Thread by @conspirator0

An increasing number of tweets containing #Media4RestartLeader or #Restart_Opposition, many of them tagging Donald Trump, and also containing hashtags such as #MIGA ("Make Iran Great Again") have turned up recently in both English and Farsi.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

#Media4RestartLeader/#Restart_Opposition proved a bit tricky to investigate due to many of the tweets being absent from search results (shadowbans possibly?) In lieu of search, we used the followers & followers' followers of the accounts that did show up in searches as a dataset.

We ended up with 74903 tweets containing #Media4Restart Leader or #Restart_Opposition (some contain both) from 1044 accounts. 395 (37.8%) were created since the beginning of the year. Many have few followers, few tweets, and only 5.6% have changed their color scheme.

The tweets are in both English and Farsi, occasionally combining both in one tweet. (Twitter's language detection identified both mixed-language tweets and all-hashtag English tweets as undetermined; we used the presence or absence of both alphabets to classify those tweets.)

Although very few of the accounts tweeting #Media4RestartLeader or #Restart_Opposition appear to be bots, they do repeat tweets profusely (especially the mixed English/Farsi ones). Caveat: many of these accounts have few tweets, making statistical automation tests less effective.

What do the accounts tweeting #Media4RestartLeader or #Restart_Opposition look like? Hashtags used are a mix of English and Farsi hashtags; many are Iran-related, but #QAnon, #MAGA, and #Trump manage to show up. @realDonaldTrump is the most frequently tagged account.

In a somewhat jarring contrast with the general content of the tweets, the accounts with #Media4RestartLeader/#Restart_Opposition tweets don't link media in multiple languages; it's almost all English right wing conspiracy media, with Breitbart in the top spot. #AltWankers.

Thanks @kfunk937 for the lead.