More Than Half of Trump’s Retweets Are White Supremacists Praising Him
More Than Half of Trumps Retweets Are White Supremacists Praising Him
By Jay Hathaway at New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/following/2016/01/
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Last week, presidential candidate Donald Trump caused a minor stir by retweeting someone with the Twitter handle @whitegenocideTM, which some saw as making explicit the connection between Trump and American white supremacists. But thats just one data point, right? A one-off thing that could have been an interns mistake? Unfortunately, no: the data shows that 62 percent of the accounts Trump has retweeted recently have white-supremacist connections.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, of social-media analytics company Little Bird, took a look at the 21 people the Donald has blessed with his fantastic, luxurious retweets this week, and discovered that six of them follow major white-nationalist accounts, and 13 of them follow multiple accounts that have used the #whitegenocide hashtag.
Conclusion? It turns out that Donald Trump mostly retweets white supremacists saying nice things about him.
Its hard to separate cause from effect here. Is Trump riling up the white nationalists by lending them his 5-million-follower megaphone whenever they praise him? Or are racists, who love Trump for his anti-immigration polemics, just more likely than others to send our future hairpiece-in-chief the kind of praise he likes to retweet?
Either way, Trump and white nationalism seem to be caught in a positive-feedback loop, each emboldening the other.
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