Thread by @conspirator0

In the aftermath of Mariia Butina's recent guilty plea and cooperation agreement, a number of narratives suggesting that she did nothing wrong have emerged on social media. Let's take a look.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Examples:

- She's not actually a spy because the charge wasn't espionage
- She's a lobbyist who forgot to register as a foreign agent (note that the charge she plead to is not FARA-related)
- She's just a graduate student/activist/etc.
- The charges are Russophobic

We downloaded tweets containing "Butina" and one or more of "not a spy", lobbyist, "graduate student", Russophobia, and "anti-Russian", resulting in 5830 tweets from 5816 accounts.

Next, we categorized the 50 most prominent accounts in terms of retweet volume by the narrative being pushed (accounts not in the top 50 that exclusively retweeted one category were assigned to that category).

Here is the resulting retweet network, colored by category. The "Butina did nothing wrong" category is mostly right-wing, but also contains left-wing accounts such as journalist @aaronjmate. Examples of tweets from the largest nodes in that category are also shown.

As it turns out, the media sources linked by the two groups are starkly different. The "Butina did nothing wrong" accounts mostly favor right-wing conspiracy sites and Kremlin media outlet RT, while the others primarily link a variety of Western MSM.

Whether the two groups are choosing their news sources based on preferred narratives, having their viewpoints molded by their sources of choice, or both can't be determined from this dataset, but it is evident that they are living in two separate realities information-wise.

Belated addition to this thread: here's a link to an SVG version of this chart that allows zooming in to see a much finer degree of detail that the version shown on Twitter.
makeadverbsgreatagain.org/images/butina_…