Thread by @timothyjgraham

Quick update - I ran a bit of analysis w/ @antmandan of these suspicious accounts, by collecting all tweets since 1/1/2022 that mention @\sydney_festival and analysing this network of coordinated behaviour

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https://twitter.com/r4dyc/status/1485445794765615107

The network above shows coordinated behaviour where accounts (nodes) are connected if they both performed the same action within 60 seconds of each other, at least twice.

We focus on the big cluster of coordinated reply activity (red links) that got folks' attention

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These are the accounts that were posting positive replies to @\sydney_festival tweets. They're clearly part of a coordinated network that spams copypasta replies mainly about crypto, but also various companies, events and personalities

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They don't really hide the fact that this is a paid PR astroturfing operation. And they tweet in multiple languages including English, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese

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It is perhaps for this reason that they score highly as bots on the 'Language-independent' @Botometer metric, but aren't particularly bot-like based on language dependent features

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I don't think they're bots - at least not fully automated accounts - but they probably use some kind of scheduling software and are controlled by a central agent, i.e., semi-automated sockpuppets for hire. Their timing and volume of tweets is almost but not quite identical

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So did @\sydney_festival hire this paid PR operation? The answer is: we just don't know (and almost certainly can't know based on Twitter data alone). So we can only speculate at this point

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Three hypotheses:
1. They were hired by @\sydney_festival or some entity trying to improve the brand reputation
2. They randomly replied as part of common practices used by infops to cover tracks and look more organic
3. Someone else hired them and wanted it to be found

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Hope this thread was helpful to shed some light on this interesting twist in the Sydney Festival fail.

If anyone would like any details of data collection, network construction, tweet IDs, etc, please feel free to DM

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