It’s confirmed: Donald Trump’s supporters on social media have all the best sources, and those sources are telling them the world is run by a single shadowy organization intent on controlling your mind.
Data provided to The Daily Beast by social media analytics company Demographics Pro shows that Donald Trump supporters are 4.2 times more likely to tweet about the New World Order than Hillary Clinton supporters. Thirty-nine percent of people who tweeted the hashtag #NewWorldOrder followed Trump’s Twitter account. Almost 32 percent who tweeted about #FalseFlag—that shootings and terror attacks like the Sandy Hook or Orlando massacres were staged by the government—followed Trump on social media. About 10 percent of the #FalseFlag tweeters followed Clinton.
“We had a much larger list, but right down the line the correlation was pretty clear. It’s three to four times more people tweeting about conspiracies who follow Trump [than Clinton],” said Demographics Pro’s Corey McCarren. “Illuminati was on there, too.”
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You likely can’t chalk up the discrepancy to irony or trolling, either. Trump’s followers are four times more likely to follow InfoWars’ Alex Jones, who believes that the government is intentionally creating gay people and inadvertently creating gay frogs, and that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.
The Demographics Pro methodology, McCarren said, excludes any fake or bot accounts that follow Trump, which both his detractors and supporters are known to deploy.
McCarren said his firm is primarily focused on consumer social media research—the next study, for example, focuses on who exactly is left playing Pokémon Go after all the dust has settled—but his co-workers wanted to take another shot at media political media consumption habits for the first time since the primaries.
“Trump was getting a lot of press for some of the conspiracy theories his supporters are putting out there, so we wanted to look into the likelihood that they were following accounts that are known for it,” said McCarren.
Over the past week, Trump’s supporters have been floating the conspiracy theory, predominantly spread by InfoWars and Breitbart, that Hillary Clinton is deathly ill with everything from Parkinson’s to syphilis. In response, Clinton’s campaign put out a note from her doctor listing her actual ailments: hypothyroidism and seasonal allergies.
One of the conspiracy theories even made it onto a printed-out chart Trump himself has been holding up at rallies. The poster, sourced by BeforeItsNews.com, shows off alleged ties between the Clinton Foundation and countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman. CNN’s Brian Stelter took Trump surrogate Jason Miller to task for the chart on Sunday.
“He’s holding up a chart here that shows alleged donations from Middle Eastern countries to the Clinton Foundation. But if you look at this website, BeforeItsNews.com—this is a crazy website, to be honest with you. It’s got alien stories, conspiracy theories, UFO stories—stuff like that. Anybody can post to that site,” said Stelter. “Who checks this data ahead of time to make sure the sources are accurate and reliable?”
Miller dodged the question, saying he “hadn’t seen that particular chart, so I can’t comment.” But there apparently is an answer to the question “who checks this data?” According to this study, it’s the people who follow Donald Trump on Twitter, and nobody else.
