Thread by @conspirator0

In the wake of Donald Trump's positive COVID-19 test and subsequent hospitalization, #MAGA Twitter has been abuzz with conspiracy theories attributing his diagnosis to an assassination attempt by various entities such as China, Biden, Pelosi, and Alexei Navalny.

cc @ZellaQuixote

We downloaded tweets containing the word "assassination" subsequent to Trump's announcement of his positive test, and filtered out some obvious false positives (tweets about the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, for example). Very little of the traffic appears to be automated.

Tweets theorizing that Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis was actually part of an assassination attempt began appearing a scant 3 minutes after his positive test was announced (Oct 1 2020), starting with a reply from 4-month old account @Freddie111112 to CNN reporter @mkraju.

Retweet network for tweets containing "assassination" subsequent to Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis. The most-retweeted account is QAnon supporter and fake follower aficionado @DeAnna4Congress, who framed Trump's infection as a Chinese assassination attempt.

We found a decent number of repeated tweets among the assassination attempt tweets. Recurring narratives:

• Trump was deliberately infected at the debate
• Pelosi and Schumer are behind it
• Four "assassination teams" are behind it
• China is behind it

Many of the repeated tweets are replies to prominent accounts. The most prolific reply spammer is @mervinxavierdx, with a whopping 113 replies. @Freddie111112, the first account to suggest that Trump's COVID diagnosis was part of an assassination attempt, turns up as well.

One of the more interesting of the reply spammers is @VladislavGinko, who per his profile is "affiliated with the Russia's largest state think-tank RANEPA". Eight of his replies claim the Biden campaign may be coordinating with Alexei Navalny to assassinate Trump.

We've seen this technique of reply-spamming big accounts to spread disinfo before. It was used in 2017 to push early Q drops, and more recently to spread the conspiracy theory that Bill Barr tried to visit Ghislaine Maxwell in jail.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/931985050987581442

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1279151104597557248

(slight correction: these tweets are obviously not in Japanese, forgot to change the column header from a previous project)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1312863155140341769?s=20