#OperationBackyardBrawl network visualizations
The hashtag for the latest #QAnon conspiracy theory about an alleged child-sex camp in Tucson, AZ is being boosted by at least 30 Twitter accounts that are tweeting more than 100 times per day. I downloaded over 12,000 tweets in a period of 6 days and found obvious signs of artificial amplification.
7,980 #OperationBackyardBrawl tweets from June 6 to June 8
User-to-hashtag network Nodes: 4967 Edges: 12,077
The orange and fuschia communities stand out because there are accounts tweeting hundreds of times per day located in those clusters.
The high volume accounts are centrally located in the hashtag network.
7,980 #OperationBackyardBrawl tweets from June 6 to June 8
User-to-user network Nodes: 4901 Edges: 9084
The accounts for Chelsea Clinton, realDonaldTrump and POTUS are included in this network because users that are tweeting hashtag #OperationBackyardBrawl are mentioning those accounts in their own tweets, not because Donald Trump or Chelsea Clinton have tweeted the hashtag.
12,357 tweets from June 6 to June 12
User-to-hashtag network Nodes: 7032 Edges: 18,453
12,357 tweets from June 6 to June 12
User-to-user network Nodes: 6,837 Edges: 13,623
I use Tweet Archivist to download tweets. Normally tweets for a given hashtag or search term will accumulate in an archive until the archive hits 50,000 tweets then it rolls over and starts another archive. I let the archive for hashtag #OperationBackyardBrawl run continuously for 6 days and it only accumulated a little over 12,000 tweets. This hashtag is not getting much traction on Twitter and if not for these high volume accounts, the amount of #OperationBackyardBrawl tweets would be far less.
Twitter is supposedly cracking down on spam accounts; a blog post from February specifically mentions that high volume accounts violate terms of service and may be subject to enforcement actions.
I have documented several instances of trends boosted by such accounts in #UniteTheRight, #KateSteinle and #MarchForOurLives hashtags. I don’t understand why Twitter cannot do more to control spam on its platform but I believe it’s important for the general public to know when a hashtag is being manipulated or artificially amplified.
I don’t know who is amplifying #OperationBackyardBrawl but some of the activity in this hashtag is not organic.
Gephi graphs in this blog were created using OpenOrd combined with Force Atlas 2 layout algorithms.
Tweets per day (TPD) cited above are via Social Bearing as of June 6 to June 12, 2018 and those metrics can fluctuate over time. TPD is calculated by the total number of tweets an account has tweeted divided by the number of days the account has been online. This metric can change if an account stops tweeting for a period of time or deletes tweets en masse.