In May, Buzzfeed reported on a trend of fake antifa twitter accounts trolling people and spreading misinformation. The fake accounts are part of a coordinated campaign to discredit anti-fascist activists. Most of the imposter accounts are pretty obvious trolls, but they’ve managed to confuse people and troll the media several times causing false news reports including hoax antifa protests in Houston and Gettysburg.

I isolated an active segment of their network and created visualizations of fake antifa twitter using gephi. It’s impossible to determine who is running the fake accounts from these visualizations but we can look at their activity, which accounts they are interacting with and who is in their immediate orbit. These accounts are mostly talking to each other and occasionally tagging accounts outside of their network.

The pattern in the following gephi graph is caused by some of the fake antifa accounts continually mentioning several other accounts and/or tagging other accounts in photos. This activity creates clusters with many larger nodes and heavy edges connecting each account.