Right-wing Twitter accounts have appropriated the term "Boogaloo" to refer to a hypothetical second US civil war, possibly sparked by gun regulations. We dug into their usage of the hashtags #Boogaloo and #Boogaloo2020.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote We downloaded tweets containing either #Boogaloo or #Boogaloo2020 and removed early non-political tweets. Volume has been slowly rising since March 2019, and spiked abruptly during/after a Nov 23 standoff between police and an armed suspect in Mahopac, NY. thedailybeast.com/how-instagram-…
@ZellaQuixote The first Twitter account to use #Boogaloo in a civil war/anti-gun law sense appears to be @Fly_guyfishy, in a March 28 reply to @NRA. The first to gain significant traction was @AP4Liberty, who felt the need to tweet about not being banned for a previous gun-related tweet.
@ZellaQuixote @Fly_guyfishy @NRA @AP4Liberty Retweet network for #Boogaloo/#Boogaloo2020 political tweets. There's a lot to unpack here, including 3D-printed firearms, T-shirt sales, anger over vaping regulations in addition to gun laws, an IFTTT bot, pundit @iheartmindy, and GOP U.S.Representative @RepThomasMassie.
@ZellaQuixote @Fly_guyfishy @NRA @AP4Liberty @iheartmindy @RepThomasMassie The #Boogaloo/#Boogaloo2020 tweets contain almost no links to actual news media sites, but they do contain a lot of links to Instagram. Most of these are memes - we found 368 unique images, this collage shows representative examples.
@ZellaQuixote @Fly_guyfishy @NRA @AP4Liberty @iheartmindy @RepThomasMassie What hashtags accompany #Boogaloo/#Boogaloo2020 in the civil war-related Boogaloo tweets? #2A, #CivilWar2, and #2ndAmendment are the most common, with 2nd amendment hashtags being a general theme. #WeVapeWeVote and #Tacocat show up largely due to @UnbreakableHate spamming them.
