Thread by @broderick

I've been working on untangling exactly how President Trump became convinced Ukrainians nationals colluded with the Democrats in 2016.

I've written three stories on the evolution of the conspiracy theory:
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…

buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…

buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…

But to show you exactly how hard it can be to follow a piece of misinformation once it gets into the system and begins evolving across social media, I'm going to try and give you a timeline via a Twitter thread.

I think I can do it in about 35 tweets. So uh mute me now.

In June 2016, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike investigates a breach into the DNC servers.

They conclude that Russian government–backed hackers compromised the network.

In December 2016, CrowdStrike releases a full report.

In January 2017, Breitbart writes the first piece that begins a right-wing smear campaign against the firm's findings.

In March 2017, news site Voice of America released an article titled “Think Tank: Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data,” which reported that a British think tank disputed CrowdStrike findings.

It does MASSIVE Facebook traffic. Adds to the pile on.

The earliest mention of CrowdStrike on 4plebs — an incomplete archive of 4chan threads — lists March 2017 as the earliest mention of the firm.

It's safe to assume there was chatter on 4chan and equivalent sites before this, but by March we're really heating up.

Two more Breitbart articles that come out that same week (March 2017) as the big 4chan thread. Both pieces paint CrowdStrike as a part of a DNC conspiracy to spread their own conspiracy about the Trump campaign colluding with the Russian government.

A week later, people on the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald mention CrowdStrike for the first time.

We're now in a full-on social media blitz around the firm.

Places like Zerohedge, the Conservative Daily Post, and Breitbart all chase after the same narrative. Also, Russian media.

A website called iBankCoin is linked to on Reddit and aggregates the previous Breitbart reporting and pulls in false rumors that the firm had ties to the think tank the Atlantic Council, a common boogeyman for the far right.

After 4chan detectives do some paranoid googling, users notice that CrowdStrike’s cofounder and CTO Dmitri Alperovitch has worked with the Atlantic Council.

They also notice Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and another 4chan boogeyman, is on the Atlantic Council’s Board.

Purple monkey dishwasher: Users seemingly start confusing Alperovitch and Pinchuk. Or they just don't care because it's more fun to assume The Atlantic Council and CrowdStrike are both being weaponized by Ukrainian oligarchs.

Really it's about whatever these people can google.

CrowdStrike and their supposed ties to the Atlantic Council appear in an April 2017 4chan thread about conspiracy theories of child trafficking by Democratic leaders.

In April 2017, Trump, in an interview with the AP, says, “Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server? They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based.”

“CrowdStrike,” the AP reporter asks.

“That’s what I heard," Trump replies.

So we can safely say that between December 2016 and April 2017, the conspiracy around CrowdStrike had reached Trump.

In May 2017 the threads of this online conspiracy, by this point loosely known as "Russiagate," connect around the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich.

Both Russian media and Fox News start leaning hard into this narrative.

A sprawling Reddit thread in May 2017 includes CrowdStrike as a major player in the DNC’s supposed inside job conspiracy.

Summer 2017, Russiagate, the DNC conspiracy, and Seth Rich all sort of germinate. It's summer, so a lot of 4chan and Reddit's college-aged userbase is sort of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

This tends to happen every summer.

In a September 2017 4chan thread about former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails CrowdStrike appears again.

QAnon's first post goes live on 8chan on Oct. 28, 2017. It begins to build a narrative around a bunch of DNC-related conspiracies.

CrowdStrike appears in a November 2017 4chan thread about a Daily Caller story about Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former head of the DNC, not telling employees about the server breach.

In December 2017, QAnon mentions CrowdStrike for the first time.

It continues to regularly mention them up until October 2018.

I include this because the Trump sons love to interact with Q stuff.

Trump tweets "Spygate" for the first time on May 23, 2018. He the FBI and the Obama administration of spying on his 2016 campaign. This is based off an NY Times report that the FBI had sent an informant to meet with former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos.

Following Trump’s tweets, Fox News runs close to a dozen pieces about it in May 2018. It also spreads to Reddit and 4chan.

It becomes the lead right-wing counter-narrative. It's less upfront deranged than QAnon.

But QAnon is still humming along.

In September 2018, Matt Palumbo, a writer who works with Spygate-truther Dan Bongino, creates a Spygate “character" chart. This begins to create a central canon to the conspiracy.

Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer are supposed key players.

In October 2018, Bongino publishes a book called "Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump".

November 2018 is when Rudy Giuliani in a Fox News interview this week said he began his Ukraine investigation.

In January 2019, Ukraine’s then–prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko reportedly meets Rudy Giuliani in New York. He says at the meeting, Giuliani asked Lutsenko to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s connections to Ukraine.

The Hill's John Solomon drops a massively shared piece in April 2019 collecting allegations made by Kostiantyn Kulyk, the deputy head of Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s International Legal Cooperation Department, that Ukrainian law enforcement had evidence of Democrat collusion.

April 21, 2019, Giuliani starts his Spygate/Ukraine media blitz. Largely to attack the Mueller report.

He appears on Fox News close to a dozen times between March 2019-May 2019.

Facebook traffic around Spygate content surges.

Russian media is also publishing stories about it.

On May 23, 2019, then–special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker meets with Trump.

Volker testified that Trump was “very skeptical” of President Zelensky and strongly believed that the Ukrainians helped the Democrats frame him for election interference in 2016.

Volker said in his testimony that in July 2016 Giuliani still wanted Ukrainian officials to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 US presidential election, even though he acknowledged Lutsenko was “not credible" and was “acting in a self-serving capacity.”

Which brings us to July 25, the day Trump and Zelensky finally spoke on the phone and the president asked Zelensky to investigate CrowdStrike and a "server," according to a non-verbatim transcript of the phone call.

Over the summer Attorney General Barr met with British officials in London and reportedly expressed a belief that the U.S. investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election stemmed from some corrupt origin.

September 2019 Attorney General Barr travels to Italy to reportedly talk to Italian secret service members about Joseph Mifsud.

September 2019 Trump urges Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to provide assistance to the ongoing Justice Department inquiry. Which is most likely a connection to Alexander Downer.

And, uh, that more or less brings us to this week. Phew...

And just think. This is ONE CONSPIRACY THEORY amplified by Facebook traffic and conservative media that has made it into the president's head.

In summation: 😕😕😕