Thread by @conspirator0

Do any interesting anomalies lurk amongst the followers of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates? We’ll be diving into this over the coming days, beginning with @marwilliamson, whose 2.75M followers seem out of proportion with her campaign’s popularity.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote Marianne Williamson’s earliest and most recent 300Kish followers look legit, but the 2 million+ in between are another story - the majority have default profile pics, few or no tweets or followers, and were recent creations at the time they followed @marwilliamson.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote Next up: @TulsiGabbard and @JulianCastro. We didn't spot any noticeable anomalies in Gabbard's follower growth; Castro's account shows some mild spikes in follows from empty accounts with default profile pictures, but on a much smaller scale than Williamson's.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro Onward to @amyklobuchar's followers, where we spy an anomaly. ~100K accounts with default profile pics and fewer than 20 tweets, followers, and likes of their own followed Klobuchar between June 2017 and April 2018, accounting for half of her follower gains during that period.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar We didn't find much in the way of anomalies among
@AndrewYang
and
@BetoORourke
's followers; here are the visualizations for both candidates for the sake of completeness.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke Next in queue is @BernieSanders, the Democratic candidate with the largest number of followers at nearly 10 million. Growth prior to ~April 2016 and subsequent to January 2018 looks organic, with multiple surges of newly-created default pic accounts in the timespan between.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders Onward to @KamalaHarris. Early follower growth and growth from ~2018 onward look organic, but a significant proportion of the ~1M followers Harris acquired in 2017 appear to be new (at the time) empty accounts with default profile pics.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris Like Harris (and arguably Klobuchar and Sanders as well), @ewarren received an influx of low-quality followers in 2017. We haven't noticed a pattern of 2017-era bogus follower gains on other accounts we've studied, so it's interesting to see it on multiple 2020 Dem candidates.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren Like several of the other candidates, @CoryBooker gained a disproportionate quantity of potentially bogus followers in 2017. Unlike the others, his first 600K or so also feature an abundance of empty or nearly-empty accounts with default profile pics.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker Most of @JoeBiden’s follower growth looks organic, but there are several brief surges where he was followed by a noticeably higher proportion of low-quality accounts.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden We didn't see much in the way of suspect follower activity for @PeteButtigieg. Almost all of his followers were gained in 2019, which is consistent with his jump from local to national politics.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg Both @JohnDelaney and @MichaelBennet's follower plots lack the anomalies we've seen for some of the other candidates. Caveat: they also have substantially fewer followers.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg @JohnDelaney @MichaelBennet We likewise didn’t see much in the way suspicious follower activity for either @TomSteyer or @WayneMessam.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg @JohnDelaney @MichaelBennet @TomSteyer @WayneMessam Last candidate: @GovernorBullock, who indeed appears to have quite a few low-quality followers - a surge of accounts with default pics followed him in early 2018, comprising the majority of his Twitter following.

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg @JohnDelaney @MichaelBennet @TomSteyer @WayneMessam @GovernorBullock Here are the default profile pic plots for all 17 candidates side by side. By and large, it's the candidates who've been in the national eye for a while who have the spikes of low-quality followers, particularly in 2017 (Williamson and Bullock are exceptions to the rule.)

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg @JohnDelaney @MichaelBennet @TomSteyer @WayneMessam @GovernorBullock To what extent do the candidates have the same followers? It turns out there's a sizable amount of overlap between the followers of the candidates with large Twitter presences, with the exception of @marwilliamson. What happens if we look only at followers with default pics?

@marwilliamson @ZellaQuixote @TulsiGabbard @JulianCastro @amyklobuchar @AndrewYang @BetoORourke @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren @CoryBooker @JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg @JohnDelaney @MichaelBennet @TomSteyer @WayneMessam @GovernorBullock Among the candidates with spikes in default-pic followers, Harris, Biden, and Warren show the most overlap, followed by Harris/Klobuchar/Booker, with Sanders and Williamson more separate. Gabbard and Yang have few default-pic followers, but 20% are shared between them.