[Thread] 1/ Ok this thread is on what looks like hardline pro-Iranian regime Twitter propaganda, targeting California separatism (wtf). Thanks @maasalan for making me aware of it. Please defer to @maasalan for issues about Iranian politics, I'll focus on the Twitter shit. Read on

2/ So 'Iranians' are supporting the hashtag #Calexit - but why, and what actually is Calexit, and why did I put 'Iranians' in quotation marks. Well Cal Exit = a California separatist campaign. It seems (is) stupid, but foreign powers like to provoke division in the domestic

3/ affairs of other countries. We've seen it with Brexit, and also with Calexit. Indeed, in 2016 Russian trolls apparently were promoting the Calexit hashtag, no doubt to provoke polarisation & societal conflict in Russia's adversary. While the Russian trolls tried to resemble

4/ Americans, the Iranian campaign is far cruder. Anyway, let's look at the data. I downloaded about 16,000 Twitter interactions (tweets, rts, replies, mentions etc) from around 8108 unique accounts tweeting on the hashtag. The time frame is mostly between 6 & 7 April (see graph)

5/ Who are the most active users on the hashtag (tweeting on the hashtag the most). I've ranked those badboys from most active. Here is a selection. Number one is @Torabi1398 no. 2 is @omidomidnazari3 no 3. is @mmb06098829 and so on. See the table for more...

6/ A lot of the tweets are in Persian, but they are also in English, Spanish, and Chinese . A lot include the hashtag "The Promised Saviour" - about the coming of the Mahdi. I am not sure why, I don't think he/she would have wanted Calexit

7/ There is strong evidence that the accounts are engaging in coordinated inauthentic activity. 8 % of all accounts (676) in the sample were created in just 7 days of this month (erm April). Almost 10% of the sample were created in January 2020 as well, which is intriguing...

8/ Usually such spikes are a good indicator of co-ordinated behaviour. The January spike also suggests that a bunch of accounts were created in January 2020 to spread propaganda around the tragic downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane.

9/ If I arrange the network graph by indegree, I can size the nodes by which account was either mentioned the most or retweeted the most. If we do that we see that the big dog is @a_raefipour1 - who is real I am told. Network graph here I have isolated his 'community'

10/ So yes, good evidence that religious hardliners or their representatives are conducting a crude influence campaign on Twitter to promote division in the United states through the encouraging of the secession of California. The Russians have done it, now the Iranians.

11/ Further reading, I suggest you check out this thread by @conspirator0 which deals with the same hashtag https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1247351060269797377