Thread by Carl Miller

twitter.com
1 Recommender
1 Mention
Recommend
Post
Save
Complete
Collect
Thread
When we say Kyiv is winning the information war, far too often we only mean information spaces we inhabit.

Pulling apart the most obvious RU info op to date (as we did using semantic modelling), very clear it is targeting BRICS, Africa, Asia. Not the West really at all.
This is the kind of thing this network shares by the way. Mainly an amplification network pumping a small number of viral pro-invasion meme, largely around themes of western hypocrisy, NATO expansionism and BRICS solidarity,
These were the accounts receiving most inward amplification - the higher value accounts actually sending the virals. You'll see they, too, are spread across Asian and African languages + identities.
For anyone who wants to dive more into this network, i'll be sharing more info about it today.

Let's start where we left yesterday. Really the point of this network was to concentrate Retweets to a small number of pro-invasion memes/virals, marked on the map here.
The clusters are distinct from each other in other ways than language. The red, bright green and beige clusters send WAY more retweets than the others. avg. ratio is about 4:1, whereas orange is 0.5.

The accs in the middle of red/beige/green only send retweets. Prolly RT farms
Let's jump into the clusters. Disclaimer: I'm going to use real accounts as examples here. I'm not suggesting they're certainly bots or Russian info agents; just that behaviourally they are very similar to a network that - in its entirely - is extremely suspicious.
The reds look like this. A tight, dense pocket of pro-BJP, hindi-language accounts.

566 in total, sending 4M messages. The spammiest is my reading: highest retweet:tweet ratio of any cluster. Weren't bothered at all by Russia until March 2nd.
The blues are different from any other cluster. English language and very little in the way of clear locality or regional focus. The youngest accounts, 5M messages and almost all of it - from what I see - is pro-invasion messaging. Almost no followers.

A separate operation imo
Orange is a tunnel of accounts that kind of connect the Hindi-cluster to the SA cluster. 736 mainly using Urdu, Javanese, Nepali, Malay. Each one averages 3.4k messages, only has avg. 23 followers. Again, 'activates' in volume over March 2nd (anyone spotting the pattern?).
The yellow cluster is really interesting. Clearly South African, lots of pro-Zuma, BRICS-solidarity messaging. Highest number of original messages and avg. followers, many of these 1010 accounts are real imo

This is where the artificial campaign got the most organic take-up imo
There are some accounts in each of these networks that have been around for years, but each cluster has a similar profile: a lot of accounts were created very recently.

Check out blue, especially
The DARKGREENS are a linguistic cluster entirely unto themselves. 474 accounts using Urdu, Sindhi, Farsi: lots of pro Imran Khan/PTI messaging.

By far the highest (mean average) followers in this analysis: 3.5k. There are some very big, very visible accounts here.
In many ways, I've found VIOLET the hardest to characterise.

- The biggest cluster (1441)
- Easily the most messages (12M)
- Most messages per user (8.6k)
- 2nd highest followers per user (220)
- Oldest accs (avg. 2017)

Currently concerned with Nigerian fuel shortages.
This just leaves the BRIGHT GREENS. It looks like a tunnel cluster but isn't really; the majority of accounts are bunched up next to the Hindi-language pinks

These are Indian accounts too, but tend to use more English. 1314 in total sending 6.8M messages. Avg. only 18 followers
The point of doing this network mapping wasn't just to describe this particular campaign, but also discovery. We're now swinging towards the less researchable and probably more harmful activity across all the other social media platforms we can reach.
Mentions
See All