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[Thread] 1/ Who wants to know some fun facts about #MAGA Twitter accounts? In this thread I will discuss how many MAGA accounts have existed, and how many have been suspended. I will also attempt to analyse how Twitter seems to deal with them. #impeachment
2/ Firstly, there are a lot of them. I downloaded around 140,000 Twitter accounts that contain the term #MAGA (Make America Great Again) in the biography. This is a good proxy for a pro-Trump account. As some of you may remember, most (4000) were created on January 2017 
3/ This bizarre anomaly aside, after downloaded on the data, @abulkhaezuran helped me get some additional data on whether the accounts were or not. So get this, out of around 140,000 accounts, 30,370 have been suspended or are 'not found'. That's a huge 21% of accounts.
@abulkhaezuran 4/ That's right, 21% of accounts with the term #MAGA in have been suspended! (FYI, 'Not Found' means the account was deleted) I do not know when they were suspended, but they are a number of interesting things we can determine about these suspensions. Read on...
@abulkhaezuran 5/ This graph shows again how many accounts have been created since around 2006/2007. The accounts in blue are those the accounts that are still live! The accounts in orange are 'not found', while those in red are 'suspended'. What you'll notice is that after January 2017,
@abulkhaezuran 6/ Indeed, after January 2017, the month we saw a seemingly anomalous surge in #MAGA account, we saw a general increase in the amount of MAGA accounts being created. At the same time, Twitter started to increase the number of MAGA accounts it suspended....See next tweet...
@abulkhaezuran 7/This cool graph below is striking. It shows the percentage change of suspended/not found accounts versus 'live' accounts.What you can see from the blue (live accounts), is that although more new accounts are being created since Jan 2017, a greater proportion are being suspended
@abulkhaezuran 8/ You can see from the orange and red lines (not found and suspended accounts respectively) a general increase. That means a larger percentage of accounts created every month are actually being suspended. Indeed, the overall trend is telling. More #MAGA accounts are being
9/ suspended as each month goes by (latest months aren't necessarily reliable). What does this mean exactly? Well it could mean a few things. 1) Twitter are taking a tougher line with suspected troll/bot/abusive accounts 2) There is more and more suspicious pro-Trump Twitter
10/ activity since 2017 that is resulting in more suspensions 3) Although there have been more #MAGA accounts created since Jan 2017, Twitter are just more likely to suspend newer accounts , and thus newer accounts get taken down more easily. Indeed, this fits with the argument
11/ that hackers like to get hold of older accounts as they are less likely to be suspended.
12/ what surprised me though looking through the records though is how obviously troll/bot-like some of the accounts are. For example, I arranged the 140,000 by biography. Quite a large number of accounts have identical biographies. Some of these are perhaps unsurprising, e.g.
13/ 1,285 of the accounts just have #MAGA as their biography. However, there are longer bios that statistically would be unlikely to be used by more than one person. Look below to see how many accounts have identical bios, i.e. one beginning 'I'm not going to censor myself..."
14/ That biography is used by 20 different accounts. Now what are the odds of that? If we take a closer look we can see that the accounts are not even trying to appear to be the same person setting them up. All different names, all different locations. All suspended...
15/ Some of my favourite are the accounts with American names and english bios, but who have Slavic sounding handles...Jack L Stanton, aka vladimirsedov54...Admittedly probably not too many of them, but still funny....
15/ A lot use legitimate places in their bios. This guy created two accounts with identical bios, claiming he was a director at @UniofExeter. Needless to say, both accounts were suspended...
16/ Of course this begs the question. How many of the accounts of the 140,000 are obviously trolls, bots or cyborgs that have not been suspended. I'd wager there is quite a few. Even browsing through the non-suspended accounts, it's not hard to find dodgy accounts...
17/ I looked through the list and found @morowin123 from Austria, a #MAGA account with a tasty mullet. His most recent tweet was back in June 2019, and was both anti-liberal and anti-Semitic. Of course maybe 'Thomas' is real, but his photo tells a potentially different story...
18/ a reverse image search reveals the same photo except that it has been flipped and cropped. Maybe I'm wrong though and Thomas is just from the classic aryan super family and really does love Trump....
19/ Mullets aside, a corpus analysis of all the bios of the 140,000 accounts gives an interesting list of the most common keywords. They include, love, god, patriot, christian, nra, and others...There are around 500 Islamophobic accounts (see next tweet) #impeachment
20/ Here is a screenshot of a few of the around 500 accounts with Islamophobic content in their bios. Another interesting aspect was the sheer number of pro-Israel accounts. Israel is the most common appearing country name. Over 2500 accounts have Israel in the bio.
21/ So there you have it, good news and bad news. Good news is that one fifth of all MAGA accounts are being suspended/have been suspended. The number of suspensions is increasing. However, I am really not convinced that all the malicious accounts are being detected. What's more
22/ they clearly do a lot of damage (tweeting) before they are ever suspended. I do wonder at what point the two trend lines, of #MAGA accounts being suspended versus those not will meet at the middle. That seems to be where it's going. Who is actually real anymore?
23/ Anyway, thanks again for listening to my thread all. Reply or retweet if you have any questions or interesting comments. :) #thread #impeachment
and apologies for all the typos. I usually read and write good. Honest.
23.5/ For those of you who asked, the 140000 MAGA-containing accounts contained 1063 accounts that also mention #Brexit - Obviously mostly pro-Brexit.
