re: #54 Thanos

Started at Zerohedge, a site run by two bulgarian bros intent on goldbuggery, oil pimping, Russian state propaganda and fleecing rw rubes through pump and dump schemes

Don’t know. Zerohedge based their story on a release from Interfax-Ukraine. The TASS byline is 6 hours earlier than Zerohedge’s. It would be logical to assume that it was the source of the Interfax release. In any case, it was Zerohedge to which SMOTI linked.

Some familiar names crop in this NBC story on the hoax.
As Sondland testified, a misleading Ukraine story spread among conservatives on social media

Within an hour of ZeroHedge publishing its story, the claim of an indictment had been spread on Twitter by tens of thousands of users. According to results on the Twitter analytics tool Hoaxy, the indictment claims were propelled by Charlie Kirk, the leader of the conservative group Turning Point USA, as well as a conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec, and the anonymous @BreakingNLive, an account that has become notorious for spreading misinformation. The account also boasts of being retweeted by the president.

More than 10,000 users engaged with the ZeroHedge story on Facebook, which was shared to dozens of pages that totaled more than 3 million followers.

One minute before the ZeroHedge article was published, the anonymous account that inspired the QAnon conspiracy theory — generally known as “Q” — linked to the same Interfax-Ukraine article.