Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #HillaryEmail
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On January 13th, 2020, shortly before midnight Pacific time, our good friend @DrunkAlexJones debuted the hashtag #FishingForRobots in order to, well, fish for robots. #ThursdayThoughts #ManyFishBite
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We used three different tools (Hypefury, Crowdfire, and TweetDeck) to schedule @DrunkAlexJones #FishingForRobots tweetstorms at roughly midnight PST on seven recent occasions. 91 additional accounts picked up the hashtag, 76 of which are at least mostly automated.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We designed #FishingForRobots tweets to attract bots, and evolved them several times over the course of the experiment. The first set of tweets (sent via Hypefury) contained hashtags we knew from previous experience would likely result in bots retweeting or cloning the tweets.
It would appear that @DrunkAlexJones went a little off the rails last night and attempted to bait retweet bots (among other things.) How'd it work out?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote Verdict: moderate success. 9 of 11 accounts that retweeted the @DrunkAlexJones tweet in question are automated: a mix of #GiletsJaunes, #Calexit, #HillaryEmail, #Resistance, and #GreenNewDeal retweet bots. All the automated retweets happened within an hour of the original tweet.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote Finally, @DrunkAlexJones drew a like from @_albaiat, the "Official Twitter of The Deputy Politician for Joe Biden candidate President 2020 of United State." This does not appear to be a real job, and Pennsylvania residence does not align with the account's tweet schedule.
Lurking among recent #UraniumOne tweets, we found a retweet bot by the name of @IsHillaryInJail. 99.9% of its content is retweets of tweets containing #ClintonEmail or #HillaryEmail. Based on its recent use of #Hillary4Prison2016, it's a bit behind the times.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@IsHillaryInJail @ZellaQuixote It took @IsHillaryInJail less than five minutes to retweet the tweet describing it, presumably because it's a rather silly bot that just retweets everything containing #ClintonEmail or #HillaryEmail without regard for context.
@IsHillaryInJail @ZellaQuixote Unsurprisingly, @IsHillaryInJail retweeted that tweet too. Since both #HillaryEmail and #ClintonEmail are low-volume, the bot is likely to retweeted every tweet containing them. (Bots that RT high-volume hashtags like #MAGA miss some tweets due to Twitter's 2400 tweet/day limit.)
The Mueller report discusses the social media disinformation aspect of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. We took a look at 12 of the hashtags mentioned over the year prior to the election, as well as a control group of 8 over the same timespan.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First observation - a sizable share (20% or more) of the traffic for 7 of the 12 hashtags mentioned in the report came from accounts that followed one of six banned IRA accounts we have follower lists for. The same is true for only one hashtag in the control group, #CruzCrew.
(previous thread discussing followers of banned trolls here)
