Dave Fleet

How MAGA hallucinations became real I pay for the data behind these myself and it take a lot of time and effort to analyze and create these graphics. If you want more of them, SUPPORT LINKS ARE IN BIO At 1:05 p.m. on Oct 11, Nick Sortor posted that an Ohio mental hospital “CONFIRMS” James Talarico was discharged. That evening the hospital said Talarico never received treatment there. Talarico says he's never even been to Ohio. Rhein Amacher, who made the recorded call, posted that he made up a verification code to get past the front desk. This story occurred over several days. Ken Paxton called Talarico “missing” on Oct 7. Sara Gonzales teased “unverified information” that would “END his campaign” on Oct 8. On Oct 9, Spencer Pratt said his sources put Talarico in a mental health facility, and a handful of accounts pasted near-identical “credible sources are leaking” posts. At 7:50 a.m. on the 11th, Sortor gave Talarico a deadline, “let us know by 1pm ET today.” The earlier pushes never fully took off, and acted more as a booster for the posts that came later. Pratt's post got 6.4 million views, but only about 60 accounts posted about the story in the hour after it. Caroline Wren's private-plane theory the next day drew about 40. Before the 11th, the story never topped 80 posts an hour. In the first hour after Sortor's post, 267 accounts posted about it, and by 3 p.m. it was running at almost 500 posts an hour. The first chart counts each account only once, at its first post about the story. Nothing they posted after that is counted, so it shows who started this and how far those first posts went. The first wave carried the whole thing. Sortor's post and the posts that followed in the next 12 minutes have 9 million views between them. The 55 accounts that joined in the first 20 minutes got 80% of the views in that lane. The other lines never came close. “He lied and covered it up,” the line Elon Musk and Richard Grenell pushed, got about 2 million views across 100 accounts. “He was in an Ohio mental hospital” got about 2 million across 132. The pushback grew the opposite way, the way a real response does. It started small and kept building all afternoon and evening, with 12 to 46 new accounts joining every hour from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. Leave out the three biggest posts, which were the hospital's statement, Talarico's reply and Ed Krassenstein's own call to the hospital, and regular accounts pushing back still reached 6 million views. The claim had nearly 90% of its views by 2 p.m. and barely grew after that. By the end of the night, the pushback had more views than the claim, 13 million to 11.4 million. The second chart is the inorganic behavior, and it covers Oct 8 to 11, not just the day of the "exclusive". Sortor's headline was reposted word for word, or nearly, by 18 other accounts, half of them with under 1,000 followers. Caroline Wren's private-plane post was copied by 14. Four accounts posted the same Eric Daugherty post within 74 seconds of each other. Four more posted the same MAGAVoice line within 54 seconds, four hours after it first went up. Some accounts barely post anything of their own. One copied 21 of its 23 posts about Talarico from other accounts, another 11 of 11. And the spammers flooded the replies. One pasted the same reply 85 times in about two hours, another 15 times in 10 minutes. Views are each post's total as of early Oct 12. A copy means word for word or at least 90% the same as an earlier post. I pulled and analyzed about 14,000 posts for this. Sharing it helps more than anything, and if you want to chip in so I can keep doing this, the links are in my bio. It goes a long way.