Thread by @conspirator0

There was a burst in activity on the #FireRosenstein hashtag this past weekend. Let's see what there is to see, shall we? (thanks @SpencerH8sTwitr for putting us on the hunt)

This diagram shows the retweet/reply relationships for #FireRosenstein. There are a few accounts in here that have turned up in previous analyses, such as jojoh888. The left and right-leaning accounts are mostly separate here, indicated by the dashed line.

The accounts pushing the #FireRosenstein hashtag are mostly right-wing accounts; however, the opposite is true of the phrase "fire Rosenstein" - here the #Resistance conversation is larger and louder.

Next, let's look for likely bot activity. Of 4275 accounts tweeting #FireRosenstein, there are 57 accounts that tweet 24 hours a day and 345 with default profile pictures. (The green "frequent fliers" category is for accounts that have appeared repeatedly in previous analyses).

Another way to visualize the same information - plotting the number of followers against the daily tweet rate for the accounts involved. Exploring this further is, for the moment, left as an exercise for the reader.

Time for a detour that isn't actually a detour: #OperationMockingbird (h/t @majorajam), a hashtag which seems to be related to the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit/#QAnon conspiracy theory. We'll return to the circled account (@realityblow) later in the thread.

The sets of accounts tweeting #FireRosenstein and #OperationMockingbird overlap - there are 304 accounts present in both, highlighted in red here in the network diagrams for each trend. The red nodes appear to be largely connected to one another, but let's verify.

This retweet/reply network was built from the most recent 1000 tweets from each of the 304 accounts in both sets. 302 are connected, and note that the degree of interconnection is high - most nodes connect to many others.

Here's the tweet volume for #OperationMockingbird for the last 10 days, with the portion from the accounts that also have #FireRosenstein tweets highlighted in red.

Like #FireRosenstein, #OperationMockingbird has some likely bot activity - 22 round-the-clock accounts, and 179 with default pictures out of 2305 total. 15 of the 22 round-the-clock accounts are also in the #FireRosenstein set. We'll take a quick look at three.

First up: @bamma0. This account is almost all retweets, and posts almost all of its tweets at 45 minutes past the hour, every hour.

Next, here's @ImmoralReport. This one is much higher volume - roughly 1000 tweets per day. It fires off a barrage of tweets every five minutes, with very occasion tweets at other times. Like @bamma1, @ImmoralReport seems to consist almsost exclusively of retweets.

(Correction to previous tweet - @bamma0, not bamma1)

Finally, here's @realityblow. This bot is a little different as it doesn't operate 24/7 and the schedule doesn't indicate automation. However, 87% of the tweets are malformed retweets (tweet starts with "RT " rather than being an actual retweet), and all are posted via IFTTT.

Thanks to @ZellaQuixote for various and sundry assistance throughout the course of this project.

We went back and looked at some of the more prominent nodes in the #FireRosenstein retweet network.

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First, there's @rp4america1st. This account isn't even four months old and has already had four different handles. (Time of change is the time of the first tweet following the change.)

Here's @rp4america1st's tweet schedule. Didn't tweet much as spicey_kevin or maga4santa, but has been more active as tuckersface and rp4america1st.

Next up: @WeSupport45. This account got its start in late 2014/early 2015 promoting marijuana tourism to Colorado.

In mid-2016, @WeSupport45's business model changed. They now want to sell you a brick in a future border wall, despite the fact that any hypothetical border wall would not in fact be composed of bricks.

Here's @WeSupport45's tweet topics over time. It's our suspicion that the primary purpose of this account is to perpetrate various moneymaking schemes, and the political material is simply a means to that end.

Moving on, here's @TrumpSuperPAC, "the #1 Super PAC in American history reaching 1 million patriots a day". Strangely, there is no such super PAC on record with the FEC, and no PAC whose name contains "Trump Super PAC" located in NY.

Also? @TrumpSuperPAC's tweet schedule is bizarre if they're really based in New York.

One more: @os4185. Their educational history speaks for itself.

Finally, let's compare what the #FireRosenstein network looks like both with and without these accounts (jojoh888 and consmover were flagged as suspicious in previous analyses and are thus included as well). Among other things, the network breaks apart.

All I did was point out they were trying to sell useless bricks to Trump supporters. . .

In other news, once you've changed your Twitter handle four times, why not go for five, eh @rp4usa1st?