Thread by @marcowenjones

[Thread] 1) Tonight's thread is on the "Make Iran Great Again" Hashtag and its subsidiaries, e.g. #MIGA. This hashtag is being used by an opposition movement called Restart, led by Mohammad Hosseini, who reminds me of a 90s TV magician. The thread, is of course, ridiculous #Iran

2) The sample analysed is taken from the period between 25th August-3 September. It consists of approx 27,000 tweets from around 3,300 accounts. I'm not an Iran expert, but with Restart you need to know that they encourage ppl to lead regime change in Iran voiceofrestart.com/about/

4) First up. There appears to be no real distance between the MIGA accounts and the MAGA accounts. The most active account on the hashtag is actually called @persia_bot - which blatantly has MIGA and MAGA in the bio. Persia bot seems just to retweet everything pro-Restart

5) Sidenote, I love that the screen shot of the Persia Bot account shows a tweet complaining that Twitter deleted a popular video of M. Hosseini. It's as if Twitter know something sketchy is going on.... #Iran #propaganda

6)A corpus analysis of all the 3300 or so biographies on the hashtag show, surprise surprise, the most common phrase is MAGA (811 hits), followed by Trump, followed by KAG. Restart, the name of the movement, comes in 7th place in this tweet storm. Again, this is a movement

7) calling for regime change in Iran. So that's a lot of pro-Trump US-connected right wing hashtags...Which kind of makes sense given Bolton's stance on Iran right...If you look through the rest of the list you'll see common keywords we see in the pro Trump accounts, e.g.

8) Christian, conservative, patriot, family etc. LOVE is also another big one, which I generally find amusing given the generally hostile nature of such accounts. Out of the 3,300 or so accounts, one third contain Trump-related hashtags (1,100). Many also contain terms like

9) Brexit (20) and Israel (42). Indeed, if you remember the Boris Johnson tweets, the #Trudeau tweets ( #cdnpoli ) you'll remember that these were the same terms that kept cropping up across these various political issues spanning continents....

10) As we've seen with other tweet storm campaigns, for example a recent one where the Emir of #Qatar visited the US, accounts tend to target US government officials and Media. Below you can see that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, foxnews and Netanyahu are among those targeted

11) A lot of the themes reflect the classic Trumpian discourses, e.g. Obama's deal was terrible, lots of stuff on Fake News, stuff on #CreepyJoeBiden - it's all there. I don't read Persian, but a lot of this in English obviously as its directed at Western leaders

12 (For some more background on the #MIGA thread see this article shared by @maasalan . Also @maasalan can answer your question much better than me on Iran) forensicnews.net/2019/07/06/tro…

@maasalan 13) A useful quote from it is "This has all seemed rather benign, hasn’t it? Aside from inciting violence Iran, Restart hasn’t been much of a threat. With the intermingling of Trump supporters and Hosseini supporters, however, the call for war with Iran is becoming magnified"

@maasalan But if we look at what we've seen across the past few days, a loosely connected bunch of MAGA/Trump accounts have now been mingling to promote #TrudeauMustGo , #LeaveOct31 and other similar fantasies of the global right. We even see Brexit accounts promoting #MIGA

@maasalan Again, many of the accounts active on this MIGA hashtag, have, as with the other investigations I've done this week, show a spike in Twitter account creation dates on January 2017. Oh hai old friend....

@maasalan That's it for tonight. Enjoy Twitter guys, and take joy in knowing the integrity of the information environment is being made great again, by what I am increasing beginning to believe is the same group of people. #SweetDreams