Thread by @conspirator0

In Aug 2020, someone redirected antifa(dot)com to joebiden(dot)com, and has now switched it to whitehouse(dot)gov. Even though anyone can buy a domain and point it at any website, some folks falsely insist Biden is affiliated with the antifa(dot)com domain name.

cc @ZellaQuixote

Whoever bought the antifa(dot)com domain also appears to have briefly pointed it at kamalaharris(dot)org and buildbackbetter(dot)gov. Again, this does not require the consent or involvement of the website being redirected to.

We downloaded tweets containing links to antifa(dot)com. There are four spikes in tweet volume, corresponding to when major accounts noticed the redirect and tweeted about it. (Earlier traffic is off-topic and extremely light, and has thus been excluded from this analysis.)

Here are the earliest on-topic tweets linking antifa(dot)com, from August 2020. The account that posted the first 2 tweets, @MannyV129, was created 3 days before posting them and did not tweet about any topic other than the antifa(dot)com website in its first 4 weeks on Twitter.

Many of the early tweets linking antifa(dot)com after it was redirected to Biden's campaign site appear to be attempts to get major accounts to notice it. 22 of the first 30 tweets have at least one account with 100K+ followers tagged. @ACTBrigitte was first to take the bait.

We've seen this technique of spreading disinfo by shopping it around to big accounts via replies before. Examples:

2017: links to early QAnon 4chan posts (

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

)
2020: bogus claim that Bill Barr tried to visit Ghislaine Maxwell in jail (

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

)

Retweet network for tweets linking antifa(dot)com subsequent to it being redirected at Biden's campaign site (and later the White House). @getongab, @BrandonStraka, @charliekirk11, @aubrey_huff, and @RyanAFournier have all been major nodes at varying points in time.