BONUS CONTENT More analysis of the online Destiny/DGG (not the video game) "liberal" community's attacks on the left. Before moving on to another project, I went back through the data behind the graphics I've released in the last few weeks to see if there were any other interesting insights. These graphics use the same data as the previous one and span the same three months (Jul 1 – Oct 3): about 24,000 posts from the 39 accounts the Destiny community reposts most. Almost nothing here is new; it's mostly the same numbers shown a different way. The one addition is a day-by-day pull of the most-viewed posts about Hasan across all of X, so I could see which big stories they didn't cover. Two things stand out. 1) This system of punching the left from the center gets rewarded, by the algorithm, by anti-left dogpiling, or both. By constantly giving anti-Hasan posts engagement (artificial or otherwise), they've created an environment where simply being critical of the left pays. The dogpile is real. In a single month, 3,062 accounts reposted, quoted or replied to Destiny's and Dan Saltman's posts about Hasan and the left, and just 200 accounts did 52% of the reposting. Of the 200 most active boosters, 176 follow Destiny or Saltman. Under Hasan's most-replied posts, 10.5% of the replies came from accounts that follow Destiny or Saltman, against 1.3% under JD Vance's and 0.7% under Gavin Newsom's. Nowhere is this stronger than with Hasan Piker, who Destiny has a personal vendetta against. He's not the only figure lined up against Hasan, but he's one of the most engaged on Twitter and by far the account his community reposts most (more than twice as often as the next account), so he can amplify these attacks significantly. Destiny posted about Hasan 131 times in three months, more than once a day on average, for 23.9M views. In a labeled sample of his posts, Hasan was his #1 target by far, with nearly four times as many attacks as his next target. You can see the effects of this ecosystem by comparing their posts about Hasan against everything else they post. For 27 of the 29 accounts in the chart, posts about Hasan get more views than their other posts: typically 1.8 times as many, and up to 6.8 times. And in a labeled sample, 96% of their posts about Hasan were attacks. Across the board, no topic does better for their views than punching left. Hasan and left-wing commentators top the list at about 1.9 times their usual views, while their posts about Trump and Republicans do worse than their average (0.9 times). There's likely a variety of factors behind this: a strong personality cult around Destiny, directed brigading, bots, the algorithm itself, and other political interests unrelated to Destiny that converge on attacking the left. All of these likely factor in. This only covers the 39 accounts the Destiny community reposts most, not everyone attacking Hasan. For some of them, attacking Hasan may just line up with their own goals, but for the online liberal Destiny community, it's very much directed at Hasan. That leads into the second chart. 2) Day by day, you can see which events they jumped on. They posted about Hasan on all 95 of 95 days: 2,899 posts and 102.9M views. A typical day was 25 posts from 13 of the 39 accounts. On Aug 26, 28 of the 39 piled on at once. This is very telling, because there IS a pattern to what they choose to cover and amplify. And it's NOT what's most friendly to Democrats. It's what they perceive to be most damaging to Hasan. They're often the FIRST point of attack against Hasan, usually in ways Republicans then pick up and amplify. Shannon Watts' "Dressed like Mao" post (1.9M views) came a day before Spencer Pratt's and two days before Fox News ran with the Mao outfit. The Talarico clip was first posted by an anti-Hasan clip account their community boosts, and RNC Research posted the same clip 47 minutes later. The "Hasan turned on Zohran" clip came from Awk20000, a clip account Destiny follows back, and when DSA_Watch re-uploaded it, 23 of its first 25 reposts came from Republican accounts. They overwhelmingly cover controversies that make him look bad, not bigger controversies that make him look good. The half-naked "meat pic" Republicans put on the big screen at their midterm convention, and Bibi's callout at the UN, barely registered, because both of those actually made Hasan look better, despite being very controversial. The biggest posts about those two stories drew 4.8M and 7.2M views. These 39 accounts posted about them 3 and 14 times, for 20K and 178K views. Hasan's al-Qaeda comments, or Abdul El-Sayed distancing himself from Piker, They capitalized on those HEAVILY. Those were their two busiest weeks of the whole cycle: 531 posts and 18M views the week El-Sayed put out his statement and Sen. Ossoff condemned Hasan (100 times the views of their Netanyahu posts), and 310 posts the week of the al-Qaeda comments. When the State Department named Hasan in a report on foreign "subversion," they posted about it once (Destiny's quote post: "🙏"). Instead, they kept amplifying the Mao-outfit attacks Fox News was running (29 posts and 906K views in three days), an attack one of their own, Shannon Watts, had kicked off two days earlier. September 17th started really well for them. The Axios interview dropped, with Hasan saying America is worse than al-Qaeda "pound for pound," and they began a feeding frenzy: 98 posts from 26 of the 39 accounts, their busiest day of the three months. It lasted until Trump called Hasan "a terrible liability" the next day. After that it faded (37 posts the next day, then 25), and they posted about Trump's comment exactly once, even though the biggest post about it drew 2.1M views. Being attacked by Trump makes Hasan look good. In short, you can see that DGG and Destiny's acolytes aren't a political movement, even though some beltway insiders seem to treat them like one: Shannon Watts in particular (the fourth most-reposted account in their community), and David Pakman, though Pakman is careful to keep his distance publicly. The numbers show that for the DGG and Destiny community itself, the left is the main enemy and Hasan is enemy number one. In a labeled sample of about 3,800 of their posts, 57% of the attacks with a named target hit the left, against 20% for Republicans and MAGA. Hasan is their single biggest target, attacked 2.5 times as often as Trump (375 vs 151). They'll attack him any way possible, including by amplifying right-wing accounts like DSA_Watch, which these 39 accounts quoted 184 times in three months. This is a community most defined by what it isn't, and it will take right-wing positions just to stand against Hasan: @SireRottweiler, one of the 39, posted that "deporting Hasan Piker to Turkey" is "the real 90/10 issue" (525K views). Hasan was born in New Jersey. This isn't the full picture as many pointed out on the last post. They often align with pro-corporate and pro-Israel groups too, which are much bigger players in media and on social media. For the destiny community, aside from Hasan, Israel and Gaza is one of their best-performing topics (1.5 times their usual views), and their most active boosters repost pro-Israel influencers like Eyal Yakoby and Max Nordau dozens of times. The difference is that the Destiny community is focused, above all, on making Hasan look bad by any means possible, while corporate, lobbyist and Israel-aligned groups have a broader range of issues that Hasan just happens to be on the other side of. The Destiny community is hyperfocused on Hasan himself, and will use pro Israel or pro corporate attacks against Hasan as a medium to launch their own attacks on Haasan or even the broader left. Visualized with matplotlib and seaborn (plus NumPy, pandas, networkx).