The government accounts of US Senator Claire McCaskill (and her staff) were targeted in 2017 by APT28 A.K.A. “Fancy Bear” according to an article published by The Daily Beast on July 26th. Senator McCaskill has since confirmed the details. And many of the subsequent (non-technical) articles that have been published has focused almost exclusively on […]

In January 2018, I wrote a couple of blog posts outlining some analysis I’d performed on followers of popular Finnish Twitter profiles. A few people asked that I share the tools used to perform that research. Today, I’ll share a tool similar to the one I used to conduct that research, and at the same […]

In a blog post I published yesterday, I detailed the methodology I have been using to discover “Finnish themed” Twitter accounts that are most likely being programmatically created. In my previous post, I called them “bots”, but for the sake of clarity, let’s refer to them as “suspicious accounts”. These suspicious accounts all follow a […]

Finland will hold a presidential election on the 28th January 2018. Campaigning just started, and candidates are being regularly interviewed by the press and on the TV. In a recent interview, one of the presidential candidates, Pekka Haavisto, mentioned that both his Twitter account, and the account of the current Finnish president, Sauli Niinistö had […]

Over the past month, I’ve pointed Twitter analytics scripts at a set of search terms relevant to the German elections in order to study trends and look for interference. Germans aren’t all that into Twitter. During European waking hours Tweets in German make up less than 0.5% of all Tweets published. Over the last month, […]

Twitter is by far the easiest social media platform to work with programmatically. The Twitter API provides developers with a clean and simple interface to query Twitter’s objects (Tweets, users, timelines, etc.) and bindings to this API exist for many languages. As an example, I’ve been using Tweepy to write Python scripts that work with Twitter data. […]

I’ve been writing scripts to process Twitter streaming data via the Twitter API. One of those scripts looks for patterns in metadata and associations between accounts, as streaming data arrives. The script processes retweets, and I decided to add functionality to also process quote Tweets. Retweets “echo” the original by embedding a copy of the […]

The 2017 UK general election just concluded, with the Conservatives gaining the most votes out of all political parties. But they didn’t win enough seats to secure a majority. The result is a hung parliament. Both the Labour and Conservative parties gained voters compared to the previous general election. Some of those wins came from […]

There’s been some speculation this week regarding Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Why? Because its follower count “dramatically” increased (according to reports) due to a bunch of bots. Since Twitter analytics are my thing at the moment, I decided to do some digging. Sean examined some of Trump’s new followers and found they had something in […]

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m writing scripts designed to analyze patterns in Twitter streams. One of the goals of my research is to follow Twitter activity around a newsworthy event, such as an election. For example, last weekend France went to the polls to vote for a new president. And so I […]

I’ve just started experimenting with Tweepy to write a series of scripts attempting to identify Twitter bots and sockpuppet rings. It’s been a while since I last played around with this kind of stuff, so I decided to start by writing a couple of small test scripts. In order to properly test it, I needed to point […]