#HellNoJoe is trending. As has been the case with pretty much every hashtag targeting a 2020 candidate we've studied, very little of the traffic appears to be from bots. We do believe this to be a manufactured trend, however, and automation did play a role.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The #HellNoJoe trend appears to have been coordinated via a Google doc (archived here: archive.is/8je0R) with a planned launch time of 7:00 AM PST. The content suggestions make the trend look bottier than it is, because organic accounts are tweeting identical text/links.
#HellNoJoe indeed kicked off as planned at 7:00 AM PST, and began trending ~15 minutes later. Here's where the automation comes in: many of the initial tweets were scheduled via TweetDeck or Buffer. 1452 of 11205 tweets (13% of total volume) are RTs of these automated tweets.
Retweet network for #HellNoJoe. @DemSocialists is the most prominent of the accounts that contributed scheduled tweets, and the second largest node overall. Although most of the accounts appear to be left-wing, prominent #MAGA account @CarmineSabia hopped on board too.
