[Thread] 1/ Ok, "Defund the BBC" trended overnight in the UK. This is interesting, as British media outlets and personalities have come under sustained harassment recently on Twitter. (Scum media hashtags) Ostensibly this has been about defending Dominic Cummings and Undermining
2/ Black Lives Matter. Anti BBC tropes are not new, but this campaign seems to have been initiated by the @DefundBBC account, which was set up 7th June 2020. The Director of the Campaign is @JamesLYucel, a member of Glasgow Uni Tories ( @GUTories ) . Unsurprisingly 
3/ as the Tory government have attacked the BBC recently. Perhaps oddly there were three accounts set up on 7th and 8th June, one called @DefundBBC_ , the other @EndBBC . I don't know if they were set up by the same person, but they all have the same generic messages. Should
4/ be noted the first account to set up is the one that has been retweeted the most @DefundBBC. Anyway, I analysed around 18.800 tweets, RTs, replies etc from around 11,533 unique accounts. The network graph is quite dense, firstly was this a conversation or mostly RTs?
5/ It's obvious from the below graph that most of the activity on the hashtag are accounts retweeting @defundbbc . The second most retweeted account is @LozzaFox the actor in @Netflix 's #WhiteLines - who is very active on the hashtag. Not quite of Lozza's beef
6/ Indeed, @LozzaFox was probably instrumental in it trending. If you see the time series graph below you will notice Lozza started tweeting early on in the hashtag. I am not sure how Lozza became aware of the hashtag. I dunno much about Fox, but he called someone racist on
7/ question time for calling him a 'white privileged male". If you analyse the biographies of most of the people using the hashtag the most cohesive community are pro-Brexit, anti-EU, also pro-Trump. Trump's name appears 280 times. So despite being a 'grassroots' campaign
8/ the engagement seems to be among the right, which we've seen with the 'media scum' hashtags and the like. A lot of anon accounts and only a few verified accounts retweeting @DefundBBC - those being @ben_kew ; @dvatw ; @DouglasCarswell ; @JamieBrysonCPNI @IndiaWilloughby ;
9/ @SuzanneEvans1 and a few more. Not sure again why they picked it up, but remember the "Defund the BBC" hashtag is not new. However it is notable that most of those engaging with the hashtag are right-wing and pro-Brexit
10/ There is another highly followed account, @Banthebbc (it blocked me but I don't recall interacting with it). Has over 70k followers. What's curious (apart from the weird aesthetics) is that it doesn't seem that there is a need for a #DefundtheBBC erm, institution. I don't
11/ know if it's a company or otherwise, you'd have to ask @JamesLYucel . I am all for criticising a license fee-funded institution, but such maximalist demands like 'defund the bbc' smack of ideology, so was curious to see what was going on here on this hashtag.
12/ curious how some people are already replying saying that they are 'not a bot'. I never suggested anyone was, which makes me think the reaction is weird...
