Thread by @conspirator0

Attorney @SidneyPowell1, known for representing Michael Flynn, filing multifarious election-related lawsuits, and overuse of the word "Kraken", has accumulated an impressive 1139718 Twitter followers, more than half of them since election day. We took a look.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

At first glance, @SidneyPowell1's followers appear to be largely run-of-the-mill #MAGA and #QAnon accounts, and the hashtags used in their profiles corroborate this. Looking deeper, however, we ran across some interesting anomalies. . .

First off, @SidneyPowell1's Twitter account began its life with an infusion of fake followers from a fake engagement botnet we've previously encountered. (647 of her earliest followers are part of this network.)

Since we've previously analyzed this fake engagement network, we're not going to go into much detail on it here. Like many of the other accounts in the botnet, @SidneyPowell1's early fake followers tweeted using a wide variety of apps, mostly in Russian.

Fast-forward to @SidneyPowell1's recent followers, where there are a couple other things to see. The proportion of her followers since the election with few or no tweets or followers has trended sharply upward, especially since the election.

More interestingly, @SidneyPowell1 has recently seen a sharp uptick in Japanese-language followers. 17092 of her 17926 followers with Japanese display names or biographies (95.3%) followed her after election day, compared to 667259 of 1139718 total followers (58.5%).

Due to the language barrier, we didn't dig too deeply into the content of @SidneyPowell1's Japanese-language followers. We did notice that the account they retweet most often is @realDonaldTrump, however. (Other accounts retweeted: @LLinWood, @epochtimes_jp, @SidneyPowell1.)

We also downloaded @LLinWood's followers. We didn't see any sign of early fake followers, but like @SidneyPowell1 he experienced a sudden post-election influx of Japanese accounts (19351 with Japanese display names or profile biographies). #KrakenWoodWorldTour

We downloaded the most recent 200 tweets from each of @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers with Japanese display names/bios. The website they most frequently link is YouTube, with a focus on conspiracy theory videos related to the 2020 US presidential election.

The recent influx of accounts with Japanese display names/bios also shows up in @RudyGiuliani's followers, although it appears to have started on September 11th, 2020 (as opposed to after the November election as was the case with @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers).