Tim Graham 🌻 Profile picture
@arc_gov_au DECRA Fellow ~ A/Prof at @QUTSchoolOfComm & @qutdmrc. Researching propaganda, mis/disinformation, platforms, social bots. Views my own.
Feb 16, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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

theguardian.com/technology/202… Image The daily tweet impressions since 1st January 2023 are even sadder and more worrying Image
Jun 12, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
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
Mar 27, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
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: 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
Mar 26, 2022 • 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
Mar 25, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
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…
Jan 25, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
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
Oct 5, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
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:
Oct 4, 2021 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
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
Aug 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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”
Jan 5, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Just to clarify, the primary interest here is Twitter's design features and dynamics, and how a single account (@PRGuy17) managed to get a hashtag to #1 on the Australia trending list in less than 1 hour

(1/5) I ran sentiment analysis to provide a quick comparison with our peer-reviewed study of hashtag publics during #Covid19Vic, where we found that pro-Andrews tweeters were overwhelmingly positive and anti-Andrews tweeters were overwhelmingly negative:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

(2/5) Image