Matt Taibbi Profile picture
Jan 27, 2023 43 tweets 20 min read Read on X
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15
MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD
2.“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” Image
3.“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.” Image
4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” Image
5.These are quotes by Twitter executives about 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. Image
6.The “dashboard” 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). Image
7.The ASD advisory council 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. ImageImage
8.News 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. ImageImageImageImage
9.Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like “deep state” or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others. ImageImageImageImage
10. The secret ingredient to Hamilton 68’s analytical method? A list: “Our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence activities online,” was how the site put it at launch. Image
11. Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing. Image
12. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data.

Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them. Image
13.“These accounts,” they concluded, “are neither strongly Russian nor strongly 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.” ImageImageImage
14. In layman’s terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.
15.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.
16. Twitter immediately recognized these Hamilton-driven news stories posed a major ethical problem, potentially implicating them.

“Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote. Image
17.Some Twitter execs badly wanted to out Hamilton 68. After Russians were blamed for hyping the #ParklandShooting hashtag, one wrote:

“Why can’t we say we’ve investigated… and citing Hamilton 68 is being wrong, irresponsible, and biased?” Image
18.Yoel Roth wanted a confrontation. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote.

However, there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy. Image
19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne. Image
20.“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” wrote Carlos Monje, the future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Image
21. 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.” Because the #TwitterFiles contain the list, they’ve begun finding out.
22.“I’m shocked,” says Sonia Monsour, who as a child lived through civil war in Lebanon. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.”
23. “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution,” says Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas. “How I made a list like this is incredible to me.” Image
24. “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” says Oregon native Jacob Levich. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, in a way… designed to undermine rights we hold dear.”
25. Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was on the list. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles about British comic @Holbornlolz: “A wind-up merchant… I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.” ImageImage
26. I’m listed as a foreign bot?” said conservative media figure Dennis Michael Lynch. “As a proud taxpaying citizen, charitable family man, and honest son of a U.S. Marine, I deserve better. We all do!” Image
27. Consortium editor Joe Lauria too was angered to find he was on the list, which targeted voices across the spectrum: “Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’” Image
28.What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. Image
29.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… ImageImageImageImage
30.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. ImageImage
31.Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter: Image
32.It was a lie. The illusion of Russian support was created by tracking people like Joe Lauria, Sonia Monsour, and Dave Shestokas. Virtually every major American news organization cited these fake tales— even fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact. ImageImage
33.Twitter didn’t have the guts to out Hamilton 68 publicly but did try to speak to reporters off the record. “Reporters are chafing,” said Horne. “It’s like shouting into a void.” ImageImage
34.Roth was offended by the idea that tweets on certain themes suggested subversion. “Can we talk about how incredibly condescending…? If you talk about these themes, you must have been duped by Russian propaganda.” Image
35.Again, even Roth, like most Twitter execs an ardent Democratic partisan, saw that the Hamilton scheme would lead people “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” Image
36.At least two other research institutions that used similar methodologies – and were cited as sources in news stories – were also criticized in Twitter email correspondence.
37.MSNBC, Watts, the Washington Post, Politico, Mother Jones (which did at least 14 Hamilton 68 stories), the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and the offices of politicians like Dianne Feinstein all refused comment, unless this counts: Image
38.This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source: ImageImageImageImage
39.Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. ImageImage
40.The mix of digital McCarthyism and fraud did great damage to American politics and culture. News outlets that don't disavow these stories, or still pay Hamilton vets as analysts, shouldn't be trusted. Every subscriber to those outlets to write to editors about the issue.
41.For more from the #TwitterFiles, follow @bariweiss, @lhfang, @ShellenbergerMD, @TheFP, and others. Twitter had no input into this story. Searches were conducted by a third party, so material may have been left out.
42. For more on this story, read the detailed new story at racket.news
And a special thanks to @0rf for putting together video for this segment - much more to come.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @mtaibbi

Sep 5
THE STEELE DOSSIER IS BULLSHIT BECAUSE:

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, a Barack Obama appointee, conducted an extensive investigation of the issuance of four FISA warrants that required an in-depth review of the Steele dossier:
justice.gov/storage/120919…

Image
"CORROBORATED LIMITED INFORMATION... MUCH OF THAT WAS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE."

There is NOT ONE piece of original reporting in the Steele dossier that turned out to be true. The only "confirmed" details were from prior public news reports, and even got some of those wrong... Image
Image
PEE TAPE: "JUST TALK" OVER "BEERS" AND IN "JEST"

Horowitz noted the sources of Steele's spiciest revelations, like the "pee tape," were tracked down and stunned they'd been taken seriously. They laughed the story off as "just talk" told over "beers" in "jest": Image
Read 21 tweets
Sep 4
On the new piece about Jeffrey Sachs and “Shock Therapy”:

I see people already suggesting this story is propaganda that paints Putin’s Russia as a victim. That’s not what this account says at all (cont’d)
The victims here are the Russian and American people, not the governments. After the Cold War we had a historic opportunity. Instead of making Russia a quasi-partner like Japan or Germany, we went the other way:
The result was economic disaster in Russia (which Westerners bailed out btw), which thanks to help from U.S. ended up ruled by rapacious oligarchs. Anti-US sentiment exploded during my time there.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 2
In this article I’m trying to express something that’s been bothering me since I wrote “The Divide” and “I Can’t Breathe”:

racket.news/p/liberalism-r…
When I first started covering policing I was taken aback by the complexity. Post-Broken Windows, big cities essentially gave up on high-end enforcement and used tactics closer to commercial fishing: sweep up everyone on small offenses, throw back some innocents.
The infamous 2015 Mike Bloomberg address to the Aspen Institute confirmed that NY busted young black men on drug offenses with the aim of pre-empting a statistical probability of them committing more serious crimes like murder - Minority Report stuff
Read 12 tweets
Aug 12
The American speech system is a simple premise. A free press delivers the information, voters make the political decisions. We’re supposed to trust audiences to know what’s best for them. (1/4)
The new digital censorship movement is based on two fallacies. The first is that voters are too stupid to sort out information on their own, so they need institutional vanguards to weigh information, “help” them choose. (2/4)
The second is that the state has special responsibility to “protect” us from bad speech. The opposite is true. The constitution specifically enjoins the government from restricting citizen-to-citizen discussion. (3/4)
Read 4 tweets
Jun 13
Not only is the @nytimes is totally wrong implying @mirandadevine’s reporting hasn’t held up, the paper ignored its own multi-level failure on that same story in 2020, which included ignoring their own reporting. It’s almost actionable — they owe a huge apology (1/6):
First of all the Times in 2020 tried to use the unprecedented censorship of the story by Facebook and Twitter to call Miranda’s story “dubious,” without saying what was dubious. (The censorship angle they of course ignore entirely.) It got worse (2/6):
Image
Image
Just a few paragraphs down, the Times contradicted itself, saying Twitter didn’t block the story because it was “dubious,” but because it was supposedly “hacked materials.”

The laptop contents were not even “hacked materials,” as Twitter quickly determined. But also (3/6): Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 6
1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway

Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#Walkaway" from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up Image
2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021.
washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…Image
3. The #TwitterFiles contained material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory Twitter analyses that contrasted with coverage describing #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” These documents should have been published earlier. I apologize to @BrandonStraka.
Image
Image
Read 41 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(