[Thread] 1/This is very interesting. I checked a sample of 31000 Twitter accounts that were engaged in the disinformation campaign claiming a coup attempt in Qatar on 4th May. Between today and 4th May, 1,100 of those accounts have either been deleted, suspended, or changed their
2/ name. That's around 3% of the total. Of these 1,100 preliminary analysis shows about 50% have been suspended. The rest have either been deleted, but many have engaged in handle switching, which is presumably done to avoid tracking and detection. I don't know baseline figures
3/ for changing handles & deleting accounts on Twitter, but I am certain this is way higher than would be considered normal. It'll be interesting to see if any of these accounts would be released by @Twitter as 'state-backed' info ops, as they were engaging in political messaging
4/ The account with the highest number of followers had 449k followers, a hell of a lot. Some of the account name changes are odd, e.g. _1lonely1 became mbs_mbs30 - see screenshot - a pro MBS account. This suggests this is happening on a massive scale for the purposes of disinfo 
5/ Other highly followed accounts to have been suspended (long after they had pumped out a lot of propaganda) was @shurafahalthani with 167k followers, this was identified by @Ql979 back in January. Also suspended was @Qtrgov - an account claiming to represent the Qatar Interim
6/ Government abroad. It was highly active in the recent disinformation campaign. It was also cited in an oped in @IndyArabia as a credible source in an article legitimising the coup disinformation. Again, striking example of soc media disinfo being fed into mainstream media
7/ [Graphic] Some of the account changes are weird but give us an indication of who was active on other messaging and influence campaigns. This one account, which went by the name hamadjjaithani, is now k40kz & has a picture of Hitler as a DP, also shared Solaymani death pics
8/ تقدرون أن تجدوا ترجمة هذه التغريدات هنا بقلم @MoeHamadi
