Thread by @conspirator0

Conspiracy theories are making the rounds centered on an alleged coup against Trump as evidenced by the various investigations focused on the Trump campaign, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and possible overlap between the two.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We downloaded recent tweets in English containing "coup", resulting in 426889 tweets from 198880 accounts over 10 days. Two topics turn up: conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation and tweets about recent events in Venezuela.

To focus on the tweets calling the investigation(s) a coup, we removed tweets containing "Venezuela", "Vzla", "Maduro", "Muduro" (sic), "Guaido", "Guaidó", or "Caracas", as well as tweets containing the expression "what a coup for [x]", leaving 271431 tweets from 138250 accounts.

The majority of the tweets come from right-wing accounts pushing the (unsubstantiated) claims about an attempted coup, using hashtags such as #MAGA, #Spygate, #QAnon, and #DeepState. Skeptical discussion is present to a lesser degree (#DerangedDonald, #Resist.)

Right-wing conspiracy sites, along with RT, dominate the set of news sources linked from the coup tweets (CNN is an exception, used to push back against the coup claims.) Humanevents(dot)com features a plea for donations because everyone is censoring conservatives or something.

Judicial Watch leads the pack of YouTube channels linked from the coup tweets, with several Fox News channels, something called "Fight Globalism TV", RT (as well as Redacted Tonight, @LeeCamp's RT show), and The @jimmy_dore show tossed in for good measure.

What's driving the coup conspiracy theory traffic? Retweets from prominent accounts, mostly. Here we see a spike on 5/1 where suddenly over 400 tweets were posted in under a minute. Bots? Nope - Trump retweeted a five day old @TomFitton tweet, giving new life to the topic.

This figure shows the traffic with the 20 most retweeted tweets highlighted. Most of them push the view that the Mueller investigation was an attempted coup, although a few pushing back on the coup claims and three off-topic tweets made it into the set as well.

Footnote: the humanevents(dot)com site mentioned earlier in this thread is new. It has nonetheless been linked on Twitter 15625 times since 4/27, perhaps due to promotion by several prominent right-wing Twitter accounts (some of whom also write for the site.)