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How an incorrect tweet about Trump protests became a national conspiracy theory

AUSTIN, Texas — It was the

for which a charged post-election moment, full of conspiracy theories and anxieties, was perfectly primed. Eric Tucker, a founder of a technology company with an Austin, Texas, office called PocketMath, claimed that protesters who had gathered Wednesday night in Austin to voice their anger about the presidential election outcome were “not as organic as they seem.”

Attaching photos of white Charter USA buses parked in East Austin near downtown, he wrote: “Here are the busses (sic) they came in.”

The post was seized as evidence that protests happening around the country were somehow concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the media, liberal financier George Soros or someone else.

By Friday morning, Tucker’s tweet had been retweeted more than 15,000 times, picked up by conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and the Austin-based national alt-right personality Alex Jones. A Fox News story headlined, “Trump protests intensify, as doubts swirl about spontaneity,” said in the second paragraph, “observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes — a telltale sign of coordination,” citing Tucker’s tweet.

The problem: It wasn’t true.

The buses shown in Tucker’s tweet had actually been hired by the Seattle-based software company Tableau Software to move more than 13,000 people

around the city.

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“I can confirm that those were our buses,” Keyana Corliss, spokeswoman for Tableau,

. “They were transporting conference attendees to our ‘Data Night Out’ party. They were caught in traffic for about 15-20 minutes in the protest, but that’s it.”

Statesman reporters also witnessed the start of the rally on Wednesday at the University of Texas before protesters marched downtown.

Tucker told the Statesman that he had been returning from a business meeting Wednesday afternoon when he spotted the buses lined up in East Austin. He decided to snap a few pictures. A couple of hours later he saw news about the protests.

“I put two and two together,” said Tucker, who said he had voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.

“I texted a couple of friends and thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll put this on Twitter,’” he continued. “I had no idea it would blow up to be this huge thing. I did not fact-check it. It was not something I put a lot of thought into, not something I deeply deliberated.”

As questions rolled into his account about the tweet, Tucker doubled down on his original claim: “I was not there during loading or unloading. Location and timing make a pretty good case,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

“Looks very planned. Every group Trump has possibly offended seemed too perfectly represented. The busses (sic) just blocks away,” he said in another tweet.

“There were even more busses (sic) than in pics. Quite near protests at right timing,” he observed again on Twitter.

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In the Statesman interview, he explained his thinking behind the original tweet: “The way I see this election, it’s really been a circus anyways, and I don’t think either side has really been looking for the truth. This was my attempt to look for the truth.

“I got it wrong,” he said.

Soon, however, it had been retweeted hundreds of times, including by someone associated with the

show.

“I kind of assumed rightly or wrongly (Jones) would fact-check that. No respectable journalist wouldn’t fact-check this,” Tucker said.

Is Jones a respectable journalist?

“Ten years ago, I was definitely skeptical, but his organization has gotten significantly larger, and I have a certain amount of belief it’s gotten more professional,” Tucker said.

Soon he saw a pileup of vitriol in the retweets, including people calling for the slashing of the buses’ tires and for violence against the protesters.

“Truthfully, at the moment I wrote it, I was fairly convinced I was right,” Tucker said. “I believed what I wrote was right. I hadn’t fact-checked it at all to the nth degree.

“It was not my intent to feed on the sensationalism,” he said.

Friday morning, after a query posted on Twitter by a Statesman reporter and by tweets from people attending the Tableau conference who said they were on the buses, Tucker had seemed to back off — sort of — his original claims.

“I strongly value the truth,”

. “There’s a pretty good case those busses (sic) were for a conference by @tableau.”

The tweet was shared 18 times by 5 p.m.

Asked whether he thought he shouldered any responsibility for the backlash against the protests, he said: “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”

He later deleted his original tweet,

late Friday, "And BOOM! The old big bad post is gone! Its memory shall live on! Thanks all! Let's keep the conversation moving!" That tweet was shared 25 times by early Sunday.