Thread by @conspirator0

Thanks to intepid reporter, animal lover, and automated (via IFTTT) account @EvelynWhiteGOP, we now know that trumpservativenews(dot)club is a thing. Yes, this is a real website and promoting it seems to be the mission of said account.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

The site consists mostly of news and opinion articles copied from other sites, which have frequently themselves copied the material in question. Oh, also ads. Lots of ads for pro-Trump paraphernalia.

We downloaded tweets linking to trumpservativenews(dot)club, resulting in 9053 tweets from 3408 accounts in the last 10 days. The site starts receiving links in late August 2018; prior to that it may have been hosted at trumpservativenews(dot)info instead.

Retweet network for trumpservativenews(dot)club. The structure is interesting; there are 7 major nodes (@DTrumpTrain_, @EmmaTurnerBN, @EvelynWhiteGOP, @Laureen4Trump, @TrumpDailyNewss, @TrumpNewsDaily_, and @TrumpNewsz) and almost no other accounts being retweeted at all.

All seven of these accounts share the same automation (via IFTTT) and have nearly identical tweet schedules. @EmmaTurnerBN has some potentially organic activity in early December 2018 via the website, but it's all RTs of the other bots.

These seven automated accounts have amassed between 32K and 53K-ish followers each, for a combined audience of 135951. 63435 (46.7%) of the followers follow more than one of the seven bots.

What websites do these accounts link? Pretty much just trumpservativenews(dot)club; Amazon is a distant (and only) second. In terms of content, the tweets are mostly the titles of the linked articles; Trump, Mueller, and immigration seem to be hot topics presently.

Do these accounts repeat tweets? The answer is yes, but not to the extent of hundreds of copies or more of each tweet. Tweets were repeated anywhere between between 2 and 24 times across anywhere between 1 account and all 7 (most frequently 4).

Finally, a brief look at a random sample of 1000 accounts that retweeted the 7 bots. Very few look like bots (2.3% based on 24/7 activity/use of automation services). The accounts largely link far-right media and use pro-Trump hashtags; #GiletsJaunes is an interesting inclusion.