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7 tweets,
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A conspiracy theory alleging that Ilhan Omar is or was married to her brother has resurfaced among the #AltWankers of Twitter. Let's dig into its origins.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We downloaded all tweets containing "Ilhan", "Omar", and "brother". After removing a few early false positives, we found this tweet from @KandiRider linking a post promoting the conspiracy theory at powerlineblog(dot)dom, and added tweets linking it to the set.
This chart shows the first 20 accounts to tweet the Ilhan Omar marriage conspiracy theory, back in August 2016. Five of them (including the first, @Conservawonk) appear to be bots due to the fact that they post all their tweets via custom scripts/automation services.
Within two days of the early Twitter activity, the Ilhan Omar conspiracy theory spread to YouTube and Reddit. We checked Gab and archived 4chan posts as well but found no early evidence of it there.
Finally, let's check out the recent spikes in Twitter activity related to the "Ilhan Omar married her brother" conspiracy theory. The first major spike was in August 2018 and was largely fueled by @AmyMek, although she may have picked it up from @realSaavedra or @jihadwatchRS.
This chart shows all tweets in the Ilhan Omar marriage conspiracy dataset with at least 1000 retweets. Account names in the lower right corner are hard to distinguish because the topic has gone rather viral recently, with several dozen accounts having reaching 1000+ RTs.
Subsequent thread with further information on automated tweet activity related to powerlineblog(dot)com (the site that the Omar story apparently first appeared on.)
