# Tracking Fringe and Coordinated Activity on Twitter Leading Up To the US Capitol Attack

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04450 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04450/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Leveraging Large Language Models to Detect Influence Campaigns in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07816/) (2023)
- [Detection and Characterization of Coordinated Online Behavior: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01257/) (2024)
- [Emergent Coordinated Behaviors in Networked LLM Agents: Modeling the Strategic Dynamics of Information Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25003/) (2025)
- [IOHunter: Graph Foundation Model to Uncover Online Information Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14663/) (2024)
- [Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13912/) (2025)
- [Quantifying Feature Importance for Online Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19882/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection of Information Operations Users via Behavioral and Language Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05855/) (2026)
- [Predicting, Evaluating, and Explaining Top Misinformation Spreaders via Archetypal User Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16323/) (2026)
- [Not All Duplicates Are Coordination: Generic vs. Non-Generic Duplicate Campaigns in Information Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13671/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misleading claims about the integrity of the election pushed by political elites and fringe communities on social media. In this study, we explore the evolution of fringe content and conspiracy theories on Twitter in the seven months leading up to the Capitol attack. We examine the suspicious coordinated activity carried out by users sharing fringe content, finding evidence of common adversarial manipulation techniques ranging from targeted amplification to manufactured consensus. Further, we map out the temporal evolution of, and the relationship between, fringe and conspiracy theories, which eventually coalesced into the rhetoric of a stolen election, with the hashtag #stopthesteal, alongside QAnon-related narratives. Our findings further highlight how social media platforms offer fertile ground for the widespread proliferation of conspiracies during major societal events, which can potentially lead to offline coordinated actions and organized violence.