Heading into the 5th #DemDebate, we’re watching three related hashtags: #DemocraticDebate, #DemDebate, and #DemDebate5. Pre-debate traffic has a greater percentage of automated tweets than last time - 6.8% vs 2.8% at the same time on the day of the 4th debate.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote One bit of automation that sticks out like a sore thumb (because we’ve seen it before, or at least an earlier incarnation): a group of 28 bots that are theoretically associated with Virginia taxi companies and realtors, but frequently act more like political retweet bots.
@ZellaQuixote Almost all of the content these bots retweet is political, in contrast with their own tweets which focus on taxi/realtor themes. Hashtags and links are a mix of political and promotional; political content seems focused on Democratic candidates, particularly Warren and Sanders.
@ZellaQuixote (Previous thread on what is likely an earlier form of the same taxi/realtor botnet - most of the accounts featured were subsequently banned by Twitter.)
@ZellaQuixote A small but notable contribution to automated #DemDebate traffic leading into the 5th debate: candidate-specific retweet bots. We only found four with multiple #DemDebate tweets, two that retweet #YangGang and two that retweet #Bernie2020.
@ZellaQuixote A few high-volume retweet bots that we've already posted about due to their status as frequent fliers in political datasets contributed to the #DemDebate traffic. Here are some threads on them.
@ZellaQuixote Shortly before the beginning of the debate, #DemDebate/#DemDebate5/#DemocraticDebate Twitter traffic has started to accelerate. If things play out as they did in the previous debates, it'll reach thousands of tweets per minute as the debate gets going.
@ZellaQuixote As predicted, #DemDebate tweet volume shot way up after the debate began, peaking at 4572 tweets per minutes so far. More of the current traffic is likely organic than prior to the debate; the percentage of tweets posted via automation apps/services has dropped from 6.8% to 3.7%.
@ZellaQuixote #DemDebate/#DemDebate5/#DemocraticDebate volume remained in the vicinity of 4000 tweets per minute for the duration of the debate. Candidates most frequently name-dropped in tweets: @KamalaHarris, @BernieSanders, @TulsiGabbard, and @AndrewYang, in that order.
@ZellaQuixote @KamalaHarris @BernieSanders @TulsiGabbard @AndrewYang We ran VADER sentiment analysis on the #DemDebate/#DemocraticDebate tweets mentioning each candidate during the debate and in the surrounding hours. Overall, sentiment scores dropped substantially, with the exception of tweets mentioning Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer, and Warren.
