Fig 1.
Map of far right groups sampled.
We found three distinct groups of accounts associated with Trump’s campaign. These are emphasised with stronger colours:(a) GOP group, (b) Trump group, and (c) Alt-right group. The plot shows all groups (> 2000 members) found by our sample linked according to how often their members follow accounts in other groups, and annotated with words used significantly commonly in the biographies of the group’s members. The thickness of links was calculated by recording, for each member of the originating-group, the proportion of accounts which were followed in the linked-group, and then taking an average of these proportions. Links are the same colour as the group containing the following accounts and point to the group containing the followed accounts. The most cohesive group (thickest self-loop) is the Trump group with an average member having 70% of the accounts they have followed being in the same group. The largest group was size 55,730, (marked *).
Fig 2.
Changing growth rates of each group.
Shows how a decrease in new accounts aligned with the GOP group coincided with a growth in the Trump and Alt-right groups, especially after Trump’s campaign announcement in June 2015. We plot the growth rates over time of the three focal groups: Trump (orange diamonds), Alt-right (purple Xs), and GOP (red circles). Events shown: p, Tax Day Events on 12 April 2009 associated with the Tea Party Movement; q, 2012 US elections on 6 November 2012; r Trump’s election campaign announcement on 16 June 2015; s 2016 US elections on 5 November 2016.
Fig 3.
Accounts followed shifted from GOP to the Trump group.
After the 2012 election, there was a shift from following accounts in the GOP group to following accounts in the Trump group (panels a, b and c). Members of the Alt-right group have increasingly followed one another over time (panel b), but are not followed by GOP or Trump group members (panels a and b). Each of the three panels show how the members of one focal group followed members of the groups over time. The time traces show the proportions of accounts that were followed in the Trump (orange line), Alt-right (purple dash-dotted line), or GOP (red dashed line) groups, averaged over each member in the originating group. Events shown (p, q, r, and s) are as in Fig 2. The data points have very small 95% confidence intervals (shaded areas, see Methods) which demonstrates that this pattern is highly statistically significant: The members of a group largely changed their following-behaviour in concert.
Table 1.
The three focal groups have few bots and are widely followed by other accounts on Twitter.
We estimated numbers of bots by testing 2,000 accounts using Botometer [24] (scores >0.8 were deemed bots). The number of followers was the number of unique accounts on the whole of Twitter that had followed at least one account in each group. The number of followers for all three groups combined is 57 million, comparable in size to the 63M who voted for Trump in the election. Figures are given to 2 d.p., K means thousands, and M means millions.