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8 tweets,
7 min read
Read on Twitter
Who gets their news from trump-train(dot)com, anyway? @mitchsnyder45, among others. When this account isn't spamming followback tweets ("IFB" = "I follow back"), it uncritically links factually dubious articles from a "news" site launched five months ago.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The claim in the trump-train(dot)com article that Trump received more donations from women than any Democratic candidate in Q1 2019 appears to be false, btw - FEC data indicates that both Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders had more female donors than Trump in that timespan.
Looking more closely at trump-train(dot)com, a weird discrepancy surfaces. The content consists mostly of low-quality news items (some copied from other sites) targeted at a right-wing audience, but the "About" section claims "health care,tips and some tretment (sic)" as topics.
trump-train(dot)com is not the only site with this text on the "About" or "Contact" page - a quick Google search reveals at least eight. Many presently look apolitical, have minimal content, and don't show up in the Twitterverse. . .
The two exceptions: trump-train(dot)com and washingtton(dot)com. Both present as news sites, have very similar visual styles, and identical "About" pages. Also, the two domain names were registered 17 minutes apart on December 30th, 2018.
We downloaded tweets linking both sites. trump-train(dot)com got substantially more traction (273403 total tweets), compared to 1704 for washingtton(dot)com (we'd say the spelling error was a turn-off to the intended audience if we actually believed it.)
Who linked the two sites on Twitter first? Five accounts (@donaldtrumpforc, @MAGandKAG, @SuperPatriotone, @TrumpGirls, and @Trump_020) created in the 9 days prior to the launch of the sites are major drivers of the early traffic. How'd they accomplish this?
The answer, revealed in the accounts' repeated tweets: followback, followback, and more followback. Each account at this point has 13-15K followers, just the ticket if you want to drive unwary visitors to your recently wrought low-quality news sites.
