Much the same can be said of #laFrancevoteMarine and #sortonsMacron. Both saw a precipitous climb towards a rate of 350 tweets a minute within the first quarter hour. Both then declined steadily, dropping back to half the original rate after an hour and a half. #sortonsMacron enjoyed a secondary surge around 19:00 UTC, but in both cases, five hours after the launch, traffic was down to one tenth of the original.

These remarkably consistent figures show two things. First, the explosive growth of the hashtag in the first quarter hour is characteristic of a campaign driven by automated accounts. Its ability to trend so rapidly is a tribute to the organization of the Le Pen supporters, but it does not show the steady and organic growth characteristic of genuine grassroots movements.

Second, the hashtags succeeded in being listed as “trending,” but they did not create a trend. Only #sortonsMacron saw a secondary surge after the initial push, and that was limited. In every case, in a few hours’ time, the hashtags had all but ceased their traffic.

Thus in terms of the key challenge — breaking out of the existing cluster of amplifiers to attract new ones — the April hashtag drives did no better than the February ones.

The amplifiers

Final confirmation of this can be gathered from an examination of the most active accounts involved in posting on the hashtags. Time and again, the same accounts emerge, many of then tweeting at inhuman speeds of hundreds of posts an hour.

For example, the account @gab01230 was the second most active tweeter of the hashtag #laFrancevoteMarine, posting 303 tweets on the subject between 16:00 and 18:00 UTC. The same account hypertweeted on #lepionMacron (175 posts in two hours), and was the fourth most prolific tweeter on #rejoignezMarine (206 posts).

Source: @gab01230 / Twitter. Screen shot showing a few of the retweets on #rejoignezMarine.

Similarly, the account @patriologue posted 181 tweets in the first two hours on #lepionMacron, 188 in the same period on #laFrancevoteMarine, 238 on #sortonsMacron and 254 on #rejoignezMarine.

Every single one of @patriologue’s posts was a retweet; 95 per cent of @gab01230’s were. This indicates that they are probably automated “bots,” set up to amplify others’ messages without the need for a human user.

Some of the most active accounts have already been identified by the DFRLab as probable bot amplifiers in other areas. @heelleclech, for example, which posted hundreds of tweets on #lepionMacron, #sortonsMacron and #rejoignezMarine, is also a major amplifier of Kremlin broadcaster RT in French.

@CHRISTINA2A12, which posted 98 retweets in two hours on #rejoignezMarine, was an amplifier of an unsuccessful hashtag drive launched by a Russian nationalist, #dislikeMacron, just before the April 23 first-round vote. This account uses actress Sandra Bullock as its avatar and gives no verifiable personal information, reinforcing the impression that it is a fake account set up to amplify others.