Thread by @Shayan86

I'm following the massive spike in #QudsDay after an Iranian conspiracy theorist with a history of anti-Semitic comments encouraged his followers to get it trending in a Twitter "storm" tonight. 328,000 tweets sent. BUT, only 27,000 unique accounts are engaging with the hashtag

This means most of the traffic has been achieved by mass retweeting, in fact, 76% of it. Notice the massive drop in numbers once you exclude retweets from the traffic. 81,000 original tweets from 18,000 unique accounts. Most of the tweets are in English, not Persian

The most popular tweets all came from Mr Raefipour's accounts. I previously mentioned one of his conspiracy theories in a piece I wrote about coronavirus misinformation in Iran. He has a huge following among young Iranian hardliners

Let's look at some of the most active accounts tweeting the hashtag. 527, 512, 502, 489, 483, 459, 451, 435, 434, 392, 391 and 380 tweets from each account in less than six hours. That's not organic behaviour. But these Twitter "storms" have become so common on Iranian Twitter

You can see the beginning and subsequent rise of the hashtag in this GIF. Clearly, most of the traffic came from inside Iran. A second "storm" has been planned for tomorrow morning

So round two of the "storm" happened this morning. It was smaller than last night. 306,000 tweets by 30,000 unique accounts. Exclude the retweets and you end up with 55,000 tweets from 16,000 unique accounts. Once again, the hashtag was mainly driven by mass retweeting

83% of the overall traffic was driven by retweets today, compared with 76% last night. We usually view anything more than 75-80% as a sign the traffic is not entirely organic and features some coordination. In this case, there's no doubt the hashtag was coordinated and organised

Let's look at the whole campaign on Thu-Fri then. 685,000 tweets. You can see the two spikes in traffic here, and the specific times of the day when it was at peak traffic. 79% of the campaign's content was made up of retweets

The number of unique accounts who took part in the two storms was 53,000. Once again, all the most popular tweets came from Mr Raefipour's accounts. They were even more popular that a tweet by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei's official English account

Just take a look at the number of times these accounts have tweeted the hashtag, between 500 to 1,000 tweets each, all in less than 24 hours. This is clear spamming on their part to amplify the hashtag

Let's examine these two accounts, for instance. "reyhane" has retweeted the hashtag 1,000 times since last night. "Rey.haane" - joined Twitter in May 2020 - has done the same 777 since times last night. Both have the same profile photo and only retweet content. Coincidence?