High-profile ‘TruckersforFreedom’ tweets boosted by accounts that also amplified ‘Pfizergate’

In a little over a week, a 99,900-tweet dataset declined by 6,959 tweets. Two users appeared in the top 100 most active accounts for truck hashtags and “Pfizergate vaccine disinformation.

E. Rosalie
10 min readFeb 14, 2022

Key findings in this report

  • Between February 5 and 13, 2022, a dataset with 99,900 tweets declined by 6,959. Engagements disappear in three ways: voluntary deletion of the tweet, voluntary deletion of the account responsible for the engagement, or a user suspension.
  • Hoaxlines assessed a subset of missing engagements – a tweet, reply, quote, or retweet would be an engagement — and found that for MaximeBernier and TimCast, the majority of the engagements lost could be explained by user suspensions. Users behind the missing engagements often had recent creation dates.
  • Two users in the top 100 most active accounts for the truck-related hashtag dataset also appeared in the top 100 most active accounts for the Pfizergate hashtag in November 2021.
  • Suspensions explained most…

--

--

E. Rosalie

Disasters & information (public health + nat sec) | Johns Hopkins alum | @COVID19Tracking alum | Mapping medical misinfo 💉 and information disorder