Thread by @conspirator0

Sometimes popular disinformation accounts get banned, and sometimes their creators recreate and reintroduce them to their previous audience. This thread examines Internet Research Agency account @10_gop (replacement for @TEN_GOP), but the principle generalizes.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

First, we plotted the follower growth for both accounts over time (follower counts from IRA data by @FiveThirtyEight, available here

https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/1024299655583211520

.) @TEN_GOP had ~145K followers when banned; @10_gop made it to 10465 before being voted off the island for good 39 days in.

We then downloaded replies to and mentions of @10_gop for the duration of its existence. Of the first twenty, fourteen (maybe more - context is hard to interpret for some replies) are messages expressing positive feelings about the fraudulent account's return.

This pattern continued, with hundreds of replies promoting the following of or desire to be followed by newly-reborn Kremlin troll @10_gop (formerly @TEN_GOP.) Some of these were retweeted dozens of times, and even Trump weighed in expressing appreciation for the account.

The takeaway: folks get attached emotionally to popular disinformation accounts with interesting personas that "befriend" their followers. Their operators exploit this attachment in order to reestablish their place in existing social networks (left or right-wing) following a ban.

Clarification: both the original @TEN_GOP account and the replacement @10_gop have been suspended since 2017, and are included in the dataset of banned Internet Research Agency disinformation accounts released by Twitter.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1129308770461462528