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[Thread] Since Tamim's visit to the US, there has been, as you might expect, a surge in bot and troll activity. Of particular interest has been the crude hashtag " "Tamim supports terrorism inthe WhiteHouse" [see screenshot]. What follows is some analysis of the campaign. 
As you can see from above image, many of the unique accounts pasted the identical tweet "The Prince of Qatar a supporter of terrorism, should not be in the White House but be at Guantanamo". Indeed, between 6-9th July, I counted approx 2,582 unique accounts posting this tweet
Each of the tweets, again from unique accounts, was directed at the Trump administration, the US government and news organisations. I've generally seen similar campaigns around the Iran issue, where twitter swarms send tweets to the same group of people on twitter...
This time series graph shows that the first surge in tweets occurred on 6th July (around 800 tweets in one hour), roughly when the international press reported that Tamim would be visiting the US. The second spike is on the 9th, when Tamim was actually meeting @realDonaldTrump .
So we can surmise that the modus operandi of some of these propaganda networks is to inundate policymakers with information perhaps in the hope that some of it may register. Other than that it will dilute valid information for people looking at certain news items.
Does it mean that this 2,500 so unique accounts are bots, or semi-automated? Not necessarily, but possibly, as it could be real users posting some message on behalf of some other outlet for some incentive. Given the uniformity of accounts though, it is obviously suspicious
This behaviour was very similar to a lot of the pro-MEK bots operated. That's not to suggest a connection, but to identify a commonality of behaviours. It is worth reiterating that the above analysis is just one identical piece of content repeated by unique accounts
Here you can see a network graph of the whole hashtag. There is little community diversity (i.e. not a very organic trend). The larger nodes are those being targeted by the campaign (Trump, news orgs etc). The purple edges show Twitter 'mentions', i.e. dodgy accounts sending
their tweets to their targets. Interestingly, the green lines on the left show 'retweets'. They indicate that many of the accounts were retweeting the text of the account @MBS_KSA90 - which has previously been very active in propaganda in the Gulf Crisis >
