Meet @Wizard_Predicts, a self-anointed Election Wizard with 106K followers and a taste for dubious tweets about voter fraud. It takes pride in being followed by @DanScavino, @MattGaetz, @DLoesch, and many more. (We'll get back to the "many more" part shortly).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The first unusual thing we noticed about @Wizard_Predicts: despite it being an English-language pro-Trump account, many of the "Who To Follow" suggestions that come up when viewing its timeline are non-English accounts.
Although @Wizard_Predicts's followers mostly look like English-language #MAGA accounts, things get a weirder when we look at the first 10K or so: the 2009 spike in account creations we usually see is largely absent. (Its first follower is right-wing Twitter pundit @Barnes_Law.)
Additionally, many of @Wizard_Predicts's first 10K followers are accounts that follow hundreds of times as many accounts as they have followers of their own. Followers/following ratios are substantially less extreme for its later followers.
One more thing: a lot of @Wizard_Predicts's early followers are non-English language accounts. 23% of those of its first 10K followers with visible tweets (1779 of 7878 accounts) tweet primarily in a language other than English, compared to 6% (483/8212 accounts) of the next 10K.
Also, @Wizard_Predicts (permanent ID 1290635110149169152) wasn't always named @Wizard_Predicts. Previous names include @ConLawScholar and @RogueEsq (and possibly others we haven't found yet).
We looked further at the retweets of @Wizard_Predicts's tweets available via the Twitter API, and found that it has had at least 13 different @-names since August 1st.
(For those of you who use the Twitter API to pull data, you can tell what the name of an account was at the time it was retweeted based on the "RT @<name>" portion of the tweet text returned by the API - it will show the name at the time of retweet rather than the current name.)
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