Thread by @conspirator0

When Conspiracy Theories Meet and Make Friends. . . #UraniumOne

The Department of Justice announced the indictment of Mark Lambert on 11 charges on January 12th, and tweets appeared not long after attempting to tie this event to Hillary Clinton. In the limited searching I did, I was unable to find such a connection.
justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…

Here's the volume of tweets containing "uranium" and at least one of "indictment", "bribery", and "one" since the DOJ announcement. Total of 132031 tweets. 10301 of those came from accounts with default profile images and less than 20 followers, suggesting bot activity.

Here's the first tweet I was able to find linking the announcement to #UraniumOne. Comes from an account (@PatsforTruth) with 16 tweets and 6 followers., which I found interesting.

This appears to be the earliest tweet about the indictments to receive a substantial number of RTs. @B75434425 is interesting - mostly dormant before November, when they suddenly started tweeting profusely about conspiracy theories using the #QAnon hashtag - 1493 tweets in all.

These network diagrams show the retweet/reply relationships for the indictment tweets at three different stages - first 500 tweets, first 2000, and first 10000. The theory originates with anonymous accounts and is gradually picked up by right-wing journalists.

Here's the network after 50000 tweets. It was surprising (and a bit depressing) to see a U.S. Representative propagating a conspiracy theory, even @SteveKingIA. #AltWankers

Final network diagram containing all 132031 tweets. Despite the fact that the indictment says nothing about #UraniumOne, Fox News has joined in with a headline calling it part of the "Uranium One Probe."

Getting back to the premise of conspiracy theories meeting and making friends, it's not hard to find tweets (939 in my set) claiming the Hawaii ballistic missile false alarm was an attempt to distract the public from the indictments that aren't actually related to #UraniumOne.