5 suspicious packages found in the last 24 hours

[Angrboda]

On Thursday, sites such as Twitter remained awash with content suggesting that the pipe bombs had been mailed as part of a “false flag” attack to benefit Democrats. Memes spread on Facebook through shares and likes. A popular right-leaning Twitter user, Candace Owens, questioned the timing of the bombs’ delivery. “Caravans, fake bomb threats — these leftists are going ALL OUT for midterms,” she said in a tweet shared more than 8,700 times. By Thursday afternoon, the tweet had been deleted.

Twitter did not suspend many of the accounts sharing such messages or limit the reach of their content, saying they did not break the platform’s rules.

Still, Twitter accounts known for pushing Russian propaganda appeared to popularize some of the conspiracy theories. On Wednesday and Thursday, accounts aligned with the Kremlin’s views — tracked by Hamilton 68, a project of the German Marshall Fund that monitors social media for Russian ma­nipu­la­tion — frequently promoted hashtags including “fakebombgate,” “fakebombs” and “bombhoax.”

Bret Schafer, a social media analyst for the group’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said these accounts typically “hop on an existing bandwagon” to help boost the reach of hot-button political issues.

Social media posts about the migrant caravan have been particularly rife with misinformation. The network analysis firm Graphika studied 14,000 Twitter accounts that frequently posted about the caravan and found a high level of false and misleading information and images, including of the bloodied policeman. It also found that 22 percent of the posters showed signs of being bots, a term describing accounts that use automation software with minimal human control, signaling an unusually high level of manipulation of the caravan narrative.

(Washington Post)