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>The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Fa
by adamiscool8 5y ago
>The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators.
Less than 20% of Facebook discussion on the topic occurring outside of the US hardly suggests China and Russia are "fueling" the theories.
The author here, Michael Isikoff has a bit of reputation of being a useful dupe for US intel [1] who would love these conspiracies to be originating "outside their house".
And futher, the Soufan Center that conducted this study certainly has an ideological bent towards the US establishment [0]. Very skeptical of conclusions reached by career intel officials that suggest theories about the US establishment are baseless foreign-driven propaganda.
[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/12/isikoff_spins_his_own_russian_conspiracy_theories_--_again_140764.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/12/isikof...
[1] https://thesoufancenter.org/about/team/ https://thesoufancenter.org/about/team/
- DiogenesKynikos 5y agoIf you read the original report, it basically boils down to: we trained a classification model, and it said that X% of the people posting about QAnon on Facebook are Chinese and Russian. How this classifier works or what features it uses is not explained. Whether the classifier can tell apart a person in mainland China paid by the government to post and a Falun Gong adherent in the US is also not discussed. QAnon is heavily anti-Chinese, and Falun Gong has heavily promoted QAnon, so it would be surprising if the Chinese government were supportive of QAnon conspiracy theories.