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Conspirador Norteño @conspirator0
, 13 tweets, 7 min read Read on Twitter
Let's take an updated look at the traffic related to Russia Insider, a Russian news site featuring sections such as "Western Collapse", "The Jewish Question", "Free Assange", "Russiahoax", and "EU Conservative Uprising".
(previous Russia Insider thread in which failed Congressional Candidate Paul Nehlen featured prominently)
We downloaded the last ten days worth of tweets linking to russia-insider(dot)com, resulting in 5357 tweets from 2779 accounts.
Retweet network for tweets linking Russia Insider articles, colored by the primary language of the account (all articles are in English). This network displays both a greater variety of languages than we generally see and than the last time we checked on Russia Insider.
Also note the smaller, separate network in the upper right. This is a cluster of #QAnon-promoting accounts.
What other news sources do the accounts linking Russia Insider promote? This chart is based on the last 1000 tweets from each account in the Russia Insider dataset. Russian sites are the majority, most of the remainder are right-wing conspiracy sites or Western (largely UK) MSM.
Russia Insider's official Twitter account (@RussiaInsider) claims on their profile to be "Louise Mensch's favorite Kremlin troll." While we have not rigorously tested this assertion, it's worth taking with a grain of salt since @LouiseMensch mentions Russia Insider infrequently.
Are there bots linking Russia Insider? The answer is yes, but they're not a huge portion of the current traffic - 91 of 2799 (3.3%) of the accounts in the dataset were flagged as automated based on 24/7 activity and/or use of automation services.
Some of the bots linking Russia Insider are interesting, however. @ThisIsWhyTrump and @SuomiSanomat have nearly identical schedules, and despite being operated via the Twitter website, post round-the-clock with only an hour break. (Automating the website is a TOS violation, btw).
Here are the news sites linked by @ThisIsWhyTrump and @SuomiSanomat. Both tweet a mix of mostly Russian and fringe Western sources, with Finnish sites present on @SumoiSanomat only. Some sites linked are highly anti-Semitic, which brings up one more aspect of Russia Insider. . .
On January 15, 2018, Russia Insider announced an official change to editorial policy to allow (and in fact solicit) material blaming "the Jews" for random ills in both Russia and the larger world. Did their content subsequently change to reflect this?
This chart shows the frequency of various terms in the headlines of Russia Insider's articles over time. The "Jew/Zionist/Zionism" category indeed increases in volume from January 2018 onward, timed with Russia Insider's policy change to allow blatantly anti-Semitic material.
Thanks @ZellaQuixote for strategic assistance with this thread.
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