the pro-China "Strategic Fooyou Agency" troll group. Thread.
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Hey
@Channel7
please stop talking about the "list of demands" as though it's meaningful. It's not clear that any of these random small Telegram groups represent the
#cfmeu
#Melbourneprotest
and I'd bet money most of the people protesting today have no idea it exists.
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@OAlexanderDK
Yep, this is exactly what you should do just as all of your remaining advertisers are deciding whether to sign up with your competitor. Make him look like a wholesome family man compared to yourself as an immature 52 year old 4channer.
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Reposting from July because all of these dynamics are basically the same but but worse.
Here's a piece from me on how Twitter is downranking expertise and boosting low quality sources, misinfo and propaganda - and is preventing us from even knowing how bad the problem is
@ISDglobal
But hey, it's X now, right? Everything is fine, so fine.
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