Read on Twitter
After @arielbogle started seeing multiple accounts being created on the day Lijian Zhao posted the provoking tweet just to interact with the tweet, we took a deeper dive https://twitter.com/arielbogle/status/1333356571565256704?s=20
As of 12:45PM 2nd December 2020, Lijian Zhao's tweet has over 18K replies, 15K retweets (including quoted retweets) and 54K likes.
. @Timothyjgraham collected 10,059 replies to Zhao's tweet and noticed 8% of accounts were created on 30 November 2020 https://twitter.com/Timothyjgraham/status/1333567903061315584?s=20
We looked at samples of 606 accounts retweeting and 349 accounts liking the tweet saw similar distributions showing a spike of account creations on 30 November and 1 December 2020
Looking at our sample of accounts liking the tweet, over 35% of accounts had zero followers
These 'liker' accounts also tended to follow other Chinese diplomatic accounts, with Zhao's account followed by everyone who liked the tweet. Other US leaders, public figures and English media outlets were also followed.
Accounts created recently tended to only have a few accounts they followed. For example:
A plot of the follower network of these accounts showed that these accounts tended to follow the same major accounts. You would expect more overlap and a more diverse range of accounts being followed.
Manually inspecting some of the accounts revealed many commercial and bot-like accounts that were tweeting porn and other spammy content. In addition, some accounts had only recently begun tweeting again after a long hiatus.
