Marc Owen Jones ✓
@marcowenjones
Prof @Nuqatar | Disinformation | Author: Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, Pol. Repression in Bahrain | PhD @durham_uni
94 929Followers
5 140Following
88 390Posts total
78.1KViews on collected posts
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@marcowenjones @levantinereport Amazing investigation!
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@marcowenjones I just checked my own LinkedIn and 24 people I'm connected with follow their page.
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35/ I will leave it there for now cos this thread is hyooj, I will post the full report on my substack after dinner.
Your sincerely,
Clara Quill
#dysinfluence
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34/ What is curious is that yesterday, all of the websites removed the real editors from their editorial page, so Erik D'amato, Joseph Hammond and Lieven Taillie...They're all archived on wayback machine though. Also Global Reporters got their insta and x account suspended...
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33/ Remember this network is designed to appear like four independent news outlets, but is centrally built, adopts a uniform tactic of having 1 real person+ a bunch of made up people on their editorial page. It's clearly an information op, but what is not clear is the customer
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32/ political talking points/propaganda - much of which is currently about criticisng the Sudanese Armed Forces. These sites are the ones I mentioned that were paying to promote ads about SAF's alleged chemical attacks prior to the recent anonymous intelligence report https://t.c
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31/ So the whole story appears to be a Hong Kong based company was set up by two North Macedonians who may have contracted another guy from North Macedonia to create a series of four websites that were commissioned by a client who want to sent what appears to be specific .. https
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30/ An epieos of the email definitely show's that Dime Levov is also from North Macedonian, has expertise in Full Stack Word Press development, and also works for FX Leaders, a company with addresses split between Dubai and Tel Aviv https://t.co/EPABLiC8iX
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29/ The AI Admin account publishes a Gravatar hash thatresolves to the Gravatar username levovdime. An email address in Levov's public GitHub commits produces that same hash, which links the mailbox behind the AI Admin account to Levov. https://t.co/RoIN8EQ2VX
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28/ I also noticed through examining the website code that a lot the authors from the different websites shared the same mailboxes. Also something curious popped up, an account called 'AI Admin'. https://t.co/6NgiCQhLx5
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27/ You can see France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom got targeted with a lot of the ads. Where city level data was available you can key cities in terms of policymaking (Brussels, Strasbourg and Frankfurt) https://t.co/p0PVIK2tT0
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26/ Then there is the targeting. Europe was a large target of the operation, as were certain countries in the MENA region. Ljublana and Bern are mentioned because the sites have addresses listed there (and also British phone numbers??) https://t.co/vWByiCELHq
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25/ Across the 558 Meta and LinkedIn ads, I found no creative critical of the RSF.
The UAE likewise attracts no critical creatives in the coded ads, while 4 are favourable..
Similarly, RSF is underepresented in ads compared to SAF, while equally represented in Corpus https://t
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24/ Then I coded the stance of the promoted material.
This makes the pattern even stranger.
Most of the heavily amplified political subjects are treated negatively.
There's one conspicuous exception: the UAE. https://t.co/RnrCZjDB5y
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23/ In other words, a key topic that whoever is behind this operation appears to want people to hear about #Sudan. Remember, these sites ban crawlers. Essentially, they spew out articles to legitimise the website, but what they want you to see is just the paid ads... https://t.c
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22/ The biggest distortions are striking.
Compared with their prevalence in the 3,606 articles for which full text was recovered, paid promotion over-represents:
Islamists/Muslim Brotherhood: 5.86×
Sudan: 4.65×
SAF/Burhan: 4.59×
Saudi Arabia: 3.15×
#Sudan https://t.co/KBCm
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21/ But the ads tell a very different story. I counted >550 ads across Meta and LinkedIn
Some minor topics in the editorial corpus are massively over-represented in paid promotion.
In other words: what they publish and what they pay people to see are two very different things.
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20/ Editorially, the sites look relatively broad: Iran, Ukraine, China, US politics, European security, the Middle East. Lots of generic conflict and security coverage.
If you looked only at the websites, you might not see anything particularly remarkable. https://t.co/jTirEd2SA
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19/ Despite only being active since June, the sites had churned out a lot of articles - no doubt in part due to their stellar editorial team with stationery in their DNA...
Clara Quill anyone?
Nah they used AI of course, the content is riddled with chatgpt link tags. https://t.
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18/ But who builds four news sites and then pays to advertise them?
To find out, I downloaded all 3,606 articles published across the network and compared what the sites published with what they paid to promote.
That's where things got interesting.
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17/ I found a Linkedin account of a Martin Mitushev who'd liked two of the news sites - the Diplomatic Post and the Levantine.
So, so far we've got two guys from North Macedonia running a company sponsoring a series of news websites, paying for ads across Linkedin and Meta. http
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16/ I checked the Hong Kong company registry, paid 11 dollars and got access to the director information. Two guys with North Macedonian passports created the company in April 2026. Their names - Martin Mitushev and Borche Ivanovski. https://t.co/SjbbjzoWYv
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15/ I then began to look into BM Web Solutions Limited. There are a lot of companies with that name, but all the html of the news sites had contact [at] bmwebsolution [.] com as an email. A search for that website yielded a Hong Kong-registered company https://t.co/PSSAH6E6YU
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14/ At this point, I created a script to scrape all the Linkedin and Meta ads (will come back to this later). A lot of the early ads were the usual ones saying how you shouldn't trust the media, but you should trust this new reputable outlet... https://t.co/SmrYJSToln
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12/ You can also see that most of the sites were set up at the same time (May 2026), and started publishing at the same time. They also all started advertising at the same time (July 2026) https://t.co/KP6K8D7bEL
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13/ Whoever was running the Daniel Mercer account was using an image of journalist Heinz Abel. But the Mercer account, like the rest of the network, was running ads on Facebook and Instagram (in addition to Linkedin) https://t.co/2oN7HLNs9m
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11/ So I started digging more. By analysing the Google tag manager info and other code I confirmed shared links between the sites. I also found another account, Daniel Mercer, who had previously set up another similar news account called Noise Filter. https://t.co/qcluiNMf7Q
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10/ Indeed, one of the earliest indicators that something was amiss was the unusual nature of the names.
Some of you may have noticed that at least three of the Levantine's writers are named after stationery items. Clara Quill, Julian Page, Beatrix Binder.
I mean really... http
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9/ But as with the Levantine Report, the rest of the names seem made up. Even more weirdly, across four supposedly unrelated mastheads, five names recur: Vance, Thorne, Mercer, Marcus & Julian.
Despite this, real ppl had been solicited and written pieces (see screenshots) https
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Against accounts of the same size
38 posts from the last 90 days, next to the 10K–100K follower range. reaches fewer people than peers, but engages them much harder.
Median views1 216this account999median for 10K–100K
Reach, %1.28%this account3.62%median for 10K–100K
Engagement, %3.21%this account1.92%median for 10K–100K
| Metric | This account | Median for 10K–100K | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median views per post | 1 216 | 999 | 1.22× |
| Reach (views ÷ followers) | 1.28% | 3.62% | 0.35× |
| Engagement rate | 3.21% | 1.92% | 1.67× |
Others in this range → Compare with another account → How these benchmarks are built →
Growth & engagement
How the posts we collected actually performed: views and reaction rate post by post, what the audience did with them, and where the follower count goes.
Views per post
1.2K8 Sep
1K
1.2K
1K
1K
1.1K
2K
759
710
858
1.1K
862
93
445
Last 14 collected posts, oldest on the left. The scale is logarithmic: one post can outrun the rest a hundred times over.
Engagement rate per post
3.43%8 Sep
3.18%
2.96%
2.97%
3.17%
3.52%
2.26%
4.87%
5.77%
3.96%
5.71%
1.86%
2.15%
2.47%
Reactions — likes, reposts, replies and quotes — divided by views. Median for 10K–100K accounts is 1.92%.
What the audience does
Likes77.3%915 in total
Reposts14.5%172 in total
Replies3.8%45 in total
Quotes0.1%1 in total
Bookmarks4.2%50 in total
Share of every reaction we collected for this account. Replies mean argument, reposts mean endorsement, bookmarks mean the post was worth keeping.
The follower curve appears once this account has two daily snapshots — we take one a day, and this one is on its first.
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