Thread by @marcowenjones

1/ 🧵Hope you're ready for an epic thread!

It begins with a canal project in Afghanistan and a cafe worker called Sophia, but ends by explaining how 91% of likes on UAE Crown Prince @MohamedBinZayed's tweets are created by at least 11,000 bots/fake accounts #disinformation #UAE

2/ So what alerted me to this weirdness. Firstly, a series of strange tweets about a UAE project in Afghanistan to build a canal.

'Kate Johnson' and 'Jessica Anderson' were really amped about the project.

Yeah they're definitely real people.... #disinformation

3/ What was odd about Johnson and her ilk is how specific they were. Sophia Moore, for example, claims to work in tea junction cafe in Ajman...It's a real place, but who wants to bet Sophia doesn't work there?

...even if she does have to work to 'have money for fashion'

4/ Another example is Lara Adams, who works in a Garden Centre in Dubai, but for some reason uses a stock photo that is popular with dentists. There were dozens of accounts like this, united by their love of the UAE, canal projects in Afghanistan, and stock profile photos.

5/ Anyway, these aren't the particularly droids I'm looking for. However, I noticed that one of them, *ahem*, Megan Jones, had a weirdly high number of likes - 901 - on her tweet. In the industry we call that 'loads'. Also no retweets or replies. Odd right?

6/I clicked on the likes, and immediately noticed that many of the accounts gave creepy AI image vibes and/or had the same identical cropping.

Now these are the droids I'm looking for...

7/ Things started getting really weird when I found two accounts with identical bios. What are the odds of two people who are phd holders in the management of UAE's nuclear power plant who are also 'Swiss addicts'.

Also, wth is a Swiss addict?

8/ So I explored what these accounts were liking. All of them liked tweets by @MohamedBinZayed . Many of them boosted tweets critical of Al Jazeera, supportive of normalization with Israel, and against Qatar and Turkey. The majority though were promoting the UAE and MBZ

9/ So I wanted to an idea of just how many of these fake bois there were. I downloaded the likes and RTs of an MBZ tweet about Covid, which had around 6600 likes and 9000 RTs. I then analysed an 8000 account sample using the creation date method... #disinformation

10/ It revealed something striking. 50% of the accounts were created in just 25 days, bear in mind Twitter has been around since 2006. As the graph below shows, 41% of the accounts who liked/RT'd MBZ's tweet were created in just one month, June 2020!

11/ Based on the anomalies here, it's safe to hypothesize that the majority of accounts created after May 2020 are also sockpuppets. There were other patterns too, namely they all had similar name structures, follower/following ratios and total tweets. #disinformation

12/ Based on this, a conservative estimate is that 91% of the likes of that MBZ tweet are generated by bots.

I looked for another tweet that would have fewer genuine likes than MBZ. Who did I find the bot network boosting, but NSO/Pegasus and dictator apologist Irina Tsukerman!

13/ 8350 likes and 7 retweets is just bizarre. Anyway, I analyzed the likes, and in Irina's case the percentage of fake likes is a mind-blasting 99.7%, that's around 8333 bots! I combined these accounts with the known bots from MBZ's tweet and it comes to around 11000 unique bots

14/ Some points > It is not clear which of the accounts being boosted actually knows if they're being boosted. Pretty sure MBZ doesn't run his own account.

I believe the network operates to strategically boost some posts in certain multipliers. Not every account in the

15/ network will retweet identical posts. So even if an MBZ post has say, 4k likes and not 6k, a large number of them will be fake. This is probably to give the illusion of some level of authenticity...

16/ To sum up. There are at least 11,000 fake accounts that post pro UAE/MBZ content or content reflecting UAE foreign policy, including support for Israel, and flak against al Jazeera, Turkey and Qatar. It's not clear who runs them, but their stance is consistent! It's also

17/ super creepy that bots are boosting other bots. Botception! Anyway, happy to answer any questions you have. Hope you enjoyed today's instalment of bot wresting! #disinformation