Thread by @conspirator0

Attorney @SidneyPowell1, known for representing Michael Flynn, filing multifarious election-related lawsuits, and overuse of the word "Kraken", has accumulated an impressive 1139718 Twitter followers, more than half of them since election day. We took a look.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

At first glance, @SidneyPowell1's followers appear to be largely run-of-the-mill #MAGA and #QAnon accounts, and the hashtags used in their profiles corroborate this. Looking deeper, however, we ran across some interesting anomalies. . .

First off, @SidneyPowell1's Twitter account began its life with an infusion of fake followers from a fake engagement botnet we've previously encountered. (647 of her earliest followers are part of this network.)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1284141301932359681

Since we've previously analyzed this fake engagement network, we're not going to go into much detail on it here. Like many of the other accounts in the botnet, @SidneyPowell1's early fake followers tweeted using a wide variety of apps, mostly in Russian.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1284141518027026433

Fast-forward to @SidneyPowell1's recent followers, where there are a couple other things to see. The proportion of her followers since the election with few or no tweets or followers has trended sharply upward, especially since the election.

More interestingly, @SidneyPowell1 has recently seen a sharp uptick in Japanese-language followers. 17092 of her 17926 followers with Japanese display names or biographies (95.3%) followed her after election day, compared to 667259 of 1139718 total followers (58.5%).

Due to the language barrier, we didn't dig too deeply into the content of @SidneyPowell1's Japanese-language followers. We did notice that the account they retweet most often is @realDonaldTrump, however. (Other accounts retweeted: @LLinWood, @epochtimes_jp, @SidneyPowell1.)

We also downloaded @LLinWood's followers. We didn't see any sign of early fake followers, but like @SidneyPowell1 he experienced a sudden post-election influx of Japanese accounts (19351 with Japanese display names or profile biographies). #KrakenWoodWorldTour

We downloaded the most recent 200 tweets from each of @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers with Japanese display names/bios. The website they most frequently link is YouTube, with a focus on conspiracy theory videos related to the 2020 US presidential election.

The recent influx of accounts with Japanese display names/bios also shows up in @RudyGiuliani's followers, although it appears to have started on September 11th, 2020 (as opposed to after the November election as was the case with @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers).