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In the wake of Kamala Harris announcing her presidential run, there's been a bit of a surge of speculation that she isn't actually eligible despite having been born in the country. #SpoilerAlertBirtherismSequelIsShitty
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We downloaded tweets containing @KamalaHarris / Kamala, eligible, and president/presidency/candidate (and removed early false postives), yielding 8797 tweets from 8185 accounts. Nearly all were posted since Harris' announcement, but there are occasional tweets since July 2017.
Who tweeted the Kamala Harris pseudo-birtherism theory first? These charts show the first twenty accounts with on topic tweets both since Harris declared her candidacy and overall. Probable automated accounts are marked in red.
The very first account to claim that Kamala Harris is ineligible for the presidency was @rvail317. This account consists almost entirely of clickbait and spam, making it all the more bizarre they tweeted about this particular topic a year and a half before it was (un)cool.
Moving onward to the latter half of 2018, one starts seeing scattered activity (much of it from #QAnon accounts) linking to an article at thepostemail(dot)com outlining the "Kamala Harris is ineligible for the presidency" theory.
Following Harris' announcement, the traffic took off. #QAnon account @WeAreOneQ appears to have posted the first Harris birtherism tweet that went viral. @JacobAWohl followed suit the next day but appears to have neglected to claim the Q crew as inspiration.
Very few of the accounts tweeting about Kamala Harris' supposed presidential ineligibility look like bots based on 24/7 activity/use of automation services. There is noticeable repetition, however; both identical tweets from single accounts and tweets repeated across accounts.
Finally, here are the media sources most frequently linked by the accounts claiming Harris is ineligible. Most are right-wing conspiracy sites (orange), Gateway Pundit being the most prominent. thepostemail(dot)com gets a sizable share as their article from 2018 has resurfaced.
Correction: the account name should be @WeAreOne_Q.
Updating this thread a bit over a day later. The total volume has grown considerably - 25235 tweets from 22506 accounts (was 8797 from 8185 yesterday). @The_Trump_Train (an account with 301K followers that Trump recently RT'd) joins in on the fun.
