Thread by @conspirator0

Let's take a gander at the recent spread of the hashtag #ADOS. We began by downloading the most recent ten days worth of tweets, yielding 74190 tweets from 11844 accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Looking further back, the hashtag has been around for a long time (although the older traffic is unrelated to the current usage). Volume began to pick up in January and kicked into high gear in early February.

We didn't find much in the way of automation for #ADOS tweets, but looking at the accounts reveals something else interesting. There's a spike in account creation since the New Year, matching the time period where the hashtag took off.

645 of the 11844 accounts (5.4%) with recent #ADOS tweets were created since 1/1/2019. Additionally, those accounts are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the traffic - 7104 of 74190 tweets (9.6%).

Here are the 30 most prolific (in terms of #ADOS tweet volume) of the 645 accounts with recent #ADOS tweets created since the New Year. The numbers shown here suggest that these accounts may have been created for the purpose of pushing the hashtag.

(footnote for clarity - the numbers in the table are based on the entire tweet histories of the new accounts and thus go back further than the 10 days show in this figure)