[Thread] 1/ This thread is on a bizarre hashtag in Kuwait. Thanks for the help of @ALYOUSEF94 and @courtneyfreer for highlighting some unusual trends and steering me on certain aspects of Kuwaiti politics. I analysed the hashtag #السكران_يدعو_السكارى_للاراده , which translates as
'the drunk calls the drunks to will/freedom square'. The 'drunk' is a reference to former Kuwait Saleh al Mulla ( @SalehAlmulla ) and 'drunks' presumably to those who support him. Thus one can reasonably assume that those behind the hashtag either 1) don't like al Mulla
@SalehAlmulla 3/ 2) don't want protests 3) both. Possibly candidates for one, according to @courtneyfreer could be the Ikhwan or pro-gov Shia Islamists, or presumably, the government themselves. Anyway, I won't get bogged down in who is behind it. Onto the data...
@SalehAlmulla @courtneyfreer 4) Firstly, I analysed around 6000 tweets from 3000 unique accounts. Most of the tweets were sent on 2nd and 3rd November. I analysed the creation dates of the accounts to find anamolies. Below you can see suspicious spikes in account creation in November 2016,2017 and
@SalehAlmulla @courtneyfreer 5/ April 2015. This is usually a strong indicator that bots or suspicious accounts are present. Also a large proportion of the accounts were created in October 2019, which again is not unusual on Twitter, but also common when bots are deployed.But that's not the most telling part 
@SalehAlmulla @courtneyfreer 6/ Below I organized the sequence of tweets by time of tweet, and coloured them according to which app they used (e.g. were they sent from android, iphone, tweetdeck etc). What we can see is extremely revealing. As you can see from the graph, the accounts that started the trend
7/ all tweet from Tweetdeck (yellow). These 55-62 unique accounts tweeting on the same hashtag and from the same platform point to highly co-ordinated and 'inauthentic' behaviour - bots, or a group of people, or single person, tweeting from multiple accounts through tweetdeck
8/ The tweets can be seen below (most of them). As you'd expect given the hashtag, they were obviously anti Saleh, and anti-protest. Here is a link to an example of one of the tweets, featuring a drunk kitten...
9/ However, despite the fact this anti-Saleh hashtag was clearly started by some group of trolls or bots, it then received a lot of comments from Kuwaiti Twitter criticising how many of the accounts looked fake. Sure enough, people then started to defend protests, and criticize
10/ the sentiment behind the hashtag. So much so, that actually the most retweeted on the hashtag was supportive of the protests, and critical of the current speaker, Marzuq Al Ghanim, widely seen as 'of the establishment' that people wish to protest about
11/ I don't know why the above tweet was so popular but another tweet critical of the speaker was also retweeted by bot-like accounts, this time tweeting from the "Mobile Web (M2)" app. As you can see from the below time series, the tweets from "Mobile Web (M2)" (in orange) start
12/ about 5 hours after the initial batch of anti Saleh tweets. What's also bizarre, is that those tweeting from Mobile Web (M2) seem to be exclusively retweeting the account @ALBlDAN - which is also critical of the speaker ( I don't know who these accounts belong to).Furthermore
@ALBlDAN 13/ many of the accounts retweeting from Mobile Web M2 are also accounts created in November 2016, which I mentioned earlier was a prime anomaly in the creation dates. See some samples below>
@ALBlDAN 15/ Just as a note: If inauthentic accounts retweet someone, it doesn't necessarily mean the person that they are retweeting has paid someone to do it. It could do it, but it could also be some third party who wants to boost a particular argument.
