With the aid of open-source tools, Internet researcher Lawrence Alexander gathered and visualised data on nearly 20,500 pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts, revealing the massive scale of information manipulation attempts on the RuNet. In what is the first part of a two-part analysis, he explains how he did it and what he found.
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Using the open-source #NodeXL tool, I collected and imported a complete list of accounts tweeting that exact phrase ["Ukrainians killed him...he was stealing one of their girlfriends" in russian] into a spreadsheet. From that list, I also gathered and imported an extended community of Twitter users, comprised of the friends and followers of each account. It was going to be an interesting test: if the slurs against Nemtsov were just a minor case of rumour-spreading, they probably wouldn’t be coming from more than a few dozen users.
But once the software had finished crunching data, the full scale of the network was revealed: a staggering 2,900 accounts. This figure is perhaps understandable: for a fake Twitter account to be credible, it needs plenty of followers—which in turn requires more supporting bots.
Then I used #Gephi, another free data analysis tool, to visualize the data as an entity-relationship graph. The coloured circles—called Nodes—represent Twitter accounts, and the intersecting lines—known as Edges—refer to Follow/Follower connections between accounts. The accounts are grouped into colour-coded community clusters based on the Modularity algorithm, which detects tightly interconnected groups. The size of each node is based on the number of connections that account has with others in the network.