Thread by @marcowenjones

1/ A few people are reporting a sudden influx of suspicious followers today, including @abierkhatib . I crunched the numbers and yes, it's very anomalous, and very weird. Read on for some weird stats and possible explanations.

2/ Firstly, Abier has been followed by at least 438 accounts today. How do we know, well those were all created today - 29th April. If you see the below graph, you will see that the average number of accounts created per day among Abier's followers is 28.

3/ All these accounts have bizarre names. One of my favorites is Ashley Lascano, who has a great moustache and seems strangely proud of his driving license photo despite being into photography himself

4/ Some more examples > Check out Noble Betty Thomas! What's interesting too is that they're in multiple languages, German, French, Spanish, English - to name but a few.

5/ What is really amazing is the speed with which the accounts are created. The graph below shows how many accounts are created per hour. At their peak, there's almost one hundred per hour. That's well over one account created per minute #disinformation

6/ Most of the fake accounts follow around 44 people (Currently), and most of those accounts seem to be active tweeting on #Palestine - particularly pro-Palestinian and human rights advocacy groups/individuals.

7/ Why? The jury is out. This tactic is not uncommon. It happened a while back to @ionacraig and a few others tweeting on Yemen. Some suggest it's a means to degrade the algorithimic quality of a Twitter account so that is possibly gets suspended, some suggest it's

8/ others trying to boost popularity of an account. When it's unsolicited, as in this case, I tend to think it's more of a targeting operation. I am naturally cynical, but most people who get a sudden influx of fake followers feel unnerved and uncomfortable. If that fact

9/ is widely known it functions as a tool of surveillance and potentially intimidation (e.g. you are being watched). It also makes many people mute their accounts for a bit which has a censorship effect.

10/ Anyway, it is example 23092402302 of how seemingly easy it is to manipulate Twitter, at least temporarily. @elonmusk has his work cut out if he's sincere about getting rid of all das spam and weird political intimidation.

11/ Important update to this thread. I analysed additional followers of some other accounts reporting mass follows > @nooranhamdan @NikoRouger @lina_a2020. The reason is because many ppl were reporting the issue, and I noticed the original fake accounts didn't follow all of them

12/ This is not exhaustive, many people have reported the problem, e.g. @InesAbdelrazek @AliAbunimah - I just wanted a sample. After downloading the followers of the aforementioned accounts I found 1156 fake followers, over double the initial sample!

13/ An amazing aspect of this is that we can see how quickly they were produced. Over 180 accounts per hour, that's three per minute, which is hard to imagine being done without significant manpower or automation!

14/ Update ,Twitter have suspended approximately 1,090 of the 1156 fake follower accounts I identified in the above thread cc @nooranhamdan @marwasf @abierkhatib