Matt Taibbi dropped Twitter Files #15 on Friday.
The files have shown us a lot of things including the effort by some in the government to try to censor things they don’t like, even to censor journalists and political opponents. But this latest set shows how much the “Russia, Russia, Russia” theme was being pushed to Twitter–and to the rest of the media–to paint a lot of topics being by people on the right as somehow coming from “Russian bots,” thus seeking to discredit them.
The Files point to “Hamilton 68,” a group that had an inordinate influence on media reports.
According to Taibbi, Hamilton 68 was:
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. 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). 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.
Taibbi notes that they were cited as a source by virtually every major media outlet.
They also affected many major topics.
But according to Taibbi, there was a big problem in the claim about the “Russian” accounts. Hamilton 68 had a list that they refused to put forward–and the proof of how they were supposedly “Russian” accounts.
The kicker here? When Twitter investigated, they found they weren’t Russian accounts at all; this was all nonsense, according to Twitter.
What Twitter found was the accounts were mostly real American, Canadian, and British accounts.
Twitter Safety head Yoel Roth said that they were essentially calling right-wing accounts Russian bots and right-wing conversations “Russians.”
That left Twitter with an ethical problem. “Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote. Other Twitter execs wanted to out the Hamilton 68 group as false. “Why can’t we say we’ve investigated… and citing Hamilton 68 is being wrong, irresponsible, and biased?” one said in an email. Yoel Roth wanted to do it, to make them produce their evidence or out them, “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do.”
But he was advised against it by people who later — surprise, surprise — went on to work for the Biden administration.
Roth never ultimately outed what was going on. But now, because Twitter Files has the list from the new Twitter, letting the people know that they were being used to stoke this Russia/McCarthy-like fear.
Twitter head Elon Musk weighed in with a big takeaway — that this may have interfered with elections.
Taibbi said, “The mix of digital McCarthyism and fraud did great damage to American politics and culture.”
You can say that again. False Russia claims that Democrats pushed tore apart a lot of the country and promoted a mania that is still running among people on the left–and this amplified that even more.