This intensity was sustained for less than an hour. By 20:00, the rate was below 100 posts a minute, and by 22:00 it had dropped back to under 10 posts per minute.

This profile is characteristic of a coordinated — and probably partially automated — hashtag drive, rather than an organic movement.

That impression is reinforced by the level of activity of individual users. On average, each user who tweeted the two hashtags did so 6.6 times (a figure generated by dividing the total number of tweets by the total number of users). This is an unusually high level of activity per user; the rate of engagement of users in organic Twitter movements is usually much lower, on the order of 1.5–3.5 tweets per user.

Equally strikingly, the 50 most active users to post the two hashtags tweeted 5,568 times, accounting for over one-third of all the tweets in the scan (35.17 percent). This confirms that the Twitter traffic was significantly shaped by a relative handful of hyperactive users.

Indeed, in just two hours, between 19:00 and 21:00 on July 22, the 10 most active users posted a staggering 1,804 tweets. In other words, just 10 accounts managed to post one tweet every four seconds over a two-hour period.

The top 10 Twitter users promoting anti-astroturfing hashtags. This chart shows the number of times they tweeted the hashtags between 19:00 and 21:00 on July 22. Source: @DFRLab’s machine scan.

Perhaps most strikingly of all, out of the more than 15,000 tweets which used the two hashtags, over 11,000 used the exact phrase “Sprzeciwiam się wykorzystaniu mechanizmu” (“I am against the use of the mechanism”).

Some of the many accounts which used the same phrase. Note the time-stamps on the right-hand side of the image. They show that five accounts posted the same words at the exact same second of 19:00:01 — only one of them a retweet.

None of these indicators are consistent with the casual, organic, grassroots growth of hashtag movements. Instead, they are typical of coordinated and artificial hashtag drives amplified by highly dedicated — and possibly automated — Twitter users attempting to make hashtags appear more popular than they actually are.

Hyperactive users

Some of the top users have every appearance of being at least partially automated, judging by the degree of activity, anonymity, and amplification they show.

The account @annawitme, for example, joined Twitter on December 9, 2016; by July 23, it had posted 67,700 tweets, for an average of almost 300 tweets per day.

Archived on July 23, 2017.

The account gives no verifiable personal information; on July 22, it posted 199 tweets in the space of just over two hours, between 19:00:07 and 20:58:17.

Of those, 95 were retweets without any comment; the others were retweets with just the anti-astroturf hashtags, or with the full “I am against” text, as these examples show:

Archived on July 23. Tweet posted at 19:31 UTC.

Archived on July 23.

Archived on July 23.

Archived on July 23.

Archived on July 23.

This behavior is consistent with that of an automated “bot” account.

Much the same can be said of the account @ZawszePolska, which was created on January 1, and had, by July 23, posted 25,400 tweets (and had made more than double that number of likes), at an average rate of almost 125 tweets per day.

Archived on July 23, 2017.

On July 22, this account posted 45 tweets on two of the anti-astroturf hashtags — all of them either retweets, hashtags, or the “I am against” text.