wisepowder: Analysis of February 2021 Twitter Takedowns

wisepowder

Analysis of February 2021 Twitter Takedowns



On February 12, 2021 Twitter shared with the Stanford Internet Observatory accounts and tweets associated with four distinct takedowns. These datasets were made public today. They include:To get more twitter latest news, you can visit shine news official website.

In this post we summarize our analysis of these operations. We have also written three in-depth whitepapers, one on the anti-Azerbaijan operation, one on the Iran operation, and one on both of the Russia operations, linked at the top of the page.

This network, which advanced narratives critical of Azerbaijan and favorable toward Armenia, included 72,960 tweets dating back to 2014. Accounts quoted Azerbaijani state messaging with intermittent pro-Armenian messaging in an attempt to masquerade as Azerbaijani accounts. 

The most noteworthy tactic in this network was the creation of accounts pretending to be Azerbaijani government officials. One of these accounts was created in 2014, and changed its handle in 2020 to impersonate the Minister of Foreign Affairs. This is not the first time this tactic has been used. In October 2020 Twitter announced the suspension of a network of accounts linked to the government of Saudi Arabia that created accounts pretending to be an interim Qatari government in exile. One of these accounts, @QtrGov, was created in 2016 and had over 90,000 followers, and there is strong evidence that it did not use this handle prior to 2020. By combining an old creation date and handle switching, information operations can create the impression of account legitimacy. It is possible that @QtrGov used spammy follow-back behavior to grow its following, then wiped its tweets and changed its handle. 

On the one hand, there are reasons to not be too worried about this tactic. In both operations, Twitter users called out the accounts as fake. And for the operation described in this report, the fake government accounts got at most a few hundred followers. At the same time, this tactic has potential to mislead people. Several of the government officials impersonated in this network lacked their own official Twitter accounts, creating a search vacuum. In an example described in the report, a Google Knowledge Panel for one of these government officials linked to the fake Twitter account.