Thread by @conspirator0

In the wake of the #Novichok nerve agent attack on Sergei #Skripal and his daughter in #Salisbury, a variety of suggestions that anyone other than Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible have been circulating on Twitter. #Whataboutism

I downloaded recent tweets for the hashtag #Novichok, which started seeing significant traffic March 12th. This yielded 15371 tweets from 10668 accounts. I classified the top 50 accounts by retweet volume (74% of tweets in the set) based on their attribution of the attack.

This chart shows the volume for #Novichok tweets, classified by the perspective being expressed. Note that the portion of the volume in the “whataboutism” category has increased greatly over the past 12 hours.

We’ve seen some of the accounts involved in this trend before. Here’s a previous thread discussing @Ian56789, whose tweets garnered 8% of the RT volume for #Novichok tweets.

I decided to update the #Novichok dataset a day after originally looking at the hashtag. The whataboutism/conspiracy theory tweets have now comprised the majority of the traffic for about a day and half.

Updated retweet network for #Novichok. There's less interaction than yesterday between the accounts that blame Putin and those attempting to blame everyone else. Fake account @Ian56789 is now the largest node. There's also a smaller, separate network which we'll look at briefly.

This network centers around five accounts that tweet in Russian: @lastochkina984, @glinka768, @beregovaya768, @ponchik984, and @borisovrealtyRu. Each of these accounts has posted exactly one #Novichok tweet, but the tweets appear unrelated to the Salisbury attack.

The #Novichok tweets from those five accounts were retweeted by 64 others, 47 of which RT'd all five. Most have female avatars and handles ending in 3 digits. It's possible these are human-operated sockpuppets amplifying the five main nodes, but automation seems more likely.