🌟📝 Today Twitter announced the takedown of 7,340 accounts linked to the youth wing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey’s ruling party 🇹🇷. My SIO team, w/ @akis_alp, @makrevis, @JoshAGoldstein, and Katie Jonsson, analyzed the network cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/june-2…
Takeaways: 1) this was a prolific operation; there were 37 million tweets, mostly in Turkish. Dozens of accounts were managers of retweet 🔄 rings, which worked to artificially amplify pro-AKP hashtags and the accounts of AKP politicians. 
2) There was a centrally managed set of compromised accounts that were also used for AKP cheerleading.
3) It wasn’t just pro-AKP tweets -- tweets were critical of the opposition HDP and CHP, accusing the former of terrorism and (ironically) social media ploys. Choice hashtags:
4) Tweets tried to increase support for the 2017 constitutional referendum which consolidated power in Erdoğan. Some Turkish and English hashtags:
5) Tweets aimed to increase support for Turkish intervention in Syria. There were even some English-language tweets (likely aimed for an int’l audience) that that worked to increase legitimacy of Turkey’s offensive in northeastern Syria in October 2019.
6) Batches of fake accounts advocated for policy changes, like pardoning scholarship interest payments. If these tweets were directed by the AKP, it suggests an interesting strategy for increasing legitimacy for impending policy change / making the government seem responsive.
...alternatively, maybe this part of the network was just directed by a different entity.
Thanks to @igarciacamargo, @elegant_wallaby, and @secpolice from the @stanfordio tech team for helping with this report! 🖥️ Full report: fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/20… Twitter announcement here: blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c…
