90 Miles From Tyranny : The Russian Twitter Bots Story Is A Study In Media’s ‘Lie, Set The Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook

infinite scrolling

Friday, January 13, 2023

The Russian Twitter Bots Story Is A Study In Media’s ‘Lie, Set The Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook


The three-step process is regime media’s MO: spread a false claim, crush dissent, then admit the truth once the news cycle achieves its purpose.

he Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.

How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook

In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.

One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”

Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:

The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.

Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.

NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.

New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.

Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.

The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on...



Read More HERE

3 comments:

Drew458 said...

Don't want to read it. Knew what the truth was when all this happened. Take every single one of these lying commie scumbags and hang them or shoot them. That's the only way left, and the only way that will work.

#headsonspikes

tsquared said...

“Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters”

Yep, the asswipes controlling the Dominion counting machines controlled the election. The last two elections were stolen.

JG said...

These Electronic Voting Machines are programmable and can change votes. This was found by a Georgia State Senate Committee looking into fraud for the 2020 election in 2021. The committee found it in multiple ways and a Georgia Southern County Clerk showed how the machines even if not connected to the internet could change a vote. The results were given to the head of the State Senate and Gov Kemp but neither did anything. WE NEED TO GO BACK TO PAPER BALLOTS AND STOP MAIL-IN BALLOTS.