#FollowTheWhiteRabbit: How Conspiracy Theories Spread on the Internet via Twitter

Not sure if Tech board or Poli Board so OT it is!

Question the data if you wish. This study can be recreated. For the record, I have vetted this source over the past few months and I find his work reliable.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/931983301597913088

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According to #QAnon (source of the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit theory), Trump was elected to come to the rescue of the USA by overthrowing the "deep state", and several prominent individuals have already been secretly indicted.

Per the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit 4chan posts, Barack Obama's jury duty was actually a cover story for his indictment, and Hillary Clinton and John McCain (whose tumor was apparently faked or something) have been wearing boots to hide ankle bracelets.

Under the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit theory, Mueller and Mattis were both selected specifically due to serving in the Marine Corps. Supposedly the Marines are not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act (this claim is false) and would therefore be legally able to enforce martial law.



Michael Flynn is also part of the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit theory, but instead of being a suspicious link between the Trump campaign/administration and Russia, he was apparently using his connections to investigate the "enemies of the state within".



According to the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit posts, Trump is allowing "antifa" to operate so he can impose martial law, allowing military trial of Clinton, Obama, McCain, and others. McCain and Nancy Pelosi have supposedly faked medical issues in order to be declared unfit for trial.

That's not the whole story being propagated, but it should give you the general gist. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

Here's a chart showing the top ten external sites linked from #FollowTheWhiteRabbit tweets. Not surprisingly, the majority are from 4chan, although a few of the others are interesting; we'll come back to WJLA later.




I'll briefly draw attention to the presence of fake news site yournewswire in the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit tweets. Here are the headlines of some of the articles linked.





The motives behind #FollowTheWhiteRabbit are ambiguous - here are some possibilities. . .

(1) Raise the hopes of Cult 45 that they're witnessing something HUGE and then crushing them
(2) Groom the masses to accept/support/not protest unconstitutional actions against "establishment" authorities
(3) Groom the masses to embrace violence against their presumed enemies
(4) Sow seeds of confusion/discord and stress/distress within the masses to distract them from or slow their response to actual major event(s)
(5) Clickbait campaign to build followers for propaganda "news" sites
(6) Massive prank?
(7) Other?

This chart shows the tweet volume for #FollowTheWhiteRabbit. I'll explain the different categories of accounts in more detail in the next few tweets.





The #FollowTheWhiteRabbit trend originated shortly before midnight PST on 11/7, with a tweet from TH3WH17ERABB17. They continued to tweet aspects of the theory for the next 10 hours and then went silent.





TH3WH17ERABB17's initial push consisted of posting questions in the form of memes and crowdsourcing answers. The 3 accounts below improbably always seemed to have the right answer to the questions (and also infrequently appeared in the same set of replies for a given question).





The TH3WH17ERABB17 account and its alts appeared to have been repeatedly restricted/suspended by Twitter, btw. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

43 minutes after the first #FollowTheWhiteRabbit tweet, user AaronDBailey3 tweeted the hashtag and related 4chan links at 32 users with high follower counts.







5 of the users tagged by AaronDBailey started spreading the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit hashtag. The most successful was tracybeanz, one of whose tweets linked this story from Sinclair-owned WJNA. (I'm reminded of the Russian embassy staff burning documents when they were evicted).

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