Thread by @BenDoBrown

Here we go again. Pro-BJP networks are again targeting West Bengali politics using copy and paste text packets to spam the tag #BJPGorbeSonarBangla.

CC @TwitterSafety

The copy and paste (copypasta) network is getting its text packets from this Google document. The tweets are in English, Hindi and Bangla.

Thank you to those who sent this through to me. It's an effective campaign to influence the topic of the coming elections.

The size of this sort of influence network? Well... I've just been collecting tweets under tag #BJPGorbeSonarBangla over the past 15 minutes. So far I've raked in 1789 tweets and growing 😅

Here's a visualisation of the main strand. The large nodes are: @AmitShah and @BJP4India

There's a lot of activity boosting the topic of one specific person under the #BJPGorbeSonarBangla tag

That's not a surprise considering the pro-@AmitShah text in the Google Doc (pictured) where the tweets are being copied from by this network.

(visualisation of edges) 👇

For those wondering about the data visualisation process. This visualisation was made in @Gephi using the radial axis layout with nodes (accounts) classed. I collected the data through the Twitter API. There is a bit of a walkthrough here: benjaminstrick.com/how-i-scrape-a…