High volumes. Short intervals. Odd times of day. Twitter thinks this is the online behaviour of regular British voters, but researchers have raised doubts.
is attracting big crowds, thousands of small donors, healthy support in opinion polls — and a legion of Twitter followers sharing its campaign messages at a breathless rate.
One account, set up in March, has sent more than 23,000 tweets in its first three months on the platform, nearly all of them about Brexit. “This is likely the result of a strong pro-Brexit amplification campaign we’ve been observing over the past few weeks,” Patel told BuzzFeed News. “This campaign is utilising large numbers of low-quality accounts, including very new accounts and non-UK accounts, to amplify content from a handful of high-profile pro-Leave Twitter personalities.”
Based on its internal tools, Twitter is confident that the accounts flagged by BuzzFeed News are those of real people in the UK, despite their seemingly-suspicious activity. It’s possible that the emergence of Farage’s party has drawn thousands of voters to Twitter for the first time, the analysts say. But as a general rule, they regard a high percentage of new followers as a sign of inorganic activity. It could be a result of “astroturfing”, whereby campaigners use genuine-looking fronts to give the impression that their cause is more popular than it really is. Or it could be that bots Twitter banned for violating its policies are reforming in a different guise.
It tweeted hundreds of times a day, at short intervals, seemingly about nothing but Brexit. Many of its followers were new accounts. It tweeted at strange times of day. On a recent Wednesday morning, according to a heatmap compiled by Patel, it fired off 141 messages between 1am and 4am, paused for a few hours, then started another spree.Created in December, it claimed to be the account of Jim Nolan.
Discussions about social media manipulation often centre on the possible involvement of Russia. Bontcheva and Patel stressed they’d found no evidence that the Kremlin may be targeting the current Brexit debate with the sort of information operation it deployed so successfully in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election.
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