I hope you'll give the article a read, and please consider subscribing/sharing if you appreciate my work. I also want to give a shout out to @MalcontentmentT, who first spotted some of these seed phrases and copy-post tweets.

When we think about disinformation and influence campaigns, we often think about efforts to convince or persuade us about a particular issue, but whenever I see campaigns like this, I think it's important to highlight the fact that much of it is not so much trying to influence how you think about something, but what you think about in the first place. It does this through processes such as agenda-setting (influencing which aspects of an event seem important enough to discuss) and by providing a frame (a ready-made explanation that organizes the facts and assigns responsibility. In the Starlink debate, repeated claims about Ukraine’s alleged violation of the terms of service can make that allegation the lens through which people encounter the controversy. As a result, questions about accountability and whether Musk/SpaceX should have control of wartime communications receive less attention). Platform manipulation can intensify these effects by coordinating visibility. Accounts repeat or target the same claims or messages, and since recommendation systems use engagement as one signal when selecting content, the result of this activity may shape both what people think about and which considerations come to mind when they think about it.

The scale of these campaigns was small, relatively speaking. In total, they involved only a couple thousand tweets. However, there were several features of the campaigns that made them worth examining them in greater detail, despite the small scale. First and foremost, the narrative promoted by the Starlink disinformation campaign appeared first on a Russian Telegram channel and associated Russian-language X thread from a Moscow-based account. Secondly, the campaign's initial tweet containing one of the seed phrases was quote-tweeted by Putin ally and Russian propagandist Kirill Dmitriev just hours after being posted. Thirdly, the campaign narrative was later echoed by Russian media. I'm not claiming that Russia orchestrated this, but I *am* saying that it's worth asking how a tweet from an obscure American X account that kicked off a disinformation campaign ended up on the feed (and in the bookmarks) of a leading Kremlin apologist. As I discuss in the article, the narrative promoted by this campaign is very favorable to Russia, as it has allowed Russia to invert the situation and cast Ukraine as the aggressor while positioning itself on the side of "peacemakers" along with Elon Musk.

These are some of the tweets from the Starlink disinformation campaign. The tweets themselves came mostly from accounts that appeared to be operated by humans, but there were some signs of inauthentic activity/automation in the retweets. These tweets are copy-paste repetitions of the seed phrases, which blamed Ukraine for bringing this on themselves by "hacking" Starlink terminals.

Both campaigns were characterized by copy-and-paste style repetition of a seed phrase. The Starlink campaign used reply-focused amplification accounts that spread the seed phrase by piggybacking on the engagement and follower counts of larger accounts, esp. pro-Ukraine Democratic lawmakers in the US. The Musk campaign used quote-tweet chains clustered around a seed post