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“Whether he knows it or not, they’re aware of it,” she said. “The best thing they can hope for is a Trump retweet.”

It “highlights the impossible position we’re in, when being retweeted by the president is now the number one surefire way to enter the news cycle,” according to Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who has studied media amplification of extreme speech and misinformation online.

“Manipulators figured that out long ago. . . . You just have to find something that will stroke his ego enough or make Clinton/the Democrats look bad enough, or both, and then when he retweets it, suddenly that’s the thing everyone talks about, or at least feels they have to talk about, because he’s the president. It’s a level of media manipulation that’s almost incomprehensible, because it’s such a trap: clearly dangerous and seemingly inescapable.”

An analysis by Hoaxy, a tool created by Indiana University to analyze the spread of questionable hashtags – and the possible involvement of bots in promoting them – showed that even before the president’s social media involvement, conservative comedian and Internet personality Terrence K. Williams was a key amplifier of the #ClintonBodyCount hashtag.

“#JefferyEpstein had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead,” read the tweet retweeted by Trump. Williams also asked his more than 500,000 followers to “RT if you’re not Surprised.”

For years, figures such as Williams have known that getting a hashtag trending fuels attention, and they’ve been good at getting it done. Mike Cernovich, an early expert at this who rose in profile after Trump’s election for his role in helping to spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, has long coordinated hashtag choices on live streams with his followers during breaking news. Hashtags like #ClintonBodyCount go viral before the news can catch up, in part because a bunch of people who know exactly how important it is to trend on Twitter are working to make it happen. And it’s worth understanding that, while hashtags such as these are amplified by bots, the accounts spreading conspiratorial hashtags also belong to plenty of actual people. Hoaxy’s analysis identified 985 Twitter accounts that were key to helping the hashtag spread; 30 of those accounts had strong bot-like characteristics.