A Look Into the Pro-Trump, Alt-Right Twitterverse
Hatewatch has aggregated a glossary of some 1,000+ hate speech phrases that are popular on the radical right and cross-referenced those with a list of alt-right Twitter personalities. Among those in the initial control group were @Nero, @RickyVaughn_99, @ramzpaul, @RichardBSpencer, and @PamelaGeller. These accounts frequently used the platform to disseminate speech advocating for ethnic cleansing, racial separatism and acts of violence against minorities, as well sharing openly racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic imagery.
The resulting index has provided insight into the nature of the alt-right Twitterverse. This has been detailed in reports on the hashtags #hillaryshealth, #buildthewall and #draintheswamp, which revealed that in spite of the apparent prominence of these views on the platform, it is really the work of a small cadre of users generating the original content.
The following chart is a visualization developed to allow users to explore one specific cross-section of Hatewatch’s analysis, a period from Aug. 31-Oct. 25 which represented a peak usage period for #draintheswamp and #hillaryshealth.
Individual nodes on the chart represent distinct users who included #draintheswamp (light blue), #buildthewall (tan), #hillaryshealth (orange), or a combination of the three (dark blue) in a tweet, or retweeted one such post.