As phrases go, ‘Twitter analytics’ is not the most exciting, especially now we are, apparently, meant to say ‘the social medium formerly known as Twitter analytics’. Nonetheless if you dig into Twitter’s user and viewer data, you can unearth some surprising, even mystifying anomalies.

In this case, I’m talking about the Twitter account of the recently defenestrated former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. For example, barely 24 hours ago she posted a tweet about the Supreme Court’s judgment on the government’s Rwanda case. The rather dry, technical tweet about necessary new legislation got 2.5 million views.

Pundits have suggested this could be Russian or Chinese bots deliberately sowing extra division

If you think that’s a lot, you’re right (and we’ll come to some revealing comparisons in a minute). But this isn’t the first time Braverman’s Twitter account has been unexpectedly popular. Take the tweet she posted when she responded to her sacking by the Prime Minister. As we all know, after Suella got dumped she wrote Sunak a latter, and it was quite the letter. It has variously been called ‘excoriating’, ‘damning’, ‘eviscerating’, ‘blistering’. In three pages of fiery yet deftly phrased invective she managed to portray Sunak as a weak, inept, duplicitous fool, while stealthily exonerating herself.

And then Braverman posted the whole letter, as a single screenshot. How many views did that get? I’ll tell you: 37 million. Which is not just ‘a lot’, it is a scarcely believable figure – way off the dial and far more than tweets by other politicians, of any stripe.

For comparison, Joe Biden – with his 38 million followers – regularly gets between 500,000 and 1 million views of his tweets. Occasionally he will top out at 5 million. Meanwhile Barack Obama, hitherto the most viewed politician on Twitter, gets about 10 million views per tweet, and might hit 20 million on a really good day. So Suella Braverman is beating him.

This is particularly striking when you note that Obama is actually the second most followed person on Twitter altogether. He has 135 million followers, just ahead of Justin Bieber (111 million) and just behind the actual owner of Twitter, and most followed person on Twitter, Elon Musk (163 million). Suella Braverman herself has a mere 200,000 followers. Not remotely in the same league. Yet Braverman is now at a Taylor Swift level of Twitter exposure.

So what is going on? Various explanations are being proposed. One is that the letter was and is so painfully sharp, it has a powerful virality of its own. And yes it has been shared a great deal, and by many other well-followed people. Nonetheless this is a tweeted resignation letter from a British MP, not an important, potentially world-changing statement by the most powerful man on the planet, so that doesn’t really add up.

To add to the puzzle, as we now know this isn’t the only one of Braverman’s tweets that has gone oddly viral. Others in recent days have reached tens of millions: her figures initially surged in early November. An extra twist is that Braverman’s screenshotted resignation letter, in particular – with its 37 million views – didn’t generate anything near the ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ you would expect from a ‘normal’ but viral tweet.

This is where it gets murkier, and where conspiracy theories sprout. Pundits have suggested this could be Russian or Chinese bots gaming social media, deliberately sowing extra division in the West by boosting the controversial Braverman. Others wonder if it is Indian people driving this (Indians are assiduous users of Twitter, and often aggressively pro-Israel – so perhaps sympathetic to Braverman). But then if you look at the tweets of Indian PM Narendra Modi, he only gets about 500,000 views per tweet, so these dead-keen Indian tweeters are oddly neglectful of their own leader, in favour of the MP for Fareham in Hampshire.

Could it be the work of pro-Israel bots? That sounds cranky, but we know that pro-Palestinian actors are flooding TikTok with pro-Palestinian memes, news and images – it might make sense for Israel to counter that, perhaps on a different social medium. But again Braverman seems an obscure, tangential choice of person to promote.

Finally, it could be Elon Musk having a laugh – he does like to troll the world. Or maybe Braverman’s Twitter fame is a simple glitch in the system. If so, it is quite a persistent glitch: I just checked again, and her latest tweet is, yet again, hitting seven figures. Perhaps have a look when you’ve finished reading this, and decide for yourself what’s going on.