Thread by @conspirator0

#PharmaFauci utterly failed to trend despite self-proclaimed "Inventor of Email" @va_shiva's best efforts, so this isn't a thread about that hashtag. It is, however, a thread about @va_shiva's earliest followers.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Although @va_shiva's recent followers look unremarkable, a significant majority of his first 5000 followers appear to have been created in batches and to have subsequently followed @va_shiva in rapid succession.

The batch-created accounts following @va_shiva look extremely similar; all have display names that match the account name, have liked exactly zero tweets, follow a 3 digit number of accounts, and tweeted (when they were active) almost exclusively via the Twitter website.

The actual content of this network's tweets is rather varied and in multiple languages, with English and Portuguese being the most common. Tweets are repeated across accounts, although only a small fraction of the 3840 accounts tweeted any given tweet.

One last interesting quirk: these accounts posted 7376 tweets of the format Id:<number> or ScreenName:<name>. It's possible that these are references to other tweets/Twitter accounts but if so only about half of them actually exist and those seem unrelated to the network.