The Twitter Files Part XV Unrolled
The next great media fraud.
You can find all the Twitter Files unrolled here. I’m pretty sure this is actually part XVI, but Taibbi calls it XV so we’ll leave it at that.
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15
MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
1.34K Reposts · 2.63K Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
2.“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
129 Reposts · 738 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
3.“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
159 Reposts · 755 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
143 Reposts · 679 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
132 Reposts · 648 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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).
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
196 Reposts · 696 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
193 Reposts · 661 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
122 Reposts · 577 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
121 Reposts · 559 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
98 Reposts · 508 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
109 Reposts · 545 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
119 Reposts · 539 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
127 Reposts · 540 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
128 Reposts · 560 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
151 Reposts · 590 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
127 Reposts · 545 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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?”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
99 Reposts · 517 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
105 Reposts · 493 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
102 Reposts · 472 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
109 Reposts · 470 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
94 Reposts · 465 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
91 Reposts · 465 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
94 Reposts · 456 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
100 Reposts · 487 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
102 Reposts · 474 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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!”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
59 Reposts · 274 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.’”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
54 Reposts · 270 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
83 Reposts · 292 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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…
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
71 Reposts · 261 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
69 Reposts · 283 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
31.Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter:
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
59 Reposts · 275 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
83 Reposts · 243 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
61 Reposts · 226 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
48 Reposts · 215 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.”
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
55 Reposts · 222 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
36.at
36.at (FOR SALE)
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
39 Reposts · 200 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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:
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
63 Reposts · 236 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
38.This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source:
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
79 Reposts · 259 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
71 Reposts · 252 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
77 Reposts · 291 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
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.
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
42 Reposts · 257 Likes
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
42. For more on this story, read the detailed new story at racket.news
5:49 PM · Jan 27, 2023
43 Reposts · 303 Likes
If the Trump election can be considered some type of revolt—the revolt of the Nationalists against the Globalists, or of downscale hollowed-out America vs upscale cosmopolitan America—then all that has happened in response is a counterattack or Counter-Revolt of the elites.
The WEF class, and their beneficiaries and foot soldiers and clients in the Cathedral of media-academia-NGOs etc have convinced themselves that no other possible principle matters but that they retake complete control of our culture and politics, that they are our rightful rulers and leaders.
Sometimes I think we're living through a Lite American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, sometimes I think we're living through a Lite American version of the Protestant wars of Reformation, but either way all our old ways of life (especially things like free speech, free thought, fair play, journalistic and scholarly integrity etc) are dead and gone and won't be returning anytime soon.