Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #AltWankers
Most recents (10)
Yesterday (2018-10-02), four members of the white supremacist group known as the "Rise Above Movement" were arrested by the feds for their part in the violence at the #UniteTheRight rally in Charlottesville in August 2018. Let's take a look at related Twitter traffic.
(previous thread on the Twitter activity surrounding the #UniteTheRight hashtag leading up to and during the rally last year.)
We downloaded tweets containing "Charlottesville" and "arrests", resulting in 15082 tweets from 12331 accounts beginning with the first report of the arrests (from @HenryGraff). 
We started looking at the data set of tweets from banned Internet Research Agency accounts recently released by @FiveThirtyEight. This thread is intended as initial observations rather than exhaustive analysis.
In addition to a larger number of tweets (2973371 vs 203468), this dataset contains some information not in the set released by NBC - @FiveThirtyEight's team has classified them into several categories, and the follower counts at the time the tweets were captured is also present.
This chart shows the follower growth for several of the more prominent IRA troll accounts. Most were created (or at least started gaining followers) in late 2015 as the 2016 campaigns were getting underway - @JennAbrams was an outlier, having been active earlier.
Meet @leedelon. We'll let him introduce himself. 
On his profile page, @leedelon lists London as his home. His tweet timings in GMT look reasonable. So far, so good. . . 
It gets slightly more complicated when you look at @leedelon's schedule alongside the tweets indicating his country of residence. His schedule remains fairly consistent throughout, which is inconsistent with the 8 hour time difference between Japan and UK in the summer. 
When Conspiracy Theories Meet and Make Friends. . . #UraniumOne 
The Department of Justice announced the indictment of Mark Lambert on 11 charges on January 12th, and tweets appeared not long after attempting to tie this event to Hillary Clinton. In the limited searching I did, I was unable to find such a connection.
justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
Here's the volume of tweets containing "uranium" and at least one of "indictment", "bribery", and "one" since the DOJ announcement. Total of 132031 tweets. 10301 of those came from accounts with default profile images and less than 20 followers, suggesting bot activity. 
Unimaginative Musician or Kremlin Propagandist? You Decide!
Meet @1ChordWonder. This tweet is one of the better examples of Kremlin agitprop I've seen on Twitter. Can you spot all the propaganda techniques being used?
Here's @1ChordWonder's tweet schedule for the past month. The variance is interesting. What does this account tweet about?
The #UraniumOne hashtag (related to the bogus Clinton/Mueller/uranium) story has generated 328870 tweets in the last ten days.
High volume makes me suspect bot activity. I looked for repeated tweets, and found quite a few. 127 accounts tweeted this, for example.
Next I looked at the top 40 accounts (measured by number of RTs) driving the #UraniumOne traffic. @RealJamesWoods is the biggest source.
After the terror attack in New York today, I went looking to see what propaganda #AltWankers were pushing in the aftermath.
It didn't take very long to find this tweet from Jack Posobiec tying the attack to the claim that antifa are being trained by ISIS.
So, I searched for tweets containing "antifa" and "training". Relevant activity goes back to January, with a huge spike in the last 2 days.
Let's Make a (Plea) Deal
Top users pushing Manafort/Podesta tweets: Cernovich, mitchellvii, and RightWingAngel. I know who the first two are; what's behind door #3?
(Thread from earlier today describing the propagation of tweets containing both "Manafort" and "Podesta", ICYMI)
David Jones' Locker: Where Truth Goes to Die #TrumpRussia
A pattern you may have noticed: many bot and troll accounts have usernames that end in 8 random digits.
I searched through two recent datasets (propagators of #FireMcMaster and #UniteTheRight hashtags) and found 824 such accounts.
I decided to dig into the UniteTheRight hashtag associated with the Charlottesville white nationalist rally. #TrumpRussia #MAGA #AltWankers
I downloaded all of the tweets containing the hashtag as of 11:35 EST 8/12 (Saturday). 143925 tweets going back to 8/3.
I looked at the spread of the hashtag by plotting the network of replies and RTs containing the UniteTheRight hashtag each day.
