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Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
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Mar 26 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I've been tracking accounts that 'liked' tweets from Russian government and embassy accounts. Sprayed a bit of sparkling water on the screen when I looked at the account creation dates
Suffice to say I'm currently running @Botometer on 16513 Kremlin liking accounts created in 2021 and 2022. Should be done in a day or so
@Botometer Some of these accounts are hilariously honest about themselves
Well that's one way to get around bot detection tools - don't tweet anything but just smash that like button
@Botometer Here it is:
Due to popular request, here's the full picture (not just from 2021 onwards)
Not analysis thread is up:
*bot 🤦🏽‍♂️

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Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Mar 27
So I ran @Botometer on 16513 pro-Russian accounts born in 2022. There's clearly a HUGE bot 🤖 network artificially hyping up ('liking') Russian government and embassy tweets

This chart shows the number of accounts with a given bot score, where a higher score means more bot-like: Image
Notice the big spike at 1.0?

That's 714 accounts that have a perfect bot score, so they are almost certainly automated.

The above chart uses the 'universal' Completely Automated Probability (CAP) score. So basically a CAP score of 1 means the @Botometer model is certain
Digging deeper into the bot metrics, this density plot shows various measures of botness (where 0 is low and 5 is a high score)

We see that a signature giveaway for these pro-Russian accounts is a high proportion of fake followers Image
Read 6 tweets
Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Mar 25
I spoke with @JamesClayton5 on the @bbcworldservice Tech Tent podcast about how Russian government and embassy accounts exploit a loophole in Twitter’s rules to spread disinformation about the Ukraine war (segment starts about 12:00).

bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3…
This podcast chat builds off a news article bbc.com/news/technolog…
And before that a piece @JaysProofs and I wrote in the @ConversationEDU theconversation.com/russian-govern…
Read 4 tweets
Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Jan 25
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

1/9 🧵
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

2/9
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

3/9
Read 9 tweets
Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Oct 5, 2021
Following up this analysis, even though @CraigKellyMP only sent 114 (0.001%) of the anti-lockdown campaign tweets, he received a whopping:

- 28% of all likes
- 25% of all replies
- 26% of all quoted retweets.

This diagram shows the top accounts by engagement metrics 🧵
But when it comes to retweets, Kelly's metrics are overshadowed by the amplification efforts of a coordinated network of fringe protestor accounts, as this chart shows:
We see that Kelly doesn't appear in the coordinated behaviour network (see original tweet above). Rather, his tweets frame the agenda and injects a massive amount of fuel into the Twitter protest networks *but* he doesn't coordinate his activity with them.
Read 8 tweets
Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Oct 4, 2021
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
Read 13 tweets
Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
Aug 1, 2021
New study reveals private groups behind the 'pl*ndemic’ disinformation campaign. These groups not only coordinated a surge in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but also "coached" citizens into fanatic activism against COVID-19 measures. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
The study found that this was driven mostly by small-reach conspiracy theorists all posting at once:

“The most influential Twitter users … appear to be either citizens or activist accounts, rather than bots”
Also interesting:

“And the most common word in more than half of all top users' profile descriptions was “truth.” These profile descriptions often signal a search for a “hidden truth,” as if they are part of a citizen initiative to purge the world of evil actors.”
Read 4 tweets

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