Twitter files the compliant press addition.
“I think we need to just call this out on the b***sh*t it is.”
That was the response by Yoel Roth to requests by 'Hamilton 68', a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.; to shut down right leaning posters because they accused them of being Russian bots or influenced by Russia.
(68 tweets by Matt Taibbi about the fake charges about so called Russian influence )
Matt Taibbi on Twitter: "https://t.co/0yk0y7VlGX outlets for years cited Watts and Hamilton 68 when claiming Russian bots were “amplifying” an endless parade of social media causes – against strikes in Syria, in support of Fox host Laura Ingraham, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. https://t.co/Qwf5UuKUkb" / Twitter
Roth commented that “Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
Hamilton 68 was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the 'Alliance for Securing Democracy '(ASD)and includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security. They went after an array of Conservatives but chiefly focused on Trump and his policies.
They claimed to have a secret list of offenders that they never disclosed because they claimed that if they did the Russians would shut the bots down.
All the compliant press needed to know was that these former intel people had a list of bots . The compliant press did not even know what was meant by a bot. All they knew was Russia=bad .
But Twitter execs put 2 and 2 together and determined that not only were the sites particularly Russian ;but they were not bots. “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.”“Hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.”
Twitter execs concluded that it was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.“Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote.
Roth wanted to expose it . But the Twitter organization was afraid of the consequences of taking on such a powerful group].
So the “legitimate people,” as one Twitter exec called them, never found out they’d been used as fodder for mountains of news stories about “Russian influence.”
Editor in chief of Consortium News wrote
“Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’”
According to Matt Taibbi ;
Hamilton 68 was used as a source to assert Russian influence in an astonishing array of news stories: support for Brett Kavanaugh or the Devin Nunes memo, the Parkland shooting, manipulation of black voters, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation....
These stories raised fears in the population, and most insidious of all, were used to smear people like Tulsi Gabbard as foreign “assets,” and drum up sympathy for political causes like Joe Biden’s campaign by describing critics as Russian-aligned.
Virtually every major American news organization cited these fake tales— even fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact.
