I'm not sure disinfo campaigns on X still work

On Saturday night, CNN national security analyst Alex Plitsas wrote in an X post that President Donald Trump was meeting at Camp David to “deliberate and review Yemen strike options.” He also said that US embassies were bracing for “retaliatory strikes” and that Trump’s Camp David meeting had ended early. “If something was decided it’s a tight window if strikes are during period of darkness and less likely tonight,” Plitsas wrote in a followup post. “Could mean another day or not at all.”

Plitsas’ reporting did not go viral in the traditional sense. He only got a few hundred shares on his post. But his reporting was quickly repackaged by X’s various “monitoring the situation” accounts. Hundreds of users began speculating that World War III was right around the corner. As Plitsas would later complain, “Terrible clickbait accounts paraphrased the original tweet and said the U.S. was preparing to conduct major strikes.”

One of the most popular of these accounts, The Kobeissi Letter, wrote, “The US is preparing to conduct a large-scale military operation against Houthi forces in Yemen in response to their strikes on Saudi Arabia.” The account is run by Adam Kobeissi, an investment banker. The Kobeissi Letter eventually deleted their Yemen post, but I was able to find a backup of it cached on a Yahoo! Japan search. (Which I did not know had access to X’s API. Fascinating!)

That insipid “Pentagon Pizza Report” account ran with it too, writing, “The closest Dominos to the Pentagon is reporting very high traffic. Freddies Beach Bar, the closest gay bar to the Pentagon, is reporting low traffic.” The account now also tracks foot traffic to gay bars around the Pentagon.

But the account that got the most mileage out of Plitsas’ reporting was The Hormuz Letter, an X-native news account covering the war in Iran. There’s not a lot we know about the author(s) behind The Hormuz Letter, but Reddit’s r/oil subreddit hates them and thinks they’re an Iranian propaganda outlet. But I have to assume the users in r/oil think everything is Iranian propaganda.

The Hormuz Letter identifies as “Iranian” and, per X’s account info widget, it was created in late 2025, has changed its name twice since then, and is run out of Europe or a device using a VPN based in Europe. The account is Verified — as are the rest of them — and has around 200,000 followers. Its aggregation of Plitsas’ post, which claimed the “US is preparing a large-scale military operation against Yemen's Houthis in retaliation for their strikes on Saudi Arabia,” was shared thousands of times Saturday night.

By midnight eastern standard time, my X feed was completely convinced that nuclear war was imminent. According to Axios this morning, it does seem like Trump flipped back and forth all day Saturday about whether he should attack Yemen, before ultimately deciding against it (for now).

The most interesting side effect of the X’s Saturday night doomsday panic was that, by Sunday morning, hundreds of videos had gone viral making fun of Yemenis for chewing khat. If you’ve never heard of khat before, it’s recreational stimulant that is pretty popular in the country and if you chew a ton of it at once you end up looking like one of the jawbreaker kids from Ed, Edd, n Eddy. I’ve seen speculation on X that this sudden surge of anti-Yemeni content was a psyop, deployed to sway public perception in the wake of a US-led missile strike against the Houthis.

In the process of trying to nail whether that was true or not, I actually discovered something surprising about how X currently works. But let’s start with the Khat posts.

The most viral post about khat was from a right-wing Verified user based in the US going by @LeeKuanYimby, who was sharing a video originally posted by a Turkish user several days before. A similar post, featuring a different video, was posted the next morning by Visegrád 24’s X account. The video in that post has been bouncing around X since 2024. Visegrád 24 is a right-wing international news aggregator run by a Polish national Stefan Tompson. It launched right after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has close ties to Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party. A third viral post about khat came from an X account called @hijibijihijibi, which is based in India.

My assumption was that all of this activity on X would have spread to other platforms. I mean, let’s say that this was a psyop. Why spend all the time and money targeting X if it’s not going to trickle down to the rest of the web? And I definitely found some evidence that that pipeline still exists. Posts about Yemen’s khat consumption showed up on the r/todayilearned and r/AskIsrael subreddits right after it started trending on X. And I found a few of the viral khat videos on TikTok, as well, though they weren’t performing very well. What surprised me, however, was almost all of the anti-Yemeni videos circulating on X this week were, literally, just months-old videos that pop up when you search “Yemen” or “khat” on Instagram. Which has drastically changed my opinion of what’s happening on X right now. Let’s put this all together.

The few establishment journalists still on X use the platform more or less the way they always have. Their posts don’t get nearly as much traction as they used to, but their reporting routinely gets gobbled up by Verified accounts that are basically running DIY Bloomberg terminals, catering to the post-pandemic class of day traders and finance psychos that primarily use the app now. Those accounts create Trending Topics, which are then used as the pretext for coordinated far-right disinformation campaigns. But almost all of the videos being circulated during these flare-ups are just stolen Instagram Reels and very little of it is actually leaving the platform once it trends there. In fact, if I hadn’t have opened X at the exact moment all of this was happening, there would be barely any evidence that it happened at all.

And if you were to remove the first link in that chain, if there were no journalists on there at all, I genuinely do think that entire ecosystem would completely break down. Or at the very least disappear inside its own filter bubble. Something to consider.

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I assume many of you have been tormented by this song over the last few weeks. If you have, you were no doubt sent the version embedded above, performed by Kaien Nuen and Angelina “Sugar” Zhang.

Nuen and Zhang are both multi-platform content creators who, unlike the Yemeni khat guys above, were successfully rocketed into the cultural consciousness off the back of a viral hate campaign on X earlier this month. An X post making fun of their music video, sarcastically captioned, “Prod. by me” by a user who definitely did not, has now been shared close to 10,000 times and racked up nearly 100 million views. So why did “GGEZ” break containment and not all the other miserable garbage on that platform?

“Some of the hate clearly comes from the fact that ‘GG EZ’ is just sleek enough to be listenable, while the subject matter microwaves stale flaps of internet culture à la ‘Pokémon Go to the polls,’ Kieran Press-Reynolds argued in a great Pitchfork piece on the sudden popularity of the song. “But a lot of the backlash is also just racist and misogynistic, and there’s a flood of gross incel behavior around the video.”

What I, personally, find most, uh, not exciting exactly, but fascinating, I suppose, is that this is an example of something I’ve been waiting years to see. “GGEZ” was actually originally generated by AI and then covered by Nuen and Zhang. The original was popular in Korea as a dance challenge, but it wasn’t until human beings performed it that it really blew up. I expect a lot more of this going forward actually. God help us all, etc.

Alright, so I do not keep up with what’s going on at SeaWorld, but I guess they do a Halloween thing every year called Howl-O-Scream. And this year they have a new “scare zone” at the park called Just One More Chapter which is both horny AND scary. Essentially, it’s a booktok haunted house. Here’s a video someone shot from inside the park.

It’s a lot of shirtless dudes wearing half-masks and holding roses. It also has a lot of sliders, those guys you see on Instagram that do that weird thing where they roller blade without roller-blading? Like they have knee pads on and they use them to slide around. Not totally clear how that lines up with scary booktok stuff, but I guess it aesthetically makes sense.

I guess my main question is like… if this is at SeaWorld does it smell like SeaWorld? Like are all these guys crawling around and being sexy and it just smells like an aquarium?

The view count on the first video posted by @jean_philanthrope Instagram account is staggering. Over a million likes and close to 30 million views since it was posted this weekend. And all that engagement seems pretty organic. The comments are mostly people making fun of how the guy looks. His account now has over 100,000 followers.

Shortly after the account started going viral, the bio on the page started advertising a Pump dot fun link. We actually can’t link to Pump dot fun because every major email service provider lists it as spam, but it’s the cryptocurrency platform that recently added a “bounties” feature. The owner of the @jean_philanthrope launched a $JEANPHIL token, which currently has a market cap of $1.6 million.

As for the AI dimension to this. There are more than a few folks claim all the videos on the account are AI-generated. I ran a couple of his videos through a few different AI-detector services and got some mixed results that were sort of interesting. Most detectors I used said that his first video, the one that got 30 million views, was real. But they flagged the subsequent videos as AI-generated.

So that either means that his first video was just really well-done and the owner of the page has gotten lazier. Or there is a real guy out there who looks like this and he recorded one video and then decided to just start AI-generating other videos of himself.

Weird either way. Anyways, just to circle back to the crypto coin. Monetizing memes has been a big project for the crypto community over the last few years. They really want to tie viral content to crypto markets and this would be another test of that idea. Best to ignore it.

Alright, so I came across a video from a user named @askmineralmomma called “Why I stopped using Himalaya pink salt.” And I’ll be honest, I have genuinely no idea what she’s talking about. She seems to be arguing that Himalayan pink salt is suspicious because she thinks it’s full of metal from the machines that process it. I think idk. It doesn’t really matter because a bunch of people in her comments wrote that Himalayan pink salt is “petrified giants.” Which I was far more curious about!

It’s been a while since I checked in on the “giants are real” internet. And it turns out there are more than few folks on TikTok who think that pink salt comes from giants. From what I understand, there was already a large sub-section of TikTok users who believed that giants were real and once walked the earth and I guess they assume Himalayan pink salt is petrified chunks of their bodies but it kind of looks like meat when you carve it up.

It’s important to have a hobby.

(instagram.com/reels/Ddh4gK-BqKi)

This was shared by Tyler in the Garbage Day Discord.

P.S. here’s a good meme.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***