Saud al-Qahtani
Fake accounts run by Partido Popular in Spain
Hong Kong
Saudi/UAE
Ecuador
Happy Friday, folks.
blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c…
@SaudQ1978 led Saudi Arabia's troll army during the Qatar crisis.
Here's traffic on قذافي_الخليج, "Qadhafi of the Gulf," 14.09.2017.
30,000 out of 45,000 posts were raw retweets of @SaudQ1978. Two-thirds of the total.
Bots all over the place.
Archive of the most recent activity here: archive.is/SIilb
Twitter also reported taking down :
6 accounts linked to Saudi state media, posing as independent outlets;
267 accounts from UAE and Egypt targeting Qatar and Iran, run by a private company;
over 4k accounts run from UAE.
telegram.me/s/KSAtoday
Get used to this. As long as people believe online info ops are effective, we're going to see more and more shady companies trying to cash in, whether they're effective or not.
Mainly fake accounts spamming and retweeting. The unsubtle end of the spectrum.
Seriously?
Created this spring. None had more than a few hundred followers, many had zero.
About 87k tweets overall.
about.twitter.com/en_us/values/e…
"Attempting to sow discord about the protest movement in Hong Kong."
I love the "Bisou Patisserie" in the middle of it. Located in Bandung, Indonesia.
Most likely that the account was hijacked and repurposed. Seen that done many times.
This Egyptian saying is definitely the best thing I've seen this morning.
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…
That's a pattern we'll be discussing more later.
Doesn't look like a long-planned or deliberate campaign. Hasty reaction to events in HK, relying on numbers, not skill?
Political party involvement again.
"Tied to the PAIS Alliance".
Hashtag manipulation and retweet spam.
Welcome to our world.