Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion @trutherbotprop Resist autocracy and research/counter disinformation. I serve the realm.

Jul 6, 2018, 7 tweets

Two days ago, the news broke that two people in #Amesbury, England (not far from the site of the Skripal poisoning) were poisoned with an unknown chemical agent. Police have since announced that the two recent victims were, like the Skripals, exposed to #Novichok.

Here's an analysis of the first ~40 hours of Twitter traffic related to the #Amesbury poisoning. This dataset contains 34848 tweets from 21500 accounts containing the word "Amesbury" - almost all are related to the incident.

Retweet network for Amesbury tweets. The disinformation category was determined by checking the tweets of the 50 most retweeted accounts in the set for #Amesbury #FalseFlag theories and the like. Accounts which exclusively RT'd accounts in the disinfo category are also included.

Most of the major purveyors of conspiracy theories about the #Amesbury poisoning are familiar from the March 2018 #Novichok attack - Craig Murray, @Ian56789, etc. Infowars employee Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) throws his hat into the ring with this link to Sputnik News.

This chart shows the news sources most frequently linked from tweets about the #Amesbury poisoning. Western mainstream media makes up the majority, but RT, Sputnik, and Craig Murray's site put in sizable contributions as well.

Is there bot activity surrounding the #Amesbury poisoning? Searching for accounts that tweet 24/7, post 90% and/or more of their tweets via an automation service turns up 1311 automated accounts. (There are likely more, as bots that fit neither pattern wouldn't test positive).

These 1311 automated accounts tweeted 4007 of the 34848 Amesbury tweets, 11.5% of the overall traffic. This makes these accounts disproportionately prolific, as they only comprise 6% of the accounts in the dataset (21500 total).

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