Thread by @conspirator0

Here's an interesting account. @GregRubini is a stalwart US citizen who spreads a veritable buffet of conspiracy theories involving anything and everything from space travel, 9/11, Syria, Novichok, and the Vatican to over 113K Twitter followers.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Among @GregRubini's perpetual themes is a portrayal of the world as a conflict between a sinister Soros-led globalist cabal and various right-wing authoritarian leaders, such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orbán.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Despite the claims in many of @GregRubini's tweets ranging from wildly speculative to outright false, they're obviously true because @GregRubini has sources. Sources in the FBI, sources with access to closed-door hearings, and last but not least a Security Officer at Trump Tower.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote The security guard story is clearly legitimate as @GregRubini has posted several photos of the interior of Trump tower (one, featuring an empty bar, twice.) The promised video footage somehow never materialized. We were unable to prove @GregRubini didn't take these photos, but...

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote The photograph of the speakers in @GregRubini's sitting room and the lovely view of the New York City skyline from a Trump Tower apartment do not appear to have in fact been take by @GregRubini; both turn up in multiple unrelated results in Yandex reverse image search.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote What does @GregRubini do for a living? He's a jack-of-all-trades, having worked in Art Direction, Sound Engineering, International Marketing, and "optic electronics", the latter two at more or less the same time.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Also, this US citizen has an occasional propensity for UK spellings such as "tyres", especially in earlier tweets. There's one more interesting and esoteric detail that suggests (but does not prove) that this account may not be operated from the USA.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Tweet IDs encode several pieces of data, including a number identifying the datacenter that processed the tweet. Since distance affects network speed, it would be logical to handle tweets in datacenters on the same continent as the user. Can we find evidence that this is so?

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote The answer appears to be yes, but it's a rough metric. We tested 1500 English-language accounts, 750 with US and 750 with European profile locations, and found each datacenter indeed seems to preferentially (but not exclusively) handle either US or European traffic.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Connecting this back to the @GregRubini account, tweets thus far have been sent more frequently via datacenters that appear to more frequently handle European than US tweets.

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote (We got an error rate of 20.9% in our control group, so assuming there are no other flaws in the metric and our control group is representative, one can expect this method to be wrong roughly one out of every five times.)

@GregRubini @ZellaQuixote Update: in a development that will come as no surprise to anyone who is paying attention, @GregRubini's prediction of McCabe's arrest has aged rather quite poorly.
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