[Thread] 1/ Just did a quick analysis of this Facebook thread (have to be quick as I have a wedding to get to). I downloaded around 750 of the 4,400 comments. (I will aim on getting more). As you can see from @mykegrimes 's tweet, a lot of people seem to be posting identical
@mykegrimes 2/ identical comments, such as "brilliant boris" or 'support boris 100%". This has been raised several times before, with some attributing to pro-Brexit groups asking people to post phrases like "brilliant boris" on his various posts. However, if we learned anything from #Brexit
@mykegrimes 3/ there's a fine line between authentic activity and inauthentic activity. If indeed the accounts are real, then it's depressing that people are reduced to parrots, repeating slogans like 'leave means leave' and 'get one with it'. On the other hands, bots and fake accounts
@mykegrimes 4/ are capable of repeating simple messages, and simple messages transmit. Indeed, Brexit is all about simple messaging, reducing rationale being into those resembling automatons. Anyway, to the analysis..... >
@mykegrimes 5/ I downloaded around 750 comments and grouped them according to whether they contained keywords/phrases like 'brilliant', excellent', or '100%'. When I exclude null results (often gif comments) it seems that around 22% of the sample are comments containing the word "brilliant"
@mykegrimes 6/ That's a fifth. 100% appeared in 9% of comments, and WTO (wtf!) appeared in around 8% of the comments. Why so many people would be obsessing about the WTO is beyond me, presumably to give the illusion of informed opinion without having to reason it...Also I didn't group 
@mykegrimes 7/ the word 'twat', but it appeared quite a lot, which is perhaps reassuring. The below graph shows grouped comments over posting time, I excluded comments that appeared less than three times which left around 250. Interestingly, you can see the initial flurry of comments
8/ included mentioning "WTO". Not sure why, but in the initial hour of comments, WTO made up around 44% of this sub sample of pro-Boris tweets. Presumably if this was authentic activity we'd see a more even distribution of WTO comments over time....
9/ Anyway, will try to look more later at more comments, but got to get ready for that wedding! Happy weekend folk, and bots!
