Thread by @marcowenjones

Thread 1/ This is a thread about suspicious amplification and engagement farming on #Ukraine-related hashtags. I highlight a rampant violation of Twitter's Ts & Cs that makes getting valuable info on Ukraine more burdensome #disinformation #UkraineRussiaWar

2/ Firstly the tactic. Many of you will have noticed that a lot of #Ukraine hashtags are dominated by the below types of tweets. Ones that say 'RT for Russia" or "like for Ukraine" - sometimes it's reversed. They have huge engagement levels.
#UkraineRussiaWar

3/ I counted around 790 unique tweets, many with likes and RTs in the hundreds and thousands. So total engagement levels in the hundreds of thousands. This explains why many of these tweets appear in the 'top' tweets on #Ukraine hashtags

4/ The below network graph is a network graph of accounts that deploy the 'RT for russia' tactic. I mostly included it to give a sense of scale and also because it looks neat...

However some important things to note...

#Ukraine️
#disinformation

5/ Firstly, many of those engaging in the behaviour are also newly created accounts. As we saw before, there appears to be a large number of new or barely active accounts with a lot of engagement. That's suspicious. The below account is a few days old

6/ It also appears to be an account that tweets on Indian politics, and has changed its name to #UkraineRussianWar . It has a total of 3 tweets, and is following no one. Despite only having 3 tweets, and being created in March, one of the tweets has+3k likes. Good fortune? Hmmm

7/ Also, and this is bizarre. A huge proportion of accounts engaged in this activity (RT'ing it mostly) were created in February 2022 - around 1627. The average per month is around 120. Notwithstanding the fact the data is usually skewed to the right and that big events #ukraine

8/ drive people to Twitter, this is quite odd - especially considering they are all engaging in similar behaviour. It's around 8% of the 21000 accounts in the sample.

So what's the point?

Well it depends on your levels of cynicism...

#Ukraine️
#disinformation

9/ Starting with the most cynical.
a) Create moral parity between Putin and Zelensky. I.e.; war is just a competition between 2 opponents, like a football game, so don't feel guilt for choosing one side above the other. In other words, muddy waters between aggressor & defender

10 b) Create lots of 'noise' on #Ukraine hashtags with these banal tweets. Allows you to promote hashtags and create a presence on Twitter's 'top tweets'. This can dilute useful and legitimate content (unless you find these tweets useful). Can also 'launder' new fake accounts

11 c) Troll farms using trending topics to grow new accounts
d) Twitter newbies having lolz
Regardless of how you interpret it, it's hashtag spamming and engagement manipulation, which violates Twitter's terms and conditions in quite an obvious way. So why allow it?
#ukraine

12/ Some additional notes. Most of the accounts with user-reported location (take with a pinch of salt) state they are in India, Pakistan, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Side note, The @EmbassyofRussia (South Africa) is giving a lot of love to its supporters #ukraine

12/ Some may be pleased to note that #Ukraine usually comes out on top in terms of numbers in these RT for Russia, like for ukraine tweets. But part of me thinks that is expected, and that a healthy RT to Like ratio is what helps them trend.
#UkraineRussianWar

13/ So the TL;DR. There is extensive & obvious engagement farming/hashtag spamming on #Ukraine hahstags at a time when ppl need good and accessible information, not noise. This violates Twitter rules

Why do Twitter allow it.

RT for 'Twitter suck', 💓 for 'Twitter don't care'