In the aftermath of Alex Jones' ban from PayPal, the #DumpPayPal hashtag has materialized in protest. We downloaded tweets containing this hashtag this morning, resulting in 1063 tweets from 512 accounts.
Not many of the #DumpPayPal accounts (only 9 of 512) appear to be bots based on 24/7 activity/use of automation services. There are, however, 35 accounts with default pics (7%) and 86 (17%) with < 100 followers, some of which are likely sockpuppets (examples shown).
The example #DumpPayPal accounts in the previous tweet both blamed George Soros for the ban without evidence. As this chart shows (among other things), this appears to be a common theme.
What media sources do the accounts that want to #DumpPayPal over Alex Jones' ban link? Unsurprisingly, Infowars is popular. So are a number of other conspiracy centric right-wing sites, and Russia Today also puts in an appearance. We'll take "pie we won't eat" for $2000, Alex.
There weren't many obvious bots in this dataset, but let's take a look at one interesting one. Meet @russ30327. This account operates 24/7, and almost all of its tweets are retweets posted in batches at 15 minute intervals via an app called "$Stup!dTwitB0t$".
Per the profile, @russ30327 is "dedicated to getting rid of Trump". All of the unique tweets from this account and the majority of the RTs are consistent with this description; however, as shown here, some retweets are decidedly at odds with this mission (including #DumpPayPal).
There is a github page associated with the $Stup!dTwitB0t$/stupidtwitbot app, but unfortunately no source code is present. It was created the same day as the @russ30327 Twitter account. This bot is likely operated using custom software rather than a major automation tool.
Much appreciate to @ZellaQuixote for various and sundry aid exploring the subject matter of this thread.
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