Meet @Garexit, the official Twitter account of the Gary, Indiana secession campaign. If you live in Gary (or anywhere else) and have never heard of this movement, that's not surprising, as we made it up in early April.
We decided to use @Garexit to test a couple of the social media automation services we've seen used by other bots, and simultaneously gauge the online activity around various secession movements.
We started with paper.li. This service is a search-based news aggregator. We configured it to gather articles based on the search terms "Indiana secession movements" and "Texas secession", and to link the articles on Twitter.
The @Garexit account didn't get much attention in this form, but it did dredge up a variety of articles. Most of them relate to secession in some way (#Calexit, #Texit, #Catalonia, as well as some more local stuff), although there are some really random articles in there too.
On 6/11 we evolved the experiment by adding IFTTT to the mix. We set up IFTTT to have @Garexit automatically retweet tweets containing any of the following:
secede
secession
calexit
#freethebear
#bearflagrepublic
#californiarepublic
texit
frexit
grexit
washexit
orexit
#indyref
Here's @Garexit's schedule, broken down by automation service used. The IFTTT tweets make up the bulk of the volume.
What content did @Garexit find and retweet via IFTTT? A pretty wide variety - these charts show the percentage of tweets containing each search term, and the language of the tweets (English is the most popular, with French making a solid contribution as well.)
The IFTTT incarnation of @Garexit was more successful both at finding other material worth investigating and getting interesting attention. This thread on #Texit and #Calexit automated accounts came about as a result of @Garexit retweeting some of them.
Despite Brexit not being among the search terms, @Garexit also found this bot (@brexit_clock) due to the #indyref hashtag. It tweets the time remaining until the theoretical date of #Brexit.
Some of @Garexit's #indyref (Scottish independence referendum) retweets got a surprising amount of attention considering that @Garexit only has 55 followers. How'd this happen?
It turns out that two high-volume retweet bots (@IsThisAB0t and @StillYesScot) with more followers than @Garexit found and retweeted @Garexit's #indyreftweets. Both run 24/7 and retweet tweets containing #indyref and a couple other Scottish independence hashtags.
.@Garexit also managed to snag a "like" from Assad-friendly journalist @vanessabeeley. Apparently an interest in #FalseFlag conspiracy theories pairs nicely with fake secession movements.
Not many folks have followed @Garexit, but some of those who have are interesting. Among them are a former California gubernatorial candidate and a Scottish journalist. There was one more notable follower, but they've since been suspended. . .
Internet Research Agency creation @USA_Really (twitter account of the fake news site by the same name) followed @Garexit prior to being banned. Apparently the folks at the trollfarm never met a secession movement they didn't like, even one we made up on April Fools' day.
Much appreciation to @ZellaQuixote for assistance with the design and direction of this experiment.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.