Thread by @conspirator0

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).

Retweet network for "Charlottesville" + "arrests" since the recent arrests. The main cluster of the network consists mostly of journalists and prominent left-leaning accounts. There's a separate, smaller cluster around @SheriffClarke.

Who tweeted about the recent Charlottesville arrests first? This chart shows the first twenty accounts - most are journalists, left-wing activists, or automated news feeds from media organizations. There's an outlier, which we'll get to shortly.

For the most part, the traffic on this topic consists of factual reporting, amplified by parties supportive of the decision to arrest the individuals in question. There's not a lot of agitprop (or bot activity) so far, but let's look at some exceptions.

First up, there is an unusual bot among the first twenty accounts to tweet about the Charlottesville arrests. @anglew_meth (what a name, right?) is an automated account that does nothing but link to livetechinfo(dot)com. We suspect it's based in Pakistan rather than the USA.

Next, although there aren't many tweets supportive of the arrested individuals (no pro-#UniteTheRight cluster appears in the network), we did manage to find a few. Here's an example. #AltWankers

The only right-wing account to show up prominently in the retweet network for the Charlottesville arrest traffic is @SheriffClarke. He's pushing "violent antifa" messaging, one of the prominent agitprop themes surrounding the original rally in 2017.

Another agitprop theme that comes up so frequently you'd think it had already jumped all the available sharks: SOROS. Someone always blames SOROS. Always. (and often it's an account that's a week old. . .)

The previous two examples both involve redirecting blame from the #UniteTheRight rallygoers to other parties. Here's a more sophisticated version of the same concept: these tweets express/encourage suspicions and doubt of those working to resist the current administration.

In order to better understand, we dug deeper and found an older thread (related to the Parkland shooting) containing some of the same themes - speculation that prominent activists are paid and shifting the blame from the guilty parties to those protesting their actions are two.

Much appreciation to @ZellaQuixote for assistance with research, direction, and strategy.