[Thread] 1/ This one is on seriously high volume Saudi Twitter bots tweeting on the hashtag #اتفاق_الرياض , which translates as the Riyadh Agreement. If you search Twitter for hashtag, you will see something like '330 tweets in the past hour'. Most of them are bots. Read on...
2/ For some context. The #RiyadhAgreement is a power-sharing agreement between UAE-backed separatists in Yemen, and the internationally recognized government of Yemen. Since 5th November, Saudi social media has been portraying Saudi as a 'peacemaker' in Yemen. Gross I know. 
3/ Firstly, if you want to have a look at what this looks like on Twitter, here is a short video screen capture of the search results. You can see that many of the accounts that are unique are posting content from "Saudi 24", the sectarian and virulently anti-Iranian news channel
4/ I downloaded around 15,000 tweets from around 10,500 unique Twitter accounts tweeting on the hashtag. When organized by creation date the result was staggering. 2671 accounts were created in March 2015. The average is only around 70 per month! That is phenomenal.
5/ When I tabulated the other suspicious accounts, shown by the spikes in the previous graph, it appears that around 50% of the sample are likely bots or semi-automated accounts spreading Saudi 24 and pro-Saudi propaganda. Aka, it's the bot equivalent of the monster mash,
6/ Now each of these accounts is tweeting approximately 7-8 times on the hashtag. There around 5,250 suspicious accounts. Multiply the two together and you get around 42,000. These accounts, that myself and @abulkhaezuran have been tracking for years have been active since 2015
@abulkhaezuran 7/ That alone is a lot, but if you calculate the tweeting history of these accounts, you realise these 5,250 accounts have sent around 14,500,000 tweets. That's approximate of course, bots often delete tweets so this is only an estimate of past behaviour. Still, 14 million!
@abulkhaezuran 8/Interestingly, this is probably related to the bot network I reported to Twitter back in 2016. The Saudi 24 network is one of the most long lived bot/quasi bot networks in the region. This is the same network that was tweeting pro-Saudi propaganda on #JamalKhashoggi hashtag
@abulkhaezuran 9/ Over the years thousands have been shut down, but it is curious that this vast swarm still live on. It is perhaps even more peculiar that Twitter made a big thing about their recent deletion of around 4,500 Saudi and UAE linked political spam accounts. They also
10/ deleted SIX accounts linked to Saudi-state media. That number is paltry really, as is evidenced here. So let's end this by saying, 'Dear @Twitter - here around 5,000 political spam accounts linked to Saudi state media - why not delete them too? All the best, MOJ"
@Twitter 11/ So to sum up this thread. We have found around 5,000 accounts, likely bots, promoting pro-Saudi propaganda. They are promoting a media channel with links to the Saudi state (don't they all right?), and this is in violation of Twitter's advertising policy.
