In a sample of 31,000 tweets about the Georgia special election from late last week, POLITICO found that slightly over 1 percent bore the #RobertsRooms tag. This alone is a considerable share. It doesn’t match the performance of the primary campaign tags like #VoteYourOssoff or #KarenHandel, which were in 17 percent and 9 percent of tweets, respectively, but it beats many of the second-tier tags.
But the #RobertsRooms tag is just a useful marker for Shelton’s network of affiliated accounts. Together, accounts that used this tag punched far above their combined weight. Although only around 3 percent of individuals ever used it, this group accounted for 5 percent of all tweets about the special election in our sample.
Their output is even more stark when you look at posts that praise Handel. More than a third of positive tweets that mention Handel by name came from this small cluster of accounts, according to our analysis, and 11 percent of all tweets that tagged Handel or used her primary hashtag.
In another sample of 4,500 tweets that bothered to namecheck Handel’s pretty anemic official campaign account, more than 70 percent came from those in Shelton’s network. And close to 75 percent of those using solidarity tags like #HoldThe6th — an answer to #FlipThe6th from the Ossoff camp — came from this same group.
Virtually all tweets from the network come with slapdash memes of some sort. There’s "Ossoff is owned by George Soros," one of Shelton’s favorite themes, “Make sure your church votes for Karen on June 20,” and “Ossoff supports Sharia law,” among others. It’s not clear how many of these originated with Shelton, but many only took off once amplified by the #RobertsRooms network.
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
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