During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump used fake news site beforeitsnews(dot)com as the source for a chart he displayed at one of his rallies (#IronyIsDead). Here's a brief look at Twitter traffic linking to the site.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We've seen beforeitsnews before - among other things, the site turns up in #JadeHelm and Vegas shooting conspiracy theories. Oh, it was also popular among the banned Internet Research Agency troll accounts.
We downloaded tweets linking to beforeitsnews(dot)com, resulting in 4003 tweets from 1526 accounts in the last ten days.
Of these 1526 accounts, only 28 (1.8%) look like bots based on 24/7 activity or usage of automation services for 90+% of their tweets. However, 858 of 4003 tweets (21.4%) are either tweets from or retweets of those automated accounts.
Five of the automated accounts (@RealDead67, @shrimp_shrimpy, @inkme211, @anonymous5595, and @newstome72) are virtually identical in terms of schedule, content, and automation services used (KUKU). It's likely they are all operated by the same entity.
Interestingly, the official @beforeitsnews Twitter account at one point used the same automation service (KUKU) to post some of its own tweets. They stopped using it in late April, and the account has been completely silent since November 20th.
What topics turn up in tweets linking to beforeitsnews? 45% of tweets (many of which are simply copies of the title of the linked article) contain one or more of the terms shown in this figure.
Finally, here are the media sites most frequently linked by the accounts with recent tweets linking beforeitsnews (based on the last 1000 tweets from each account). The only thing that even borders on legitimate is Fox.
