OK, so the hashtag "Sack*Dan*Andrews" is trending in Australia right now...

A brief thread:

I collected 2,374 tweets containing this hashtag, sent by 959 accounts.

Nearly a quarter of accounts (24%) were created in 2020

The top 20 accounts posted 25% (n=593) of tweets.

Yes that's right, just 20 Twitter accounts make up *one quarter* of the volume of this hashtag, which is now appearing on everyone's screens via the trending list.

To clarify: the issue here isn't about politics, and it's not about bots or trolls.

What's most interesting is that a small group of actors, many of them recently created and anonymous, can get a hashtag to trend nationally.

This is a double edged sword for democracy.

In the interest of scientific rigour and transparency, I provide the code for data collection, along with a CSV file containing the tweet IDs of the dataset I initially collected for this analysis. https://github.com/timothyjgraham/sackdanandrews_hashtag_analysis

Addendum on the dynamics of the trending list.

The diagram below provides further insights about how a relatively small fraction of very active accounts can contribute to a hashtag hitting the trending list.