Thread by @Ex_Trac

1. Over the last few days, we’ve been tracking a major new influence campaign being deployed by the #Taliban in #Afghanistan.

On 22 July, its networks on Twitter and Telegram were three times more active than usual – more active than they've been across all of 2022 to date.

2. This surge was the result of a defensive comms campaign aimed at legitimising the #Taliban, sparked when @Meta banned its media agencies, Bakhtar/RTA, last week.

In the wake of that, thousands started tweeting #BanTaliban in the hope that @Twitter would follow suit.

3. Responding to this, the #Taliban launched its own campaign, #AfghansSupportTaliban, on 22 July.

Within three days, it was shared more than twice as many times as the initial anti-#Taliban hashtag (200k+).

Here’s where it all started.

4. In the 48 hours that followed, #Taliban officials and supporters flooded Twitter with ‘evidence’ that #AfghansSupportTaliban.

During that period, the hashtag was tweeted more than 189,000 times by around 4,000 accounts.

5. The #Taliban has gone to town with this.

Yesterday, its Urdu WhatsApp feed shared a visual purporting that over a third of those who tweeted in its support were based in the #USA.

(Location data collected in this way is notoriously incomplete, but this is still surprising.)

(5a. We doubled-checked this data using the same software the #Taliban used, @Talkwalker, and got similar results: significantly more than a third of the accounts that tweeted #AfghansSupportTaliban in the last few days are 'located' in the #USA.)

6. Notably, most posts containing “#AfghansSupportTaliban” originated from a relatively small number of accounts.

There was a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination.

You can see that in how concentrated its distribution (pink) was compared to that of #BanTaliban (purple).

7. Moreover, the account that shared it most frequently is a fake, its profile pic pulled from a UChicago theatre website.

We can’t say for certain who's behind it, but the same pic was used by another fake ‘doctor’ pushing #Taliban comms around the takeover of #Kabul last year.

8. Whatever the case, it’s important to keep things in perspective.

This same network was more than twice as active when #Kabul fell to the #Taliban.

What we saw last week was significant hyperactivity, but nothing close to full capacity.

9. We’ll be continuing to track this in the coming weeks.

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