[Thread] 1/ A large influence campaign using the hashtag 'Qatar is the source of ruin' (قطر منبع الخراب) was highly active from 15th December, trending in Egypt. It's designed to appear as a hashtag generated by those supported Southern Transitional Council in Yemen (UAE-backed)
2/ Between 15th December and 20th December there were around 12,000 interactions between around 5100 unique accounts. The recent trend was started by some of the below accounts - some using the same image of the Qatari Emir in front of an Iranian flag 
3/ Most influential accounts on the hashtag are mostly likely the large nodes below. Green means verified, red, non-verified. So they include @hsom67 (UAE) @atayyh (Aden) @Osamabinfayed @FahdAlktbi (UAE). The large amount of pink indicates around 80% of the hashtag was Retweets
@hsom67 @atayyh @Osamabinfayed @FahdAlktbi 4/ Around 1,900 of the 4,900 accounts that tweeted the hashtag were created in 2019. (The earliest in the sample is 2008). Such a high proportion of new accounts is often indicative of inorganic behaviour, but need not be, especially if a big event has occurred. I'd wager in this
5/ case what we are seeing is inorganic. It's certainly an influence campaign designed by people to send out a specific message - in this case Qatar is trying to undermine peace and stability in Yemen with the help of Iran. Remember. This theme is similar to the content produced
6/ by UAE accounts removed by Twitter (announced in Sept 2019) that were tweeting on issues related to the Houthis being backed by Iran. For my write up in the Washington Post you can check here >washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?…
7/ Many of the accounts active on the network appear to be South Yemen activist accounts > it's very flag heavy as you can see from the screenshot. Lot's of randomly generated Twitter handles, suggest account was made in a hurry, or en masse, or someone who hates technology
8/ Of possible interest too is this network graph. Here I coloured the edges by device (e.g. iphone or android). You'll notice iphone (green) and android (pink) seem to be quite separated. It's as if there are two distinct communities interacting in different ways based on device
9/ This could mean many things, for example, a set of accounts programmed to interact in a specific predictable way, or people from poorer countries (android is cheaper) such as Yemen, interacting with iphone users from richer country (UAE perhaps). This is speculative though
10/ Anyway given the orchestrated nature of the hashtag, the message discipline (e.g. Qatar + Iran + terrorism), the similarity of a lot of accounts, the lack of engagement by dissenting voices, this is certainly an influence campaign. The uniformity implies it could be a troll
11/ farm, but that could mean info wing of the South Yemen forces. It could also just be activists, although I'd be surprised if everyone had the same specific political opinion - although in times of polarisation and disinformation it is also possible.
