This tweet from @charliekirk11 that incorrectly claims that @KamalaHarris is a Marxist is an excellent example of a common Twitter phenomenon: conservatives using the words "Marxist", "communist", and "socialist" as a rhetorical cudgel regardless of accuracy.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We downloaded eight days' worth of tweets containing Marxist/Marxism/communist/communism/socialist/socialism, yielding a total of 1829636 tweets from 657718 accounts. What sort of accounts are tweeting about these topics?
Answer: almost all of the popular tweets mentioning Marxism, communism, or socialism are from right-wing accounts using the terms (generally incorrectly) to insult Democrats. @BernieSanders' tweet making fun of @ElonMusk is a (delightful) exception.
Similarly, the majority of the media sites linked from recent tweets mentioning Marxism, communism, or socialism are to far-right sites, rather than neutral sites or left-wing sites that might be sympathetic to the ideologies in question.
