1/ 🧵There aren't many people who would consider themselves an apologist of #NSOGroup, or opponents of @amnesty, but Irina Tsukerman is one of them. This thread highlights the presence of artificial amplification of her thread attempting to discredit those orgs #disinformation
2/ After more news broke today/yesterday about Pegasus spyware being used to target human rights activists, Irina posted a lengthy thread with various ad hominem and/or scurrilous claims about @amnesty and @citizenlab. Quickly the threads got a lot of engagement
3/ However the engagement was suspicious for a number of reasons
a) It was extremely rapid considering the poor content
b) There were numerous identical and generic replies like 'good job' and '👍👍'
c) Accounts would reply generically to each tweet in the thread - which is
4) weird unless you want to drive engagement numbers
d) Similarly, many of the generic responses also had a high number of likes, which again is odd unless you're trying to drive engagement.
5/ e) Crucially though, the distribution of of the creation of the accounts is very odd. The accounts engaging with the tweet show little diversity in when they were created. In fact, 25% of the 451 accounts who liked or RTd the tweet were created in just a 10 day period. (Bear
6/ in mind Twitter is over 5700 days old! 40% of the accounts were created in just 21 days.
7) An inspection of the accounts reveals many of them are impersonal egg accounts (no profile pics) and retweet the same content. Others have generic profile pictures or stolen images. Most aren't particulary active.
8) Judging from the accounts past activity, they concern themselves with Moroccan affairs. That's relevant because Irina has defended the Moroccan government against accusations of it using Pegasus. Many Moroccans have explained about the increased presence of online flies
9) It's entirely possible that Irina has nothing to do with the fake accounts promoting her arguments, but the fact that there are few people willing to defend NSOGroup make her tweets targets for those wishing to defend them and its clients. That's it for now! #disinformation
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