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Aaron Maté @aaronjmate
, 3 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
There's an awkward omission underpinning virtually everyone's (to illustrate, even @democracynow ) coverage of NYT Facebook story: no one details the "Russian misinformation campaign" that FB supposedly hid. Why? Cause it was juvenile clickbait trash mostly unrelated to election.
Which tells us that every outlet credulously parroting the NYT's line is in fact taking part in a misinformation campaign about a "Russian misinformation campaign." 2/
3/ NYT claims that "close to 126 million people [saw] the Russian posts." That's bunk. The 126 million figure is in fact FB's *"estimate"* of how many people *"may have been served"* *one* piece of Russian troll content in their FB feeds *over 2 years*! thenation.com/article/russia…
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My new piece on what the recent Senate studies about Russian social media posts actually show: a juvenile, microscopic operation massively over-hyped by political elites, pundits, & "experts" with sketchy agendas & contemptuous views of average voters:
thenation.com/article/russia…
Some points to stress: 1) it's tough to suggest that Russian clickbait helped decide the 2016 election when even the Senate authors acknowledge that just "11% of the total content" from Russian trolls "was related to the election", & their posts "minimally about the candidates."
2) the widespread claim that Russian trolls reached 126M on Facebook is in fact a spin on Facebook's own "estimate":
Read 11 tweets
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1/ What happened to Reality Winner is an injustice. But @theIntercept compounds it & is journalistically derelict by continuing to a) avoid owning up to its own role & b) pretend she exposed a Russian intel operation, when they are fully aware she didn’t. theintercept.com/2018/12/23/rea…
2) re: a), here’s Glenn Greenwald, per the New Yorker:

“The site ‘fucked up,’ Greenwald said. He added that, if he didn’t work there, he might be wondering aloud why nobody was fired.”

newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…
3) The same accountability we’ve all sought from the Guardian over the Manafort-Assange story should also be sought over TI’s Russian vote hacking story. They’re not perfectly analogous, but what GG says here about the Guardian story also applies to TI: theintercept.com/amp/it-is-poss…
Read 6 tweets
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👌🏼: The CEO of New Knowledge — the US gov’t-aligned firm that published a recent (& universally, credulously parroted) Senate report Russian social media interference —has been suspended from Facebook for running a fake election interference operation. washingtonpost.com/technology/201…
Shout out to everyone — and I mean, everyone, you’d be shocked who — took this report on the dire Russian social media threat seriously.
Also hilarious/telling here is acknowledgement that a $100k operation that “imitated Russian tactics” was too small to impact 2017 Alabama Senate race. Given that, how could even more microscopic Russian tactics have impacted a $2.5b 2016
election? nyti.ms/2GtEkuw?smid=n…
Read 3 tweets

Related threads

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🔥FACEBOOK🔥

@Facebook “used us for crisis PR...They are more interested in making themselves look good & passing the buck…I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments.” ~@brooklynmarie

HT @ChiefCovfefe
Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize debunking misinformation that *affected Facebook advertisers*, which @brooklynmarie thought crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism anymore. You’re doing #propaganda.”🤬

Another fact-checker who has long worked on the #Facebook partnership said they were demoralized, saying that #Facebook is “a terrible company and, on a personal level, I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”🔥

#DeleteFacebook

amp.theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 3 tweets
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After sleeping on this, I’ve unearthed a couple of salient points.this Op-Ed-as I said-is actually a more brilliant piece of writing than anyone has noticed. It’s incredibly hard to write with this much precision on a topic about which you ultimately divulge no information.
This is also a verifiable masterpiece of spinning language, worthy of its own Pulitzer Prize. You’ve noticed how the Democrats echo each other. Here’s “kids in cages” to refresh your memory but there are a thousand loops of this-all the same. They have 0 creativity changing words
That’s what makes this @nytopinion so astounding. It repeats every BS narrative of the last two years without using any of the same language. To tell you hard that is: imagine making a Land Rover without using any of the original parts, but making it even better.
Read 19 tweets
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WHERE ARE THE RUSSIANS?
1. As conservative commentator @MarkSteynOnline commented recently, “the only thing missing from the Russia investigation are the Russians." Mark might closer to the truth than he realized. Let me see see if I can explain.
2. Did you happen to catch @DevinNunes on @MariaBartiromo over the weekend? Lets give a little listen. Pay very close attention to the first minute or two for important details.

3. Very first statement. "No one was ever interested in an an informant." There may be an informant or informants. What we have been asking for are the handful of documents used to begin this investigation:". Nunes has been driving toward the heart of where this thing started.
Read 47 tweets
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Facebook has some really creepy plans!
Just check their patents!
Small thread with thanks to @jashkenas 👇

1⃣ Facebook wants to track your eye movements
using special infrared LEDs that shine into your pupil & cornea to determine gaze patents.google.com/patent/US20180… #Facebook #privacy
Facebook wants to reads your comments for positive or negative “affinity scores”
to generate sentiments and “trust scores”
and use the resulting data sets from trusted users
to train a machine learning model
patents.google.com/patent/US20180… | #privacy #facebook
to manipulate people..
3⃣ Facebook wants to “automatically sense, record and identify all types of activities such as walking, running, jogging, cycling, rowing, driving with car, bus, train, walking stairs, jumping, swimming, playing football & skiing” patents.google.com/patent/US20150… | #Facebook #privacy
Read 8 tweets
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MEGA THREAD: TAD DEVINE - BERNIE SANDERS - PAUL MANAFORT - DONALD TRUMP - "Our Brand is Corrupt Establishment"

As we all know, the indictments handed down have shed a light on the #Russian interference in the #2016election. What those indictments revealed is, that Bernie…
…Sanders was given support by the Russians in an effort to pull votes from Hillary Clinton.

Let me give you a little more detail on how Sanders campaign was benefitting from the Russian misinformation to shape the minds of his supporters and used their own branding to…
…split the American electorate.

Most of you remember at the beginning of the primary race, Sanders was not toxic and he was very respectful of Hillary. I was actually very proud of him.
Read 41 tweets

Trending hashtags

#Wylie #Kremlin #Mercer #SCL #Facebook #menlopark #Russia #LQQK #email #Russian #facebook #FacebookFriday #Trump #2016election #OCEAN #CambridgeUniversity #DataPrivacy #TrumpRussia #Turkey #MuellerTime #FBI #MoneyLaundering #Media #Republican #Twitter

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