Thread by @conspirator0

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been a hot topic of late among #coronavirus conspiracy theorists, many of whom seem eager to blame anyone and everyone other than the present occupant of the White House for the crisis.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We downloaded recent tweets containing "Bill Gates" or #BillGates, yielding a massive 1144642 tweets from 411882 accounts in eight days. Automation does not appear to be a major factor. Based on the hashtags in their profiles, the tweeters are pretty much all #MAGA accounts.

The Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracies involve multiple overlapping narratives:

• Gates planned the outbreak in advance and simulated it
• Gates patented the SARS-CoV-2 virus
• Gates is planning "depopulation"
• Gates is planning to implant tracking devices in everyone

These narratives are backed with articles from (mostly) far-right sites such as Creative Destruction Media, Zero Hedge, and Epoch Times. Creative Destruction is a site that complains about "globalists" while having former Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley executives on its staff.

The Bill Gates/#coronavirus conspiracy theories began surfacing on Twitter on obscure accounts on February 19th, 2020. Most of the early adopters are English language #MAGA/#QAnon accounts, but German, Spanish, and French tweets turn up too.

Fast forward to the present, and the various #coronavirus/#BillGates conspiracy narratives have gone mainstream on #MAGA Twitter, with @johncardillo, @QBlueSkyQ, the ironically-named @Education4Libs, and coronavirus disinfo frequent flier @DeAnna4Congress as the largest nodes.

One more thing: Bill Gates/#coronavirus conspiracy theories appear to be a good way for smaller fringy websites to generate traffic. Both creativedestructionmedia(dot)com and fort-russ(dot)com experienced particularly large increases in the volume of tweets linking the site.