How Doppelgänger Hides Its Engagement

InfoEpi Lab

Doppelgänger networks are more difficult to identify due to their strategic use of reply quotes. You won’t see any activity when you view post engagements on a tweet with hundreds or even thousands of quote tweets. If the quotes were posted on an account’s timeline, they would appear in the engagements for the tweet.

Figure 1: Example of a post showing 717 quotes or retweets but showing no engagement when viewed.

Doppelgänger places its reply quotes as responses to other replies. This exploitation of Twitter’s increasingly obscure infrastructure makes online operations more challenging to detect and, once detected, harder to fully identify and prove.

Figure 2: Another example with 732 quote tweets shows nothing when you view post engagements.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{infoepi_lab2024,
  author = {{InfoEpi Lab}},
  publisher = {Information Epidemiology Lab},
  title = {How {Doppelgänger} {Hides} {Its} {Engagement}},
  journal = {InfoEpi Lab},
  date = {2024-05-01},
  url = {https://infoepi.org/posts/2024/05/01-doppelganger-hides-engagement.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

InfoEpi Lab. 2024. “How Doppelgänger Hides Its Engagement.” InfoEpi Lab, May. https://infoepi.org/posts/2024/05/01-doppelganger-hides-engagement.html.

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Citation