#I'm tagging those 'cause I KNOW most of you don't look at zzh's tag

[bizarrequazar]

Another version of a water army: The fake following of @JusticeForZhangZheHan

[twitter thread summarizing this essay, please retweet it if you agree]

Yesterday, two accounts on Twitter made tweets about Zhang Sanjian which got a fair amount of attention for how they prioritized Zhang Sanjian over Zhang Zhehan. “Zhehan I love you. But lately i love sanjian more ...” These tweets came across as obviously inflamatory, so I decided to check something—were these real people? A very quick check revealed that they were not: both accounts had been created years ago, yet they had no posts until the last few months when they suddenly started tweeting about almost nothing but Zhang Zhehan.

Those who have been following developments about Zhang Zhehan’s case on Twitter are probably familiar with the user JusticeForZhangZheHan (nicknamed and hereafter referred to as Justina). This account has become a driving force among the English community for supporting Zhang Sanjian and directing hate and false accusations against Gong Jun, including making unfounded claims of him being the mastermind behind 813. Despite her name, she does very very little to actually seek justice, instead persistently harrassing larger accounts that discuss information about his case. This account boasts 773 followers at the time of writing this.

The question is, how many of these followers are actual people who believe what she’s saying? How can we tell?

Method

The data presented below was collected by myself on the evening of March 21st 2022. As a representative sample, I started at the top of Justina’s follower list and checked every fifth account until I had looked at 100. Privated accounts were skipped. When I encountered an empty account—one with no tweets or retweets—I noted down that it existed then checked the one directly beneath it; these serve only to fill the base statistic and are not included in the further analysis. For each account with tweets, I checked what month and year the account had been registered in, then scrolled down until I reached the earliest post that still remains on it and took note of the date. I tried to look only at original tweets for this as there’s no way (to my knowledge) to look when something was retweeted, but retweets were counted for accounts that had no original tweets.

All of this should be very easily replicable for anyone who doesn’t trust my word on it.

I did not take statistical data on when the accounts had most recently posted, nor what the content of the accounts’ tweets were, though I’ve noted down some of my observations.

Findings and Evidence

The first thing to take into account is empty accounts. Of the hundred accounts checked, 33 did not have any content, leaving 67 to be looked at further. Taking it as a percent, this already brings Justina’s follower count to 518 rounding up.

Next is the matter of when accounts were registered. Of the 67 remaining accounts, 30 had been created in or following August 2021, with 18 created since the start of 2022.

Of the 37 accounts registered before 813, 10 had not made tweets within the last year. One notable account registered in 2009 had not been active since 2013, and reading the tweets indicated that the user had likely committed suicide. 

Almost all of the accounts with older tweets had ones from within a few months after they had been registered, had gone inactive for a period of at least a year, then had suddenly started tweeting/retweeting about Zhang Zhehan following 813, even if they had never tweeted about anything related to pop culture previously. In some cases, older posts indicated that the account had either been hacked at some point or had been created as a bot only to be abandoned. One was still an active spam account. A number of accounts had previously tweeted in other languages only to switch to English when they started tweeting about Zhang Zhehan; several of these had a transition where posts about Zhang Zhehan were created in the original language, then slowly changed partially or wholly to English.

Moving onto when the accounts’ earliest tweets were made, 48 of the 67 accounts did not have any tweets from before 813, with 29 not having any tweets until 2022. To compare: 67.5% of the accounts existing before 813 did not make their “first tweet” until after it. 

I have been made aware that there is a flaw in my data about old accounts that appear to only have recent tweets due to a feature of Twitter’s where older tweets are sometimes hidden on accounts with a high number of posts. I have all the accounts I checked for this written down and I will be going through them again using a workaround that lets me view their full tweet history. This only affects this one area of data and there are only a handful of accounts that this should apply to.

I apologize for not being aware of this sooner. Thank you to those who pointed it out and explained it to me. Please let me know if there are any further concerns.

Of the more recent accounts and the older accounts with only recent posts, those created in the last few months were often either very sparse with only perhaps a few dozen tweets, or else they had mass-retweeted hundreds of tweets about Zhang Zhehan over the course of a couple days. With one exception, every account where I noticed slander against Gong Jun had been created or had become active only in or after February.

Breaking it down further into dates, the highest amount of accounts—whether new or old—became active around early February and March 13th. The former was just before the six month marker from 813 when Zhang Sanjian was beginning to make his presence known, and the latter was when Zhang Zhehan’s fans on Twitter held an event to raise awareness about what had happened—an event during which Justina and her followers did not particpate other than to use it as an opportunity to slander Gong Jun. Furthermore, the two accounts I found that had become active on March 16th were one after the other:

Given that I was only checking every 5th account, this indicates that there was a significant rise in new followers for Justina that day, likely fueled by or in partner with the attack on Gong Jun that day (March 17th in China).

Conclusion

After looking at so many accounts, it is glaringly obvious that not simply the vast majority but almost all of Justina’s followers are fake. When I was going through them, there reached a point where I was hoping to find accounts that seemed legitimate just so my data wouldn’t seem intentionally skewed. Nearly every account I looked at had some indication of being fake—whether it was a newly registered account with a ton of activity, a huge gap in activity, no past history of interest in pop culture, a language discrepancy, or simply no content at all.

Of the the 100 accounts that I looked at, there were only 6 six that seemed as if they might be genuine—and that’s being generous. To apply those statistics to her entire follower count, Justina likely only has a real following of about 47 people, rounding up. The rest of them are artificially created to give the illusion of credibility.

JusticeForZhangZheHan is not an account that is on our side fighting for justice for Zhang Zhehan, despite what her handle claims. There is no army of followers at her side—only hundreds of suspicious accounts without real people behind them, which have seen a rise in number within just the last few weeks. Allowing people to believe what Justina says is dangerous, as whether intentional or not, she has become a vehicle for planted fake fans and toxic behaviour that is already serving to only hurt Zhang Zhehan more.

[twitter thread summarizing this essay, please retweet it if you agree]