[Thread]1/ This one is on the campaign "Facebook Caliphate", which is a mostly Saudi-led protest against @TawakkolKarman . What was striking about the hashtag is the number of clearly suspicious accounts tweeting on it. Read on for more #disinformation
2/ I downloaded around 17,000 'tweets' (interactions) from around 10,000 unique accounts using the Facebook Caliphate hashtag. Of these, I suspect at least 2,000 are sockpuppets or possibly bot accounts. It is almost certainly co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour #propaganda
3/ Pay attention to this graph. It's interesting. You'll notice something very striking. Firstly, the main cluster at the top. But what is more interesting, are the green stragglers in the bottom left. 2 distinct communities that are somehow separate from the 'main conversation' 
4/ What does this mean. It means that these communities tend to interact with each other. The fact they are separate from the rest also is unusual. If we colour the edges by the source (e.g. did they use android, iphone, Twitter Web App) - we can see something interesting
5/ Notice how the separate community lights up blue, while the main community is a mix of greens and purples. This is no coincidence. What it means is that the separate community are actually all communicating using "Twitter Web App". If this was an organic group, we would expect
6/ a more varied selection of twitter apps would be expect. If we then arrange the accounts by the date of creation we see a massive spike between May and August 2019. The two coloured lines are the two communities in the network graph. Bingo! We have a match.
7/ if we examine the accounts closer we see that the 2,000 suspicious ones all have tweeted around 200 times. What's more, as you can see from the diagram, most are in Riyadh, or Saudi, in a neatly split and seemingly non random grouping #thread #disinformation #tawakkolkarman
8/ There's also this fella. It seems to be a retweet network for @YahyaKumait - who works at @AlwatanSA . If we resize nodes by how much they've tweeted, we can see it's a very spammy community - meaning likely paid retweets.
9/ So this is actually one of the most striking co-ordinated inauthentic campaigns I have seen in some time. I am also quite curious about the possible link to Saudi newspaper Al Watan....
10/ And I don't care what you think about
@TawakkolKarman - I am simply pointing out this this rather crass and puerile campaign is also being promoted artificially, and is a solid example of platform manipulation. #propaganda #twitter
@TawakkolKarman - I am simply pointing out this this rather crass and puerile campaign is also being promoted artificially, and is a solid example of platform manipulation. #propaganda #twitter
يمكنكم أن تقرأوا الترجمة هنا. شكرأ @MoeHamadi
