Thread by @thackerpd

1. Twitter Files: Who Are the People Claiming RFK Jr. is “Disinformation”?

Let's look at what I found inside Twitter's internal documents.

2. First thing I found was Twitter officials discussing action they were taking on @RobertKennedyJr b/c of a report put out by the Center for Countering Digital Hate @CCDHate

CCDH's report was called "The Disinformation Dozen."

But was the report credible?

3. Facebook said @CCDHate report lacked credibility and posted a statement dismissing it.

4. But the report took off like a rocket, getting attention from the White House and Congress. Who is this group CCDH by the way?

5. It's run by a British political operative named Imran Ahmed, who wrote "New Serfdom" a book critical of free market ideology."

QUESTION 1: How did being a Labour Party political operative prepare Ahmed to rebrand himself as an expert in vaccines and disinformation?

6. QUESTION 2: Who runs Imran Ahmed and @CCDHate? Is it governments? Is it pharma interests?

I asked. Imran Ahmed won't respond.

7. Twitter officials discussed taking action based on the CCDH report. “COVID-19 misinfo enforcement team is planning on taking action on a handful of accounts surfaced by the CCDH report.”

8. Note that Imran Ahmed released his report to coincide with Biden's vaccine rollout and congressional hearings w/ Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

QUESTION: Who is Ahmed working with?

9. Based on this discredited report, Twitter labeled the following tweets. (When Elon Musk took over Twitter, these labels were removed).

9. Twitter placed a “Vaccine Safety” label on this tweet where Kennedy sent a letter to Biden. What is wrong with sending the President a letter?

How does this violate safety? It's just odd.

10. Ahmed's CCDH ran a bumbling campaign the year prior ran the year prior, CCDH targeted 10 websites for allegedly posting racist narratives. One of the group's they targeted was @zerohedge

11. Fact checkers w/ NBC News “verify unit” fell for CCDH’s report,“Google has banned two far-right websites from its advertising platform after research revealed the tech giant was profiting from articles pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests.”

12. But Ahmed's report wasn't true. Ahmed took passages from the comments section and claimed they were articles. NBC then stealth edited their story.

This is NBC's "verify" fact check unit, mind you.

13. Another incident involves disinformation researcher Filippo Menczer at the U of Indiana. Back in 2014, a member of the Federal Communications Commission wrote a Washington Post essay calling his federally funded research “Orwellian”

14. Menczer's University shot back that his research had nothing to do with “attempting to track political misinformation in a way that would somehow limit free speech.”

15. Menczer later told the Columbia Journalism Review that criticism of him had nothing to do with the reality of his research—it merely confirmed the problem of misinformation.

(Most disinformation researcher claim any criticism is "disinformation")

16. Fast forward several years and what is Menczer doing? SURPRISE!!!!

Defining types of speech as misinformation, tracking people’s social media, and creating an online database.

17. In December 2021, Menczer emailed a misinformation group “Our CoVaxx dashboard quoted in the article, ranks CHD as the top source of COVID vaccine disinformation,” Menczer wrote. The abbreviation “CHD” stands for Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy runs.

18. Menczer also falsely claimed that Kennedy has misrepresented his research. Kennedy hadn't.

QUESTION: Why do misinformation experts put out misinformation so often?

QUESTION 2: Who is paying for all this research?

19. Menczer’s email ended up at Twitter after he posted it to the Google Group “Combatting Fake News: The Science of Misinformation.” This group apparently claims that research to censor some news as fake actually strengthens the First Amendment.

20. When explaining his research, Menczer sometimes makes it appear abstract and nebulous. When he won a recent $1.2 million Department of Defense grant to study misinformation, his university put out a statement.

QUESTION: What does this mean?

21. At other times, Menczer is more direct in highlighting that his research can help government officials regulate speech—something he denied back in 2014. He wrote this essay recently after criticising @elonmusk

I think this is what his research is really about.

@elonmusk 22. Read more here at @DisInfoChron And please subscribe! https://t.co/JdocY6hjJLdisinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/twitter-file…