Indian tokens WRX and ECOIN dominate Twitter but questions remain

Data gathered from the Utradea social media financial sentiment API shows that the ticker ECOIN has gathered the most positive attention on Twitter over the last 24 hours.

Social media analytics data shows that ECOIN-related tweets have gathered over 102 million impressions, 171 million retweets and 106 million likes. Furthermore, this ticker also saw over 49,000 posts be published over the last 24 hours.

Popular Twitter tokens seem suspicious

WRX — the token of major Indian crypto exchange Wazirx — closely follows with over 40 million impressions, about 13.5 million likes and retweets and 38,766 posts over the last 24 hours alone.

Both the tokens have left ethereum (ETH) — the only major token among the ten tokens showing the most bullish sentiment on twitter over the last 24 hours — in the dust with only 58 million impressions, 3.4 million likes, 2.8 million retweets, 17,500 posts.

The data shows multiple signs of artificial manipulation. First of all, both ECOIN and XRP have gotten more likes and retweets than impressions. Impressions are counted every time a tweet is displayed, regardless of whether the user interacts with the content.

Twitter also clearly states that one user may count as multiple impressions by viewing a tweet multiple times and even the tweet’s author counts, making those numbers even more unexplainable.

Impressions for older tweets are not counted, so although unlikely a disproportionate number of interactions with old tweets could theoretically explain the discrepancy. A much more believable explanation is that ECOIN and XRP tweets see a disproportionate number of bots interacting with and sharing posts — very possibly in a way that does not count toward the impression count.

As explained in a recent analysis, “artificially driving up engagement numbers by this much would be significantly more cumbersome from a computing and bandwidth perspective if the bots had to completely load the content, so those systems may end up not triggering an impression based on how they are counted.”

Another hint that suggests that the Twitter activity is indeed anomalous is the average age of the accounts that interact with ECOIN tweets and their sentiment.

The average age for ECOIN-engaged accounts is just 706 days, significantly lower than the average for the other coins and only near the second anomalous entry which is lunaverse (LUV), with its average account age of 874 days.

Another quite suspicious datapoint is ECOIN’s sentiment score of 52.5 — over 38.5% higher than the second-highest sentiment of 32.28 reported by WRX.

Such a high sentiment compared to the rest of the market, paired with unreasonable numbers for likes, retweets and impressions and an outlier for average account age, suggest that it is rather unlikely that this activity is driven by spontaneous human interest and not coordinated bot activity.