[Thread] 1/ Network graph of Twitter accounts targeting @BillGates on the "Bill Gates is not our friend hashtag". This is a sample of around 11,000 interactions (tweets, replies, mentions, rts etc) by around 6,500 unique accounts taken from around 6th April until now. 
2/ As you can see, most of the interactions are "mentions in retweets". This is often indicative of 'Trump trains', when pro Trump accounts mass mention other accounts and others retweet those tweets. The purpose of these is to get things trending. Let's see who is tweeting...
3/ One of the most vocal people on the hashtag is this "Devin Beavers" chap. If we look at his account. Yup, no surprises, it's a "Make America Great Again" account, with the aesthetics you'd expect, US flag, a selection of on message tweets supporting Trump
4/ As I suspected from the hashtag itself, and also the high number of "mentions in retweets", the hashtag is dominated by pro-Trump and alt right accounts. A corpus analysis of the account biographies reveals most common noun is MAGA, then Trump, then KAG (Keep America Great)
5/ In fact, around 42% of all the accounts with any biographical detail had either a pro-Trump or alt right related term in their bio (e.g WWG1WGA , Qanon). #disinformation
6/ If we look at the most influential accounts on the hashtag we can see @billgates is clearly being targeted by the accounts. @RealDonaldTrump is also mentioned (unsurprisingly). An interesting influential account is @DonnaWR8 . A pro-Trump account spreading conspiracies
7/ Donna, whose account has 108k thousand followers and over 225k tweets is suggesting that there is some global luciferian cabal at work, involving Bill Gates, who apparently wants to depopulate the planet... Also apparently Tedros was a Marxist Terrorist.... #Coronavirus
8/ I am always amazed by how spammy the disinformation and conspiracy networks are. I sized nodes by how many tweets the accounts have sent. There's a lot of large nodes. Take this pink community. Many of the accounts have hundreds of thousands of tweets. That is phenomenal
9/Again, we see the online MAGA movement spreading conspiracies and disinformation pertaining to #coronavirus, and in this case, specifically about Bill Gates. At what point is it fair to say that one specific community is responsible for so much of the disinformation we see?
10/ For some more interesting reads on the upsurge in attacks on Bill Gates, read this > thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2020/04/1… and this nytimes.com/2020/04/17/tec… #Covid_19
