by Tom Parker, Reclaim The Net:
Twitter staff expressed exasperation at “feeding congressional trolls.”
A new batch of internal Twitter Files released by journalist Matt Taibbi shows that in 2018, Democrats and the legacy media continued to claim that Russian “bots” and “trolls” were amplifying hashtags on the platform, despite Twitter officials warning politicians and the media that they’d found no evidence to support the claims.
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One of the main targets of the Democrats’ claims about Russia artificially boosting Twitter hashtags was “#ReleaseTheMemo” — a hashtag that gained prominence on Twitter in January 2018 and called for the release of a classified memo submitted by then-Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes.
This memo detailed abuses by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) when obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on consultant Carter Page in October 2016 shortly after he left his role as a foreign-policy adviser to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
After #ReleaseTheMemo started to trend, numerous legacy media outlets claimed that the hashtag was a “top-trending hashtag among Russian bots and trolls” and “accounts linked to Russian influence operations.”
A few days later, several Democratic politicians, including Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) published letters echoing these claims and alleged that Russian agents had influenced the hashtag.
The Democrats and media all cited “Hamilton 68” — a dashboard that claimed to track Russian influence campaigns and was created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts under the umbrella of the Alliance for Securing Democracy — as the source for their claims of Russian influence.
But internally, Twitter staff were skeptical of this dashboard and found no evidence to support the alleged Russian influence on #ReleaseTheMemo.
Twitter’s then-Global Policy Communications Chief, Emily Horne, wrote “I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which as far as I can tell is the only source for these stories” and described it as “a comms play for ASD [Alliance for Securing Democracy].”
Twitter’s then-Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, added “all the swirl around #releasethememo is based on Hamilton” and that Twitter would be able to “broadly refute it.”
Roth also reviewed numerous accounts that posted tweets with the hashtag and said: “None of them have any signs of being tied to Russia.”
