[Thread time!] 1/ I was made aware of the hashtag "Investigate Ilhan". The thread refers to the bizarre claims that @IlhanMN needs to be investigated due to some connections with Qatar and Iran. It is obviously part of the usual Islamophobic dog whistle politics that seeks to
2/ distract people from Trump's misgivings by invoking Iran, and this case Qatar. However, as Ilhan mentions below, these are most likely disinformation campaigns by certain actors. Ppl like the @Imamofpeace . But who is behind the investigate Ilhan trend? #disinformation 
@Imamofpeace 3/ So I downloaded a bunch of tweets from the hashtag - approximately 21,000 Tweets, retweets, and replies. These were produced by around 14,000 individual accounts. In the following thread I will analyse their biographies, the influencers, and whether or not this 'authentic'
@Imamofpeace 4/ Firstly a corpus analysis. What can we learn from the bios of the accounts tweeting on the hashtag? Well a whopping 3652 of the accounts contained the word 'MAGA' - Make America Great Again, another 3000 or so contained the word "Trump'. Indeed, collating all the pro-Trump
@Imamofpeace 5/ accounts in the sample, approximately 5,199 of the accounts contained pro-Trump terminology or right-wing conspiratorial lingo (e.g. MAGA, KAG, WWG1WWA, Qanon). That's around 37% of all the accounts in the sample! A huge amount. What's more, if we look at the creation date
@Imamofpeace 6/ we once again see that spike in accounts created in January 2017. That's not a smoking gun, but indicative that a community active on multiple foreign policy issues, from pro-Brexit tweets to pro-regime change in Iran are also tweeting on the Investigate Ilhan hashtag.
@Imamofpeace 7/ The trend also took off extremely quickly. You can see from the graph at 03.27 UTC the trend spiked very quickly. While this in theory could be organic, it, in addition to other anomalies suggests co-ordinated retweeting by a specific community of tweeters.
@Imamofpeace 8/ Most of the content appears to be retweets (around 77%). The most commonly retweeted tweets are those by @RyanAFournier @MichaelCoudrey @LacyJohnsonMN @gailsline @Imamofpeace . Incidentally, Ryan Fournier says he is founder and chairman of Trump Students...
@Imamofpeace @RyanAFournier @MichaelCoudrey @LacyJohnsonMN @gailsline 9/ The most common external URL in the dataset is a link to the JPost story about Ilhan Omer allegedly being recruited as a 'Qatari Asset' - based on testimony by Alan Bender, a man who, according to this Foreign Policy, has a bit of a dodgy history > foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/27/qat…
@Imamofpeace @RyanAFournier @MichaelCoudrey @LacyJohnsonMN @gailsline 10/ Only 14 of the accounts tweeting the hashtag are from verified accounts, including the ones I mentioned before, the rest of them are screenshotted below for your perusal.
@Imamofpeace @RyanAFournier @MichaelCoudrey @LacyJohnsonMN @gailsline 11/. They are in interesting company. At least 37 of the accounts in the trend have explicitly Islamophobic biographies. My personal favorite, the one who is specifically against the Muslim Brotherhood... I am sure average Trump supporters care about this.
@Imamofpeace @RyanAFournier @MichaelCoudrey @LacyJohnsonMN @gailsline 12/ So I could go on, but safe to say,the #InvestigateIlhan trend is dominated by the online MAGA movement, who are, certainly co-ordinated, potentially inauthentic, and often reflecting the foreign policy concerns of a global right wing pro-Saudi, pro-Israel, Islamophobic entity
