#FollowTheWhiteRabbit

Over 100K tweets containing #FollowTheWhiteRabbit have been posted since 11/8, centered on a conspiracy theory that originated on 4chan. This appears to be the first post. I'll outline the theory briefly. . .
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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).

Digging further, I found 43 users who had tweeted #FollowTheWhiteRabbit at least 50 times and whose tweet schedules looked extremely unlikely to indicate operation by a single human being located in a US timezone-these make up the "blue" category on the volume chart. Examples:

On 11/10, a very familiar group of accounts joined in with their own #FollowTheWhiteRabbit tweets. Here's a linked to an older thread describing them. These users are the "red" category on the volume bar chart. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/926277005078880257

RT/reply network diagram for the first day (11/8) of #FollowTheWhiteRabbit traffic. TH3WH17ERABB17, who posted the original tweet is prominent. Tracybeanz, one of the users tagged shortly after, also shows as a major influence.

11/9 #FollowTheWhiteRabbit traffic. TH3WH17RABB17 had stopped tweeting but still received some residual RTs. Grey bubbles are accounts not in any of the previously described categories, and potentially indicate migration of the hashtag beyond the original propaganda networks.

#FollowTheWhiteRabbit RT/reply diagram for 11-10 and 11-11. The red nodes are a group of accounts that previously pushed #UraniumOne and #SethRich, among other things.

11-12 through 11-15. The two groups of likely propaganda accounts (red and blue) dominate the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit traffic during this period.

11-16 and 11-17 - the red and blue sets of accounts show less influence here. When I checked, these accounts had largely pivoted from #FollowTheWhiteRabbit to tweets about Al Franken. This matches the recent activity tracked on the Hamilton68 dashboard.
https://twitter.com/webradius/status/931496984841719808

This thread could have been longer, but it's long enough. Here's some further reading about other batshit crazy conspiracies. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

Updated version of the volume plot from earlier in this thread, including #FollowTheWhiteRabbit tweets from today. Note the new "counterpropaganda" category - result of today's thread. The signal is small, but could easily be grown with judicious use of the hashtag.

Footnote - despite me not tagging her in this thread, one of the early drivers of the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit hashtag, tracybeanz, blocked me sometime in the last few hours.

An additional development related to #FollowTheWhiteRabbit - a story appeared last night claiming that Marines had landed at Langley to prevent a coup against Trump. The main source appears to be a YouTube video.

In addition to the video being circulated by the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit accounts, several dubious "news" sites posted articles on the topic, linking the video.

I downloaded tweets linking the YouTube video in question (linked below). As of 11 CST, there were 1736 tweets from 1457 accounts. I'll note that 212 of these (14%) were created in the last two months. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

I looked at the schedules of the top 20 accounts posting the video in terms of retweet volume. Eight of them, including the top two (a_americafirst and TrumpsBlonde) have tweet schedules that are unlikely to be a solo human tweeting on US time. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

There are a signs that a number of the accounts involved are bots. Default profile picture is a frequent sign, as is steady tweet volume 24 hours a day. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

Here's the tweet volume for tweets linking the "Marines landed at Langley" video. Note the spike at 3 AM, driven almost entirely by the accounts with bizarre tweet schedules. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

This diagram shows the retweet/reply relationships for tweets linking the "Marines landed at Langley" YouTube video. Color scheme is the same as in the bar chart in the previous tweet. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit

Noted #Altwanker Vox Day aka Theodore Beale has belately jumped on the #FollowTheWhiteRabbit bandwagon. It's kind of astonishing it took this long, since he has a habit of promoting 4chan as a legitimate news source.