(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The latest edition of the Twitter Files that were released by investigative journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that mass media, academia and policymakers who were talking non-stop about the “Russian disinformation” for the last six years happened to be a scam.
Recently, Taibbi published an article and a thread on Twitter, saying that Hamilton 68, a computerized dashboard that monitored purported Russian bot infiltration, tracked 644 accounts supposedly linked to “Russian influence activities online,” according to the Daily Wire. Executives at Twitter “reverse-engineered” the list of accounts because they were concerned that the users were influencing the American political conversation on behalf of the Russians, even though only 36 of the 644 accounts were registered in Russia, while many others were just ordinary American accounts.
In internal company emails, executives wrote that the accounts were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots” and concluded there was “no evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information.”
Even Yoel Roth, the social media company’s former Trust and Safety lead, said that the project is “bulls***” in one of the messages. He said that Twitter “falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots” and earns “traction around partisan trends” to assert that “any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.”
The “Russian collusion” narrative appeared right after Donald Trump ran for the presidency, and followed him throughout his administration. A special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, Robert Mueller, investigated claims that the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with Russian agents to influence the 2016 election. In the end, he concluded that there is no evidence to back up this claim.
Taibbi also found out that leftist propaganda outlets like NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Mother Jones cited the so-called data on Russian disinformation from Hamilton 68 on “hundreds if not thousands” of occasions.
