Anatomy of an Anti-Muslim Influence Operation | First Draft

Last month, as violence escalated in Israel and Palestine, the hashtag #UnitedAgainstJehad trended, sparked by an open call to propel an anti-Muslim narrative to prominence.

An analysis of the network of accounts behind the campaign has revealed some key tactics that were used to spread Islamophobia online, exploiting the conflict while targeting India’s minority Muslim community.

First Draft used Twitter’s API to scrape more than 6,000 tweets that were posted over a six-day period and which produced nearly 70,000 interactions on the platform. We created multiple visualizations to depict the relationship between accounts using the hashtag and the complexity of the network; you can learn more about network visualizations here.

Here are some key takeaways that emerged from the analysis:

Demonstrating inauthentic behavior on social media is complicated. There are no unique definitions and metrics experts agree on, and influence campaigns can often include a mix of deliberately manipulative tactics and organic social media activity.

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