[Thread] 1/ Ok this is a long one, but IMPORTANT. @Twitter have quietly suspended a network of between 1000-2000 troll and/or bot accounts spreading mostly anti-Qatar propaganda, and content related to Libya, Saudi, and even Tareq Ramadan! It's a big network #Disinformation #قطر
@Twitter 2/ For my new mostly UK followers this will also concern you, as these tactics are not limited to the Middle East. This thread is specifically about the hashtag "Qatar la tureed al Salah", which translates as "Qatar does not want reconciliation". For some brief political context
@Twitter 3/ there has been a talk of thawing in the relationship between Qatar and Saudi, after Saudi (and 4 other countries) initiated a blockaded of Qatar in 2017. Whoever is behind this hashtag clearly wants to demonstrate that a thaw is certainly not on the horizon.
@Twitter 4/ I downloaded 5596 interactions from around 1916 accounts. I'm estimating that around 1685 of these accounts are trolls or possibly bots - or even soc puppets. I am not 100% sure which category they fall in. This trend was mostly from 9th-10th December. Things will get weird..
@Twitter 5/ I started examining how the trend started. It begins mostly by accounts replying to older tweets by highly followed accounts. However, when I looked into the accounts starting the trend, I noticed I was blocked by a lot of them. This was fascinating, as I'd never interacted
@Twitter 6/ with them. Indeed, the scale was incredible. I literally went through the accounts one by one, and found I had been blocked by at least 500 accounts. 500 accounts I didn't even know, tweeting on the same hashtag, had blocked a person known for tackling disinformation...
@Twitter 7/ The aesthetic of the accounts was fairly similar - headshots of fairly attractive person, with a generic banner picture. The pictures were of both men and women, but also there was a lot of attempts to highlight the breadth of representation of Arabic Countries. From Oman 
8/ to Mauritania, flags, or well-known skylines featured heavily. It's as if whoever created the network wanted people to suggest that whatever message they were sending represented a broad cross-section of Arab public opinion. That's not all.
9/ Almost the day after I started my investigation, I noticed that a lot of the accounts had been suspended. Of course this validated my concerns. Whoever blocked me was engaged in suspicious activity. So what I did was run another collection of tweets on the same hashtag
10/ This is because if you search for tweets from accounts that have been suspended you will return no results. I could then subtract this number from my previous-pre account suspension number. The new search turned up just 100 accounts. 1916-100 - 1816. So that would suggest
11/ 1816 have been suspended or are bots. I could check the list for the exact number with the assistance of comrade @abulkhaezuran - but at the moment the crucial thing to note is simply the scale of this disinformation network. But read on for some notes on their modus operandi
@abulkhaezuran 12 / Below you can see the core of the disinformation network. These accounts are the ones actually tweeting the hashtag. In the gif I toggle on and off the accounts seeding the hashtag, versus those who are not. You can see how the accounts work to target big influencers
@abulkhaezuran 13/ The accounts are also active on #Libya. Will try do a thread tomorrow on that but @k_ramali is the expert on Libya -based social media and data analytics. Strongly recommend a follow.
14/ it's hard to know where these bots are from, perhaps UAE, Saudi or Egypt given the politics of them. However a few of them had South Republic of Yemen flags as profile pics. That was somewhat esoteric and made me wonder if they are UAE related, like the September batch
