Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 6, 2018 7 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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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More from @conspirator0

Oct 9, 2018
Honey Pot Bots
Meet @ShawneeDeaver. This account's first tweet - and only non-reply tweet - is 2scEY0T, an apparently random 7-character alphanumeric code. The rest of the tweets are replies sent within hours of its creation; the collage is representative. (Thanks @OlgaNYC1211 for the lead).
We decided to look for more accounts like it. We started by harvesting the recent replies to the accounts that @ShawneeDeaver replied to, and filtering the results to accounts with a 7-character code as their first tweet and all subsequent tweets being quickly-launched replies.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
Let's take an updated look at the traffic related to Russia Insider, a Russian news site featuring sections such as "Western Collapse", "The Jewish Question", "Free Assange", "Russiahoax", and "EU Conservative Uprising".
(previous Russia Insider thread in which failed Congressional Candidate Paul Nehlen featured prominently)
We downloaded the last ten days worth of tweets linking to russia-insider(dot)com, resulting in 5357 tweets from 2779 accounts.
Read 13 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
While looking for streams of the Kavanaugh confirmation cloture vote yesterday, we stumbled on @Seekandfind, an account that linked Russia Today's stream. Spoiler alert - this account is (at least presently) a bot with signs of some human interjections.
This account is extremely high-volume (900+ tweets per day at present) and uses a massive cornucopia of different automation tools to tweet (mostly Microsoft PowerApps, Buffer, Integromat, IFTTT, and Zapier).
What does @Seekandfind tweet about? 37.1% of tweets contain one or more of the keywords shown in this chart - the Trump, Hillary Clinton, MSM/fake news, and deep state categories being the most prominent.
Read 10 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
On October 2nd, the news came out that envelopes containing suspected ricin had been mailed to the Pentagon and the White House. We downloaded tweets containing the word "ricin" a few hours after the news broke, resulting in 45007 tweets from 29308 accounts.
Here's the retweet network for "ricin" on 2018-10-02. It consists almost entirely of right wing accounts, most of which are speculating that the ricin mailing was left-wing terrorism.
We tested a sample of 10000 of the accounts with ricin tweets for automation (based on either 24/7 activity or 90%+ of tweets being posted via automation services/custom apps). 817 (8.2%) were flagged as bots. Let's look at a few of them.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 4, 2018
Yesterday (2018-10-02), four members of the white supremacist group known as the "Rise Above Movement" were arrested by the feds for their part in the violence at the #UniteTheRight rally in Charlottesville in August 2018. Let's take a look at related Twitter traffic.
(previous thread on the Twitter activity surrounding the #UniteTheRight hashtag leading up to and during the rally last year.)
We downloaded tweets containing "Charlottesville" and "arrests", resulting in 15082 tweets from 12331 accounts beginning with the first report of the arrests (from @HenryGraff).
Read 13 tweets
Sep 30, 2018
How does one go about detecting Twitter bots (automated accounts)? Let's take a look at three different tests for detecting signs of automation, and try them on three different sample sets of accounts.
The first two tests may be familiar from previous threads:

1. 24/7 tweet activity - this could point to multiple human operators, but is usually the result of automation/tweet scheduling.
2. Use of automation services such as IFTTT or custom apps built with the Twitter API.
The tweet schedule plots shown in the previous tweet can be used to visually perform both these tests. You can generate them yourself for accounts of interest here: makeadverbsgreatagain.org/allegedly
Read 9 tweets

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