Thread by @marcowenjones

🧵1/ Good morning! I gathered more data over night on the hashtag 'Qatar Revolts', which is exaggerating the scale of protests in Qatar. Approx 1040 of 10500 accounts in the sample are probably fake. There is also at least one other hacked verified account #disinformation

2/ The network graph shows a fairly independent community in the top right quadrant. If you zoom in you'll see a lot of the accounts boosting the hashtag are retweets of the account @JesseCsincsak .... #cybersecurity #disinformation

3/ Now at first glance @JesseCsincsak is a company called JCK - even the name seems to kind of match the handle. Clever. But that's a ruse, the account actually promotes almalka_store. The account is hacked, and belongs to Jesse Csinscak a pro snowboarder &ABC Bachorlette winner!

4/ As you can see JCK/Jesse is spamming numerous hashtags with content, and being retweeted by hundreds of accounts. Most of these retweeting accounts are fake. #disinformation

5/ Other accounts in the community seem quite spammy , retweeting adverts for various companies among other things. Now all those retweeting in this community amount to around 1000, although of course some will be real, but many are just fluffer accounts, au RT'ing

6/ Again, these manipulated and hacked accounts are statistically some of the most influential on t he hashtag. The most influential in this case is @TurkeyAffairs - a dodgy anti Erdogan account that also spends a lot of time writing about Qatar. I say dodgy because its

7/ links to its blogspot and Facebook account are broken (taken down?). Hardly the measure of a sophisticated or well maintained news outlet, despite some of the polish of the videos...Anyone smell a PR company? #disinformation

8/ So that's it for now. Will keep looking at the data. But it's interesting to see the extent of manipulation on these hashtags targeting Qatar. Particularly interesting to see the mysterious @TurkeyAffairs account playing such a large role in it too 🤔 #disinformation