Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion @trutherbotprop Resist autocracy and research/counter disinformation. I serve the realm.

Sep 23, 2020, 7 tweets

Over in #TheMighty200 #MAGA retweet rooms, a report (consisting largely of recycled allegations and rumors) on Hunter Biden and Burisma issued by @SenRonJohnson and @ChuckGrassley is among today's hot topics.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We download the first few hours' worth of tweets containing "Hunter Biden", #HunterBiden, or Burisma following the report's release, yielding 196168 tweets from 72724 accounts. Traffic largely doesn't look automated.

We've previously observed that accounts that participate in #MAGA retweet rooms tend to have a lot of tweets/retweets with more retweets than likes. We can use this to estimate the amount of the Biden/Burisma traffic that came from accounts in these rooms.

We found 348 accounts that we believe are likely #MAGA retweet room participants among the Biden/Burisma tweets. These 348 accounts are responsible for 5866 tweets/retweets (3% of the total volume). #Lobsterfest

Retweet network for the first few hours of Biden/Burisma traffic following the report's release. @DonaldJTrumpJr, @SenRonJohnson, and CBS reporter @CBS_Herridge are the largest nodes. Much of the probable retweet room activity is clustered around @no_silenced.

Almost all of the media websites linked from the Biden/Burisma tweets are right wing. Although some of the reporting is relatively factual, some (such as @gatewaypundit's claim that the report "FINDS BIDEN FAMILY GUILTY") is not even remotely supported by the actual document.

(related hashtag that ended up trending: #MoscowHunter)

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