Thread by @conspirator0

Let's take a quick look at the propagation of the #Bernie2020 hashtag. We captured tweets yesterday (1/26) at roughly noon CST, resulting in 52395 tweets from 20572 accounts in the preceding 10 days. Traffic was light until the evening of 1/25.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Retweet network for #Bernie2020 as of 1/26. The activity is divided into two main clusters: the group of accounts in the upper right are those pushing the hashtag, and those in the lower left (mostly liberal) are discussing it. The upper right right cluster is very dense. . .

The reason for this is that many of the major accounts pushing #Bernie2020 are retweeting each other. This diagram shows what the network looks like when just accounts with mutual retweet relationships are included (total of 81 accounts).

Here's the complete network again, with the activity involving the accounts that mutually retweet each other's #Bernie2020 tweets in pink. 14925 of 22395 tweets (66.6%) in this cluster are tweets or retweets of one of these 81 accounts.

We then updated the #Bernie2020 dataset this morning (1/27) at ~9 AM CST. There are now 100402 tweets from 43572 accounts. Let's take a look at the updated network.

A third cluster has emerged: right-wing accounts discussing the #Bernie2020 hashtag. There are now occasional instances of mutual retweeting in the other two clusters, but the vast majority of the mutual retweet activity is still in the group pushing the hashtag.