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[Thread] 1) @StephanieCarvin asked a very important question. It is one that I have been trying to address, but one that will take time, but also one that probably underpins a lot of the troll/bot mystery. The question is...
2) Are the same Brexit trolls also active on other hashtags, such as #TrudeauMustGo, or Iran-related issues? In other words, are the same accounts roaming from divisive hashtag to divisive hashtag? If so, it could point to an organized, international influence campaign...
3) I will give my formative answer, showing some of the working. The short answer is 'yes, they are', the long answer is 'yes and what the, please no...!' #cdnpoli #StoptheCoup
4) In order to find out. We have to examine all the accounts tweeting on these different, varied hashtags, such as #LeaveOct31 #TrudeauMustGo and #MIGA (obviously there are more).This is an example. We can then see if the same accounts are active on the different issues. But how?
5) Well we could identify a few suspicious accounts and check them over time, but this would be time consuming and a bit of a lottery. What I have done below, is take three samples of all the suspicious #MAGA accounts from three separate topics. Sample 1) is from
Nigel Farage's tweet that I analysed this morning. Sample 2) is from the #TrudeauMustGo hashtag I analysed the other day. 3) Sample three is from the Make Iran Great Again (MIGA) hashtag I analyzed - also a few days ago. So as you can see, three separate issues...
7) Because I am basic af, I placed the 3 different samples into a single excel file (I am a visual guy). I asked excel to highlight duplicate values. Lo & behold, we see that x number of accounts tweeting on Brexit are also tweeting on Iran issues and Canadian politics! #cdnpoli
9) The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed something. Usually the duplicates are both the biography and the screen name of the user. This makes sense right, unless of course, I have changed my biography, or user name. Then you'd expect to only see one highlighted 
10) in this case, we can see that @PanamaforTrump has changed his biography between hashtags (space of a few days). Not drastically, but deleted a couple of hashtags. Check the screenshots. This is potentially huge, but why?
@PanamaforTrump 11) Well, and this answers a question by @RussellGowers - about the scale of crossover. Well we don't know how big this is yet, but, even within this small sample (each one about one 800 accounts), we see around 150 duplicates. If we now consider how many MAGA accounts might
@PanamaforTrump @RussellGowers 12) be doing this, across different hashtags, at different times, while also potentially changing their bios, then it could be extraordinarily huge. Indeed, I downloaded all accounts containing #MAGA #WWG1WGA #KAG #QAnon and a few other terms.This came to around 140,000 accounts!
@PanamaforTrump @RussellGowers 13) Now how many of those accounts are switching between hashtags, changing bios, tweeting on transnational issues? We don't know of course, as we'd have to track all those accounts over time...Which hopefully I'll be doing next with help from @abulkhaezuran :O
