Thread by @conspirator0

How did @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN end up with over 900K followers? We decided to take a brief peek. . .

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Here are the creation dates of @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN's followers. There's a major spike in the first couple of months of 2012, curiously aligned with the Russian presidential election of that year. Can we find any pattern in these accounts?

The answer is yes. Digging deeper, 78194 of 91776 (85.2%) of @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN's followers created between 2/1/2012 and 3/5/2012 have never liked a single tweet, compared with 35% overall.

Additionally, there's a pattern in the names of many of the accounts with 0 likes: the account name is all lowercase, contains either the first or last name but not both, and has additional random letters added to it.

Filtering @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN's followers to those accounts which match the naming pattern and have zero likes leaves us with 92063 accounts. Nearly all (87663, 95.2%) were created within three months in either direction of the 2012 Russian election.

There's an anomaly lurking among the interactions received by @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN's tweets. In 2013/2014, they routinely received hundreds or thousands of retweets each yet almost no likes; generally these two metrics are correlated (yes, we used @Ian56789 as our control "group".)

The Sochi Olympics are the topic of @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN's most retweeted tweet of all time. The second most popular is far more interesting - a meme attacking Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. It was retweeted 4372 times yet only liked 127 times. What's going on?

We took a look at a random sample of 3337 accounts that retweeted @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN in 2013 or 2014 (200 tweets per account). The list of other accounts frequently RT'd by this set of accounts is a bit odd - 11 of the top 20 are spam of varying types (shown in red).

Here are some examples of the spammy accounts retweeted by the same accounts that were amplifying @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN in 2013/2014. Products and services being hawked include orange whole wheat pancakes, payday loans, bitcoin, dodgy websites, and viagra.

Not all of the accounts amplified by the accounts that boosted @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN in 2013/2014 are spam. Of particular interest: @politilogija_. It's no longer active, but when it was it routinely pulled more RTs than it has followers, especially on pro-Kremlin/anti-Obama memes.

Although we can't be certain, the above suggests that in 2013/2014 a group of accounts boosting @ARTEM_KLUYSHIN also:

1) didn't use the like button
2) retweeted spammers
3) retweeted political memes, resulting in thousands of retweets for an otherwise obscure account.