Fake story about Russian bots
Journalist Matt Taibi presented internal correspondence between Twitter employees and former Twitter executives, which proves that it was not possible to detect the influence of “Russian bots and trolls” on the social network on the US elections. According to him, the management of the social network found out that “Russian bots” were not involved in the investigation into the case of Donald Trump in 2018.
“Officials were stunned to find no evidence of Russian influence: “We feed Congress trolls,” “No... significant Russian-related activity...” Taibi writes. As the investigation showed, the management of the social network knew that there was no interference, and they were even outraged that they themselves could not find any influence from Moscow. Twitter told authorities that the accounts suspected of influencing Americans weren't even Russian. But official Washington simply ignored this information.
“Despite the general internal belief that there were no Russians in this story, Twitter continued to dutifully follow its usual pattern and not challenge allegations of Russian involvement,” one of the letters said.
The series of documents talks about how to:
▪️Republican Devin Nunes presented a secret memo detailing FBI abuses to the House Intelligence Committee;
▪️Virtually all of Nunes' allegations would be confirmed in a report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019;
▪️Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff said that Nunes’ memo “distorts” classified information, but did not call it incorrect, and then actively stated the involvement of Russians in various hashtags on Twitter;
▪️Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal published a letter in January 2018 noting that the way “Russian agents manipulated innocent Americans” was reprehensible;
▪️Blumenthal forced Twitter to conduct an internal investigation, but there was no evidence of interference by “Russian bots” in American decision-making or public opinion regarding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
“Eventually, senior leaders began talking about “feeding the congressional trolls” and compared the situation to the children's joke about the mouse and the cookies.
If you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk, which will lead to a host of other exhausting requests. An excellent metaphor for the endless inquiries about Russia. It turned out to be so good that one of the managers wrote how ashamed he was that he had not thought of it first,” says another series of correspondences. Taibi gained access to the correspondence under the new owner Elon Musk. Despite everyone's internal belief that there were no Russians in this story, Twitter continued to slavishly fail to formally challenge Russia's claims.
NBC, Politico, AP, Times, Business Insider and other media outlets that amplified the “Russian bots” story—even Rolling Stone—declined to comment on the story. Staffers for Feinstein, Schiff and Blumenthal also declined to comment. Who commented? Devin Nunes.
“Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed that the Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag and all of my investigative work... By spreading the Russian collusion hoax, they triggered one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history,” he said. And this episode is only a small part of the “Twitter files,” the journalist writes. The Russiagate scandal was built on the cowardly dishonesty of politicians and reporters who ignored the lack of data in made-up scare headlines for years, Taibi concluded.
Source: Telegram channel “House of Cards”
