Read on Twitter
if you think you& #39;re seeing a ton of newly created azerbaijani accounts tweeting about #armenia - #azerbaijan rn, that is because, well, there indeed are a ton of newly created accounts
collected these from a bunch of trending pro-azerbaijan hashtags, like #StopArmenianAgression
collected these from a bunch of trending pro-azerbaijan hashtags, like #StopArmenianAgression
check @nazr1nn out. created back in march, this account basically hadn& #39;t tweeted until today, when it suddenly sent out....
1390 TWEETS
#Armenia #Azerbaijan
1390 TWEETS
#Armenia #Azerbaijan
there are many, many weird accounts.
mostly don& #39;t seem automated, as the world of influence ops has largely moved beyond brute force automated astroturfing.. but here are some particularly high-volume accounts. they average about 200-300 tweets/day - mostly hashtags and RTs
mostly don& #39;t seem automated, as the world of influence ops has largely moved beyond brute force automated astroturfing.. but here are some particularly high-volume accounts. they average about 200-300 tweets/day - mostly hashtags and RTs
most of the accounts seem to have peaked in activity today. this newly created one, @Gnai58226399, has averaged a cool 727.33 tweets/day this week!!!
not bad for a newbie ;)
not bad for a newbie ;)
they& #39;re actually quite subtle 
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On July 15 alone, the top 50 accounts tweeting these hashtags generated 25,629 tweets to them combined, an average of ~512 tweets per account.
we& #39;ve seen some cases of human-operated accounts at this scale -- see
@luizabandeira& #39;s piece on a very active grandma in brazil - but it& #39;s unusual to do w/o the help of *some* automation software, esp if you& #39;re sending out multiple tweets/second. https://medium.com/dfrlab/is-this-granny-a-bot-the-challenges-of-detecting-automation-115a2082b410">https://medium.com/dfrlab/is...
@luizabandeira& #39;s piece on a very active grandma in brazil - but it& #39;s unusual to do w/o the help of *some* automation software, esp if you& #39;re sending out multiple tweets/second. https://medium.com/dfrlab/is-this-granny-a-bot-the-challenges-of-detecting-automation-115a2082b410">https://medium.com/dfrlab/is...
what we don& #39;t know for certain is the extent to which this online activity (specifically the hashtag campaigns/manipulation - not the cyberattacks) is government coordinated or just the expression of a... vibrant online brigading culture. (both?) however...
Azerbaijan has an entrenched state propaganda apparatus & a history of employing computational propaganda for *information control*. A @polbots/ @oiioxford report put Azerbaijan& #39;s cybertroop capacity at "medium" - in the same category as India & Pakistan.
https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/CyberTroop-Report19.pdf">https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-conten...
https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/CyberTroop-Report19.pdf">https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-conten...
According to @polbots, "Medium cyber troop capacity involves teams that have a much more consistent form and strategy, involving fulltime staff members who are employed year-round to control the information space."
(also p.s.: if you want to collect some freely available twitter data for research on your own, you can use the rtweet R package: https://github.com/ropensci/rtweet
or">https://github.com/ropensci/... Twint, a Python tool: https://github.com/twintproject/twint)">https://github.com/twintproj...
or">https://github.com/ropensci/... Twint, a Python tool: https://github.com/twintproject/twint)">https://github.com/twintproj...
