After a half-decade covering extremists and disinfo pipelines, this is the week the effects of this job really got to me.

The anonymous people want me dead, the named are desperate for me to fail.

Just going to keep going. No other way.
I really should’ve predicted this would be the week i started to feel it.

It’s a week before the election. The people who pushed Pizzagate are on TV now, their millions of followers going after a new target.

I remember them from the first time around. Not great news for them.
Disinfo pipelines are crumbling. They’re having a harder time on Facebook. They can’t manipulate mainstream media as well now.

It’s angrier and more vengeance-filled than before since they can see their flirtation with real power maybe ending.
This is all really bad news from people on this beat, constant targets for years who are now covering desperate people who dogwhistle extremists.

But, again, I’m not gonna stop now. Just going to work even harder.
Anyways, here’s the funny part: they can’t help but admit we’re good at this.

And, for once, despite what they try to do to us, they’re right: we’re not going away.

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More from @oneunderscore__

22 Oct
Tucker Carlson is devoting an entire segment to attacking my colleague, Brandy Zadrozny, for doing actual reporting, like using public records to confirm identities of people who create harassment campaigns.

It's disgraceful.

She's the best reporter I know. I'm with her 1000%.
Had Tucker looked into this, his guest was emailed by Brandy the day before about a story she's doing about his website. He spent the day tweeting retributively at her.

That wasn't mentioned. Seems pretty important to include.

And the guest is this guy.
cnn.com/2018/08/19/pol…
Anyways, that was a hideously unethical segment by Tucker Carlson, framing using basic reporting tools like public records searches as some sort of evil act.

To do it to a mom, and one of the best people I know, is disgusting. I won't forget it.
Read 4 tweets
21 Oct
Rudy Giuliani has spent the last week teasing multimedia of Hunter Biden doing something sexually nefarious on a hacked laptop. He's had this allegedly criminal evidence for a year. He's produced nothing.

That same thing, featuring himself, will be on Amazon Prime on Friday.
Read 4 tweets
15 Oct
NEW from @BrandyZadrozny + me:

YouTube says it is banning QAnon, other conspiracy content that targets individuals

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
As far as we can tell, all of the major radicalization-driving QAnon videos — some of which have tens of millions of views — are still up at press time. YouTube said enforcement will take a minute.

We'll keep you updated.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
In our reporting, YouTube was QAnon's largest remaining radicalization driver.

This enforcement action puts YouTube somewhere in between Twitter (make QAnon accounts harder to find, ban overt harassment) and Facebook (outright ban on QAnon content).

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 5 tweets
11 Oct
More astroturfed fake African-American pro-Trump accounts. Almost 10,000 retweets in three hours.
Posing as Black users is a concerted disinformation effort by pro-Trump trolls in this election cycle, as noted in this story, and one that dates back more than a half-decade, discovered by Black women on Twitter, including @blackamazon and @digitalsista.
nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1…
This specific account was spotted by @BenCollins1776, my namesake and considerably better Ben Collins. Benception.
Read 4 tweets
9 Oct
New from me + @BrandyZadrozny + @Tom_Winter:

Alleged Michigan kidnapping plotters’ online lives reveal Boogaloo ties, Trump support, and swift online radicalization

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
In 2016, one of the alleged plotters of Whitmer’s kidnapping pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that absolved Russia of meddling in the 2016 election, calling investigations of Trump an "uprising.”

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
One of the alleged plotters of Whitmer’s kidnapping was radicalized very fast.

Last year, he was posting selfies and Joe Rogan clips. After the pandemic, it was only Boogaloo memes and Bill Gates conspiracy theories.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 5 tweets
7 Oct
Four years ago today, Pizzagate was born when Wikileaks dropped John Podesta's hacked emails.

Users on 4chan and Reddit said if you replaced the words "pizza" with "little girl" in his emails, suddenly they were eating children.

A year and three weeks later, QAnon was born.
In the last four years, an infrastructure for an alternate reality was built on social networks to frame one political party as Satanic child eaters.

It went unchecked by social networks and winked at by politicians who it didn't yet harm.

Millions joined those communities.
This is important to note: The reason 4chan users were so ready to accept "pizza" meant "little girls" in creating Pizzagate?

In 4chan speak, "cheese pizza" was a backronym for "CP," or child porn, which saturated the site for years.

Read 6 tweets

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