Trump's tweets about the Pensacola shooting attracted a greater share of Arabic replies than usual. We gathered the first 15999 replies, 538 of which (3.4%) are in Arabic. As a baseline, 0.1% of all replies to Trump's account in the last 72 hours are in Arabic.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote Those 538 Arabic replies were tweeted by 451 accounts, and the majority are recent creations; 315 of 451 (69.8%) were made in 2015. The spikes in the creation dates potentially indicate a single entity creating accounts in batches. . .
@ZellaQuixote Looking closer, we found 160 accounts created in eight batches in 2019 with few tweets, few or no likes, and similar naming conventions. The first batch consists of 15 accounts created in 15 minutes on May 23rd, 2019; the largest contains 82 accounts and was minted July 5th/6th.
@ZellaQuixote (the remaining four batches of bulk-created accounts that replied in Arabic to Trump's Pensacola shooting tweets since we can only attach four images to a single tweet)
@ZellaQuixote These 160 accounts theoretically tweet via the Twitter website, although due to similarity in profile and repetition in content they may well be bots rather than human sockpuppets. In addition to shared Arabic content, they RT'd many of the same English tweets about the shooting.
@ZellaQuixote What do the Arabic replies to @realDonaldTrump's Pensacola tweets say? Neither of us reads Arabic, so we ran them through Google Translate. Here's a sample of 50, with the disclaimer that machine translation does not capture nuance and sometimes gets things badly wrong.
@ZellaQuixote @realDonaldTrump Clarification based on a few replies to the previous tweet: we don't think this activity is authentic - based on the bulk creation of the accounts and the similarities between them, they're most likely either bots or sock puppets.
@ZellaQuixote @realDonaldTrump Correction: this tweet should read "315 of 451 (69.8%) were made in 2019" (not 2015.)
