Thread by @timothyjgraham

Folks messaged me about a new hashtag anti-Andrews campaign trending, so I collected over 67,000 tweets (past 7 days) containing the relevant hashtags and ran the data through a coordinated behaviour detection system

A few insights, starting with a network map 🧵

The network shows large-scale, loosely coordinated behaviour by a hard core of campaigners who spam the hashtags repeatedly together, all day long.

BUT it's @CraigKellyMP and @OzraeliAvi who jump onto the fringe activity and turn it into a roaring blaze with two viral tweets

A pro-Andrews counter-attack started almost immediately, orchestrated by @PRGuy17, in an effort to hijack the hashtags and drown out the anti-Andrews discourse

But the sustained anti-Andrews hashtag activism (see network above), super-fuelled by a handful of viral tweets by @OzraeliAvi and @CraigKellyMP, ultimately overpowers the pro-Andrews activists

The top 20 accounts sent 8% of all tweets:

The most active anti-Andrews hashtag campaigner is a newborn anonymous account, created just over 2 weeks ago. They've tweeted 311 times per day or 12 times per hour, and only tweet about Andrews and the Vic lockdown

Three key takeaways:

1. Fringe activists are driving the anti-Andrews trending campaign, but it's a politician (@CraigKellyMP) and citizen journalist (@OzraeliAvi) who, with only a few tweets, turn the sparks into a roaring blaze that sustains itself thereafter

2. There's an information war happening and a battle ensued between pro-Andrews campaigners (led by @PRGuy17) who routinely hijack such hashtags, however here they appear to be drowned out by the coordinated behaviour of the anti-Andrews campaigners

3. This little case study has many parallels with previous partisan hashtag campaigns, echoing research I've previously conducted with colleagues at @qutdmrc theconversation.com/istandwithdan-…

Finally, data was collected using the 'twarc2' toolkit and the coordination networks constructed using a custom-built software that we've made freely available!

If anyone wants to reproduce this and needs tweet IDs, please DM me.
github.com/QUT-Digital-Ob…

Quick clarification - it appears that @CraigKellyMP was more active than I noted in this dataset, as @PRGuy17 has documented here. However, his activity volume pales in comparison to the fringe accounts, although gets far far more engagement

https://twitter.com/prguy17/status/1443856889620488192

See also the excellent work by @DrCrazyThoughts

https://twitter.com/drcrazythoughts/status/1444920273912799237

Postscript: Only now do I realize that Craig Kelly’s tweets aren’t in this dataset because he already blocked me! So I can only see metadata when people retweet or reply to him, but his original tweets just aren’t in this dataset. That’s why I underestimated his tweet activity…

Follow up thread covering @CraigKellyMP's role in all this

https://twitter.com/timothyjgraham/status/1445265091939631111