[Thread] 1/For those interested in the new Twitter data dump, I will analyse a bunch of the accounts connected to Egypt that are from February 2020 but released today (April) by Twitter. First, Twitter said they have suspended 2541 accounts mostly criticised Iran, Qatar & Turkey 
2/ This was the same modus operandi of the accounts Twitter released in December 2019 that were connected to UAE, Saudi and Egypt. Interestingly they say an external source has linked this recent batch with the Egyptian government. What else can we learn about the accounts?
3/The first thing that fascinated me was how followed some of these accounts are. The most followed account was a Kuwait news portal. "Q8", which had over 1.3 million followers! That's a lot. In fact you can see 32 of the accounts had over 100,000 followers! That's pretty sick
4/ Here's a screenshot from Q8's Twitter glory days. What's interesting it appears to h ave an Instagram and possibly Youtube Account. Which begs the question. If the Twitter account is state linked, what about the YouTube and Instagram accounts?
5/ Another thing that was striking is that while the accounts were connected with Egypt, those with user reported location are from multiple places, but after a loose grouping, most are 'from' UAE, Kuwait, Saudi. Clearly whoever is running t hese accounts is trying to give
6/ to give the illusion that there is a wide base and broadbased element to this propaganda, which is what we've seen before. Also this might impact on trends, allowing certain propaganda to trend in certain locations. The most followed of the grouped accounts were Kuwait-based
7/ Apologies, that last image was from the wrong graph. Here we can see that the sample includes accounts going back to 2009. If the accounts weren't bought or appropriated, some have been tweeting propaganda for over a decade - likely they were co-opted/hacked/bought
