Tag: russiagate

The Russian Twitter Bots Story Is A Study In Media’s ‘Lie, Set The Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook

The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.

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Washington Post admits years later that Russian trolls ‘had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior’

The Washington Post, whose journalists were awarded for peddling the discredited “Russia Hoax” narrative, has admitted that so-called Russian trolls “had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior” ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

What prompted the Post to call into question the central tenet of the narrative advanced by liberal media outlets for years was a study led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics.

The study

A study published on Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications concluded that “it would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior.”

According to the study, it is unlikely that a handful of so-called Russian trolls exerted significant influence for these four reasons:

  • “exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts was concentrated among a small group of users, with only 1% of users accounting for 70% of all exposures”;
  • “exposure to Russian foreign influence tweets was overshadowed by the amount of exposure to traditional news media and US political candidates”;
  • “respondents with the highest levels of exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts were those arguably least likely to need influencing: those who identified themselves as highly partisan Republicans, who were already likely favorable to Donald Trump”; and
  • no “meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior” could be found.

In short: Few people saw the trolls’ posts; those who saw them didn’t need further convincing; the mainstream media’s narrative and candidates’ agitprop was far more pervasive; and it doesn’t seem the trolling ultimately had any meaningful effect.

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Twitter Files: Company Exaggerated Russian Influence to Appease Media, Democrats

Twitter deliberately exaggerated the extent of Russian influence on its platform in an attempt to appease the media and Democrats, even after internal investigations into the matter proved a “dud,” according to journalist Matt Taibbi, who released another batch of the Twitter Files today.

Twitter initially tried to stay out of the spotlight on the Russia issue in 2017, hoping Facebook would remain the main target of scrutiny from the media and Democrats. Twitter’s PR department even agreed on a media strategy to “keep the focus on FB.”

But after being slammed by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) for an “inadequate” response to allegations of Russian meddling, Twitter’s public policy VP said the company should “keep producing material” on Russian interference to satisfy the Democrats. As a result, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force,” to investigate Russian influence on the platform.

But the task force found little evidence of significant Russian involvement on the platform. In October 2017, the task force reported that it had found “no evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).”

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Former top intel chiefs silent after Musk Twitter disclosures

America’s top former intelligence officials were mostly mum Saturday after the release of internal Twitter documents detailing how The Post’s bombshell revelations were censored by the social media company.

Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary, John Brennan a former CIA director, Mike Hayden, a former CIA director, and Jim Clapper, a former director of national intelligence — who all once said The Post’s reporting had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” — declined or did not respond to request for comment about whether the latest disclosures had changed their opinion.

The quartet made their allegations as part of an open letter denigrating The Post’s reporting as Russian misinformation which was signed by dozens of other longtime intelligence hands.

“Our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter read. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Of the four, only Clapper has ever publicly addressed the letter, offering a vigorous defense to The Post in March.

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CNN analyst declares that freedom of speech is ‘nonsense,’ claims Elon Musk’s new Twitter empowers Vladimir Putin and is ‘destructive to American national security’

A CNN analyst aspersed the freedom of speech as “nonsense,” and claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia will be “all over Twitter” dispersing disinformation to the entire world.

Former CIA case officer and current CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer appeared on the cable news network on Friday to discuss the opening up of Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk.

“CNN Newsroom” host Boris Sanchez began by bringing up the news that Musk plans to grant mass amnesty to accounts that were previously suspended. Musk made the decision after running a Twitter poll, in which 72.4% approved of welcoming the previously banned accounts.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Sanchez asked Baer about his opinion regarding formerly banned accounts being reinstated.

Baer responded, “Well, Boris, I can tell you one thing, Putin will be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this. Fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it, this is a great opportunity for him.”

Without evidence, Baer added, “And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence.”

“The Russians are waiting for something like this,” the former CIA agent claimed.

“They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine,” he continued. “And they’re going to be all over Twitter. I guarantee this. Supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. You just wait.”

Baer alleged that the Russians will “put up” misinformation and it will “cascade everywhere, in India, in Europe.” He said the Russian disinformation would “appeal” to the European far right and Chinese. He said that Putin and the Russians are going to weaponize Musk’s new pro-free speech Twitter “as a vehicle to save himself and Ukraine.”

The CNN security and intelligence analyst bizarrely asserted, “And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go in a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law.”

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When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control Information

Facebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.

“The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.

As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.

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New York Times hires the reporter who brought Steele dossier to BuzzFeed to cover ‘right-wing media’

The New York Times announced on August 18 that Ken Bensinger is joining its politics desk and will report on right-wing media for the section’s so-called “democracy team.” Bensinger previously worked for BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

David Halbfinger, the Times’ politics editor, suggested in the announcement that Bensinger is well prepared to report on right-wing media. His recent work on the Oath Keepers (an anti-statist militia group, some of whose members were present at the January 6, 2021, Capitol protests) and on the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan were cited as evidence of the reporter’s understanding of “the rising threat of armed militant groups,” which Halbfinger intimated is relevant to the reporter’s new beat.

In the announcement, Halbfinger omitted any mention of Bensinger’s most impactful work.

Bensinger was the individual responsible for bringing the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which the organization released on January 10, 2017.

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Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

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Fake News Board (Commonly Known As Pulitzer Prize) Defends Award To 2018 Russia Hoaxers

The Pulitzer Prize Board last weekend defended its 2018 award to a team of New York Times reporters who devoted story after story to a Democrat-concocted conspiracy framing President Donald Trump as a foreign agent.

On Sunday, the board released a statement saying the organization stood by its 2018 presentations after years of criticism provoked an “independent” review.

“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed,” the committee wrote, highlighting multiple submissions received over its joint reward to The New York Times and The Washington Post over the Russia hoax four years ago. The board explained that the entries, including from Trump, led the center to commission two reviews probing the credibility of the outlets’ work.

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions,” the board wrote, “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Except the central premise of each paper’s reporting, which sought to undermine the democratically elected president, proved entirely fabricated in the publication of the Mueller report, the product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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How the Media Used Russiagate Conspiracy Theories to Create a News Cartel

In the fall of 2019, Facebook announced that it would be writing selected media outlets some very big checks. The launch of Facebook News was billed as a way to give consumers more access to information, but it was actually an attempt at appeasing big media companies.

Facebook, with its older and more conservative user base, had become the epicenter of election conspiracies from the Clinton campaign and its media allies. While Hillary Clinton and her associates were eager to shift the blame for her defeat by relaunching their existing Russiagate smears with false claims that Russian Facebook ads had tilted the election to Donald Trump, the media’s obsession with Facebook was even more corruptly self-interested.

About a third of Americans regularly get their news through Facebook. The tech giant’s algorithms had the ability to make or break the news media, and would go on to break the digital media empires of the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and others in the lefty clickbait brigade.

While Hillary wanted someone to blame for her failures, the media wanted leverage over the company that controlled its fate. The invention of a “fake news” or “misinformation” crisis, the term that the media pivoted to once President Trump made “fake news” his own, was used to persuade Big Tech companies to censor conservatives and promote media content.

Facebook News was a walled garden that pushed the content of the major papers behind Russiagate conspiracies and misinformation alarmism while profiting massively from it. The Russiagate Facebook conspiracy theories provided the rationale for censoring conservatives and for rewarding the media outlets spreading them with special promotions and lots of money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook paid over $20 million to the New York Times and $15 million to the Washington Post in annual fees. Even more valuable than the big checks was Facebook’s ability to push media content to its users. Last year, sources at several publishers were crediting Facebook News with massive traffic surges, but not everyone was equal.

“Many other U.S. news publishers are getting payments from Facebook to have their content featured in its news tab, but they only get a fraction of the sums paid to the Washington Post, the New York Times,” the Wall Street Journal noted.

Facebook and the media had created a cartel in which media sites created paywalls to raise the value of their content and gain better deals with the social media monopoly. Zuckerberg’s company offered its biggest media critics big checks in exchange for exclusive deals. Both sides claimed that they were “fighting misinformation” with what was really a shakedown and a cartel.

Now that the deal between Big Tech and Big Media is set to lapse, there’s panic in the presses.

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