Let's look at this from another angle. I've noted before that people who buy into the personas of these fake accounts tend to get attached. Is there a way to quantify and visualize these relationships? #InformationWarfare #Catfishing
Among the accounts with still-visible replies to the top 10 banned IRA accounts, there are 22156 with at least 10 replies over a span of at least 90 days. Most continued their interactions with their nonexistent "friends" right up until the trollfarm accounts were banned.
Adding some numbers to this thread based on this technique: the idea is to estimate the number of retweets the trollfarm accounts generated for the accounts they boosted based on the average number of RTs the trollfarm accounts' own tweets received.
Going by the estimates resulting from this technique, these are the twenty accounts most effectively boosted by the trollfarm accounts in NBC's dataset. Most of them are other trollfarm accounts (green).
Here are the top 20 excluding other trollfarm accounts (most are pro-Trump.)
Updating these numbers, since I finally got around to performing this test against all 2752 account names provided by Twitter to the Senate Intel committee. 2344262 replies to the banned troll accounts from 436438 users are still visible.
Earlier this evening, I noticed I have follower lists for banned Internet Research Agency accounts @TEN_GOP, @Pamela_Moore13, @tpartynes, @usa_gunslinger, @America_1st_, and @right_npr from 6/11/2017. Thankfully, no one of consequence followed these accounts. Oh wait, I lied. . .
* spelling error - @tpartynews. Because I'm pedantic like that.
* spelling error 2.0 - @rightnpr. Deal with it.
2529 accounts followed all six Internet Research Agency accounts in the previous table. 2115 are still active. Here are the external websites most frequently linked by those accounts. Seeing Unfollowspy and Crowdfire turn up prominently is interesting.
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