Thread by @conspirator0

Why does Venezuelan government account @Mippcivzla get so many more retweets than likes on its tweets? #AstroturfFriday

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Answer: @Mippcivzla's tweets (and those of a few other large Venezuelan accounts) are being retweeted by a network of 2454 accounts, all allegedly using the Twitter Android app. These accounts post almost no original content (99.6% percent of their tweets are retweets).

These accounts have all retweeted hundreds of tweets or more, but have liked few or none. The content they boost reflects this - 98.6% of the tweets they retweeted got more retweets than likes. (Based on a set of 5M random tweets, only ~0.8% of tweets get more RTs than likes.)

(some old threads with additional background on the presence of more retweets than likes on a large set of tweets being a sign of astroturfing)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1308191759298703362

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1273077086761213952

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1270444715637387266

This network amplifies two major categories of content: tweets from large Venezuelan government, media, and political accounts and Spanish-language "follow train" tweets. The network is responsible for 24.4% of the retweets of the accounts it most frequently amplifies.

Some examples of "follow train" tweets from the accounts boosted by this astroturf network, as well as a figure showing the percentage of the tweets it retweets that have various numbers of accounts tagged (most of the tweets with 8 or more tags are follow trains).