Erin Gallagher Profile picture
Aug 10, 2018 22 tweets 20 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
I've been working on two big projects for several months, one is finally finished tonight. #QAnon network visualizations: medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
#QAnon trends appear to be connected to Twitter rooms, high-volume accounts and a conservative political marketing firm called AppSame.

This is a user-to-user @gephi graph of 51,437 #QAnon tweets  from May 3 to May 11 medium.com/@erin_gallaghe… #dataviz
I constantly find high-volume accounts in certain hashtags and they are present in #QAnon networks. These high-volume accounts are hubs in Twitter networks. Here’s what some of the high-volume hubs look like in 8 days of #QAnon tweets from May 3 to May 11 medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
In network science, hubs act like bridges between smaller nodes & help spread information faster. In the case of a network of people with a contagious disease, a person who has contact with many people is a hub which spreads the infection widely. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
Hubs in a network make the network stronger. Random smaller nodes in a network can fail (or in this case their accounts can be suspended) and the network will remain intact, still connected by the larger hubs.

User-to-user graph of 48,241 #TheStorm tweets - April 27 to May 17
I started a rolling twitter thread of what I called #MAGA spammers, many of these accounts are also tweeting #QAnon hashtags (along with other MAGA related trends)

User-to-user network  of  18,868 tweets mentioning @PradRachael from May 16 to May 21
The @AP recently reported on 2 accounts that get mistaken for #bots but are actually people who are members of Twitter rooms. @MAGANinaJo is a 70 year old grandmother who is tweeting 73 tweets per day. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…

16,232 tweets mentioning MAGANinaJo — Aug 5 to Aug 8
Here's the description of Twitter rooms in the @AP article apnews.com/06efed5ede4d46… Communities of people coordinating their tweets.

Twitter rooms were 1st reported by @Bernstein in 2017 buzzfeednews.com/article/joseph… an alt-right troll called Microchip added automation to "DM groups"
If Nina is participating in Twitter rooms with other high-volume accounts and they are retweeting each other’s tweets, then their public tweets will be connected even though the rooms are private.

High-volume hubs in 16,232 tweets mentioning @MAGANinaJo — Aug 5 to Aug 8
have to charge my laptop awhile brb
I found a conservative political marketing firm called @AppSame in @MAGANinaJo's network. It's the top account in the influencer index for her account, meaning it's the account w/ highest number of followers mentioning her. AppSame has 370,819 followers & tweets 107 times per day
Looking back through the datasets I previously collected, I found @AppSame in the top of the influencer indexes for #QAnon, #TheStorm and @PradRachael's account. A conservative political marketing firm is connected to all of these networks.

infographics via @TweetArchivist
AppSame's website doesn't say much about them. Their recent posts are for essay writing services. I found a phone number & address on LinkedIn. The address is a shopping center in Tampa, FL & the phone is a Google voice number. I called, no answer. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
AppSame has one employee publicly listed on LinkedIn: Eric Stole. I found an “Eric Stole (AppSame)” on Facebook. Per LinkedIn, Eric went to U. of Tampa & previously worked @ Oracle but on Facebook he went to Holy Angel University in the Philippines & previously worked at Facebook
Lots of his Facebook friends also seem to be located in the Philippines. 🤷 No idea if Eric is real or not but of course I was curious what the network surrounding @Appsame looked like.

Here's a user-to-hashtag network for 2,477 tweets in @AppSame's network from Aug 8 to Aug 9.
Here's the user-to-user network of 2,477 tweets mentioning @AppSame from August 8 to August 9, about 12 hours worth of activity. There are high-volume hubs in the large orange cluster. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
Those activity patterns were caused by tweets mentioning @CinepolisUSA, a theater in FL that temporarily suspended @DineshDSouza's new movie last night. Several high-volume accounts are tagged in the tweet and it received thousands of likes & retweets. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
I don’t know if this was organized brigading of @CinepolisUSA from a Twitter room but networks of high-volume accounts and communities of people coordinating in Twitter rooms *could* be mobilized to target certain accounts or hashtags. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
Several reoccuring components in these networks: high-volume hubs, a political marketing firm and Twitter rooms with real people. It would be beneficial to include real people because they would have a real phone number to add to their accounts & overall seem less bot-like.
Twitter posted a blog on June 26 that seems to address these kinds of high-volume accounts. I've been waiting to see if any of the accounts I've been tracking would be suspended but so far... nope. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…
So far I tweeted 63 high-volume accounts with at least 10K followers each who tweet 100+ times per day. Since some of these accounts are in @MAGANinaJo's network & @MAGANinaJo is in Twitter rooms, it's likely some of these accounts are in Twitter rooms too
Ok I think that's probably enough tweets for tonight. Apologies for the monster thread, I tried to be succinct but it's a lot to unpack. Hope it helps!

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More from @3r1nG

Oct 1, 2018
OK my @medium account got "caught in the spam filter" & has been restored so let me try this #thread again. I've been working for several months on a series of blogs explaining trolling & botting tactics used by 4chan during the election. #ContentWarning: medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
Several months ago @elimisteve from @PursuanceProj found a series of pastebins and sent them to me. 4chan trolls studied learned graphic design software to make memes, memetic warfare and botting to troll the election. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
The 1st part is an 8chan thread by someone who claimed to have worked in the marketing & advertising industry. The explain various components of effective graphic design & instructions for /pol/ to “normalize” their message to blend in with the normies. medium.com/@erin_gallaghe…
Read 36 tweets
Jul 23, 2018
1/ #WalkAway #FakeNews #Thread Michele Stapleton posted these posters (and the stock images they came from) on Facebook and seeing them all together I recognized the style guide.

h/t facebook.com/michelestaplet…
2/ couple more... I have seen this font on propaganda posters before.
3/ during the 2014 Gaza War we had so many trolls on the @NewsRevo FB page I made a blog about the 2009 Hasbara Handbook (now offline) and included screenshots of the posters that were going around then. Here's the blog in the wayback: web.archive.org/web/2014101705…

Same font & style:
Read 7 tweets
Jun 17, 2018
2015 UNHCR study "Women on the Run" published first hand accounts of refugees fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico acnur.org/fileadmin/Docu… (60 page pdf)
"Women interviewed for this report indicated that they and their children face extreme levels of violence on a near-daily basis. They described being raped, assaulted, extorted, and threatened by members of criminal armed groups, including gangs and drug cartels."
"Sixty-two per cent of women reported that they were confronted with dead bodies in their neighborhoods and a number of women mentioned that they and their children saw dead bodies weekly."
Read 4 tweets
Feb 8, 2018
Just poking around this interesting website... "TweetAttacksPro 4 is designed to run thousands of twitter accounts at the same time 24/7"

Unlimited accounts that you can automate 99% for $216 per year. 🙃
It's a full service website. Manage and automate an unlimited number of Twitter accounts and run a campaign right in the dashboard.
Here is the problem with attributing bots to a certain location or person. Let's say for example you buy 1000 Twitter accounts to run a campaign and you bind them all to a proxy in Canada. Are those Canadian bots?
Read 12 tweets

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