Allegations that @elonmusk is forcing his engineers to boost his tweets are fully supported by the data. I did some analysis and here's the total tweet impressions per hour over the past week... Timelines match up perfectly with the reports
The daily tweet impressions since 1st January 2023 are even sadder and more worrying
The Twitter API may shut down any moment - if this is the last data I ever collect it'll totally be worth it
And then my account was locked for no reason - I’ve just got access back (thanks @PRGuy17 for sending this thru)
Update: I’m receiving DMs that this tweet thread is hidden from view. I suspect @elonmusk’s team have labeled it as spam or harmful to minimize visibility
Update: colleagues that I’m talking to on DM about this are having their accounts locked too…
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I've been coding up a new workflow for analysis of Twitter profiles. Thought I'd kick off Monday by showcasing some insights about @PRGuy17, who everyone is talking about.
I collected the entire timeline of 45k tweets. First off, we learn they're active about 14 hours a day:
They use an Android device and web browser to post tweets, pretty much all throughout the day, with a dip in browser usage in the afternoon. This suggests they have access to a laptop most of the day, unless they're using the Android web browser for some reason
They tweet most frequently during weekdays, with a lull on the weekend and particularly on Saturday
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:
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
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).
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
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
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.