Thread by @conspirator0

Following the suspension of Paul Nehlen's Twitter account earlier today, the #FreeNehlen hashtag appeared. Here's a look at the first couple hours of the campaign.

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @conspirator0 view original on Twitter

This analysis is based off the first 2 hours and 10 minutes of the #FreeNehlen hashtag, consisting of 2384 tweets from 583 accounts. This diagram shows the retweet/reply relationships between the accounts.

The largest node, currently named @YoungerZ____, in the retweet network also posted the first #FreeNehlen tweet. I say "currently" because this account likes to vary its name.

This user has gone through various permutations of "YoungerZ" as a username since being created a few months ago. Tweet timings are shown in GMT as they claim to be in Scotland.

Unlike many of the trends we've analyzed, there are no round-the-clock bots present in this set (so far). This pattern, however, was unusual - they seem to be on a 25 rather than 24 hour cycle.

This is not the first time this particular pattern has turned up, btw.

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @conspirator0 view original on Twitter

The #FreeNehlen hashtag campaign is being organized on both 4chan and Twitter (checked /r/The_Donald too, but didn't find much there).

Finally, since 4chan showed up, I checked the last 1000 tweets of each accounts for both #FreeNehlen and #FireRosenstein for the word "anime". Results:

#FireRosenstein: 67 of 5725 accounts (1.4%)
#FreeNehlen: 211 of 582 accounts (36.3%)

I checked the #FreeNehlen hashtag again this morning. Here's the updated network, now containing 6720 tweets from 1629 accounts. @Katspa2 is now the largest node.

We took a quick look at @Katspa2. With only 636 tweets, there's not a lot to see, but between the schedule and the use of UK rather than US English, this account is likely not US based. Account has only been tweeting for 6 days and kicked into high gear for the #FreeNehlen push.

Another update on #FreeNehlen - this trend seems to slowed down substantially since the first night.

Updated network diagram - 8924 tweets from 2024 accounts. An interesting observation: 987 of the 2383 tweets I originally captured during the first two hours of the #FreeNehlen trend are now gone.