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.

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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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