Thread by @Shayan86

hardline Iranian users have started an online campaign of their own in response to #اعدام_نکنید (don't execute) to defend the death sentence for three young protesters this week. And it's about as suspicious as it can get. First, different users are copy-pasting the same tweet

Now let's look at the number of users pushing this campaign's main hashtags who joined Twitter in July or June whose timelines are RTs and nothing else. There's plenty of them. As usual with these hardline campaigns, there's a fascination with creating accounts of women users

Look at these handles of random letters and numbers in succession. Whoever's behind these accounts, at least try to make this a bit less obvious. I'd be fascinated to know if that user who claims to "love" Iran's Supreme Leader knows what "S&M" actually means

A man's name in username alongside a woman as profile photo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I've checked all the four hashtags being pushed by them. They've sent nearly 80,000 tweets so far. Only 6,000 unique accounts involved

I can kind of see why Twitter does not bother with these types of operations. In the grand scheme of things, they have negligible reach and influence for platform manipulation. But this isn't alwyas the case. Wrote this about a similar operation in 2018 bbc.co.uk/news/world-mid…