[Follow up Thread on Iraq] 1/ Given my thread today I thought it would be curious to revisit one I did back in October 2019. You can see the thread below. The question I wanted to answer, how many of those accounts no longer exist?
2/ The original thread analysed a hashtag that included "save the Iraqi people". It also advocated the right for peaceful protest. At the time I noted that a large amount of the accounts in the sample had been created in a 3 day period, October 1st - 3rd. Using Tweetbeaver
3/ We can bulk up look old accounts on Tweet Beaver to see if they have either been deleted, renamed, or suspended. What we find is interesting. In my old sample I selected 836 accounts that had been created between October 1st & Oct4th 2019. Tweetbeaver returned only 609.
4/ That means around 27% (227) of the accounts on that hashtag have either been deleted, suspended, or renamed. That is a seemingly high attrition rate. The overall fall off for the entire sample is around 13%. So while of course it is generally correct to argue that
5/ people migrate to Twitter during a big event (as is the case in most places) - it's not something you can just simply explain away all trends with. The high number of suspensions, deletions or potential handle rotations of newly created accounts could indicate a ) malicious
6/ use suspension, b) handle rotation c) boredom by a new user . For c to be true we usually expect people to abandon their account, rather than delete them, but it depends where you are. Anyway, more food for thought! Good night! DM me for the data.
