After months of declining follower counts, some state-affiliated media outlets on Twitter started to gain more followers, all around the same date. Here's the sudden shift of an account from Russia's RT, beginning a period of follower growth March 28 and onwards:

For years, Twitter's policy said that they would not recommend state-affiliated accounts or tweets to people. Twitter took this line out of their Platform Use Guidelines on April 6, but it looks like they actually instituted this change on the platform earlier.

Here's the follower count for China's CGTN Arabic-language account -- it was generally declining this whole year until March 28 (the red line), when it began increasing:

This uptick pattern across Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media outlets suggests that a platform-wide change likely occurred around March 29. Here's Iran's PressTV account, which rapidly gained followers March 29 and onwards after months of stagnation:

This means Twitter violated their own stated policies for a bit! It's pretty significant that accounts engaging in state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation can now be algorithmically amplified and served to Twitter users.

Read the full analysis about how we spotted the shift here: dfrlab.org/2023/04/21/state-controlled-media-experience-sudden-twitter-gains-after-unannounced-platfo...

And read @darakerr's scoop on how this change was a deliberate decision at Twitter: www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171193551/twitter-once-muzzled-russian-and-chinese-state-propaganda-thats-ove...