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Following the release of the Odessa shooter's name, a variety of speculation about his politics/motives/background/social media quickly spread on Twitter. Most prominent narratives:
- Beto supporter / Democrat(ic) socialist
- social media scrubbed
cc: @ZellaQuixote
- Beto supporter / Democrat(ic) socialist
- social media scrubbed
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote The repeated phrase "The Odessa Shooter's name is Seth Ator, a Democrat Socialist who had a Beto sticker on his truck" comprises a significant share of the overall volume. 2739 of 20454 tweets (13.4%) mentioning the shooter's name contain this phase.
@ZellaQuixote The first account to tweet "The Odessa Shooter's name is Seth Ator, a Democrat Socialist who had a Beto sticker on his truck" was @suemo54, an account with 364 followers that mostly crossposts from Facebook. Despite this, it somehow got hundreds of RTs on its shooter/Beto tweet.
@ZellaQuixote @suemo54 Subsequent to @suemo54's disproportionately-amplified tweets, several other accounts tweeted the same exact phrase. @nightingalern also got traction on their shooter/Beto tweet above and beyond what one might expect from their follower count: 2.4K RTs vs 11.4K followers.
@ZellaQuixote @suemo54 @nightingalern The other major theory being pushed: the shooter's social media was scrubbed to hide the fact that he was a Democrat/Republican/liberal/Trumpster/etc by the police/governor/etc. Weird.
@ZellaQuixote @suemo54 @nightingalern We updated this dataset this afternoon. The claim that the shooter was a Beto-supporting Democrat(ic) socialist remains the dominant narrative, and has attained ridiculous reach: 12856 tweets from 11566 accounts, despite no major accounts having propagated it (yet).
