Hashtags that linger for months or years tend to evolve (or devolve) over time in terms of who uses them and to what end. So it goes with #Russiagate, which we dug into from a couple of different angles (dataset: 867365 live tweets from 111930 accounts).

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Tweets containing #Russiagate go all the way back to 2010, but are few and far between until after the 2016 US presidential election. Early tweets are in a variety of languages and cover a variety of subjects, from the World Cup to word salad about George Soros and the Clintons.

The majority of #Russiagate tweets that link to news sites use mainstream media sources, but some interesting outliers turn up in the form of fringe sites at both ends of the political spectrum (ZeroHedge, Consortium News) as well as good old Russia Today.

The lineup of media sources linked in #Russiagate has changed over the course of the past 2.5 years. Early on almost all links are to MSM, but around the time of the Manafort/Gates indictments fringe/conspiracy sites become more common, as do RT and Sputnik.

Animated visualization of the distribution of media links in #Russiagate tweets. The proportion linking unreliable sources increased until the midterms, experiencing a lull until the March announcement of the forthcoming Mueller report caused links to fringe sites to spike again.

The text content of the #Russiagate tweets has also changed over time - tweets containing "Trump" have trended downward, while discussion of the media and "fake news" has increased. In the wake of the Mueller report, the "conspiracy/hoax/Russophobia" category grew considerably.