Previously, we covered Twitter Files #20, and now we will cover #21, where we learn why pretty much everyone who didn’t follow a strict party line started being called a Russian agent or bot.
And as we said in our post on Twitter Files #20, both threads have us thinking of one of our favorite quotes from President John F. Kennedy:
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
(Emphasis added.) This time we will see how far they went to protect us from those scary foreign ideas and philosophies:
1/ #TWITTERFILES 21
How to Find Russians AnywherePt.1 – PROJECT OSPREY –
After the 2016 election, the Senate Intel Committee asked Twitter to identify accounts from Russia's Internet Research Agency. But both Twitter and 3rd party researchers struggled to find Russian agents. pic.twitter.com/MZHGnIV157
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
2/ At first, Twitter was only able to produce 22 plus 179 IRA "linked" accounts. Democrat Mark Warner called the numbers "inadequate on every level". Twitter went back to the drawing board in an analysis project called "Osprey". pic.twitter.com/jFzJS5P4gH
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
This sounds like basically Democrats had a ‘quota’ of Russian bots they were searching for, and would not accept an answer of ‘there just aren’t that many.’ It is a search driven by a pre-determined outcome instead of a genuine search for the truth.
3/ In "Project Osprey," Twitter counted 2 types of Russians.
1. "A Priori" Russians – identified as Russian by outside researchers like QIntel
2. "Inferred" Russians (aka is_russian) – identified by algorithm tracking "signals" like Cyrillic text or a Russian IP address pic.twitter.com/cGP5dqL6Do
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
Both of which can be highly misleading signals. For instance, many people living in countries that used to be part of the U.S.S.R. (including Ukraine) use Russian as their primary language. It’s a product of how Russia and ethnic Russians dominated the supposedly ‘egalitarian’ Soviet Union. So is a complete fallacy to say that everyone who speaks Russian is necessarily a Russian agent—which would be true even if they were proven to be citizens of Russia. While Russia doesn’t have very strong freedom of expression, Putin doesn’t purport to control every Russian on Twitter.
And IP addresses can be equally misleading.
4/ This kind of analysis, based on "markers" like type of email carrier or retweeting history, can quickly become a Rorschach test, where you see what you want to see. "If you just look for that marker, then everything will look Russian," is how one industry analyst puts it.
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
5/ Even Twitter understood. Noting Green Party candidate @DrJillStein was "captured by is_russian" – the "inferred Russians" list – Twitter analysts commented on the "overly broad nature of is_russian." pic.twitter.com/64HNHRWXkP
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
6/ "Outrageous," says Stein. "Just more that Joe McCarthy would be proud of." pic.twitter.com/7gx7Owy3g2
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
We doubt that we would agree with Mrs. Stein on very much, but we are with her on that.
7/ Another account deemed "is_Russian" was @Wikileaks. Shown the attribution, @Stella_Assange said, "Wikileaks does not fit the definition," noting that anyone using surveillance-resistant search tools like the Tor Browser might also be deemed "Russian." pic.twitter.com/HaMeFShM4q
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
8/ "Use of TOR would randomly result in false positives," Stella Assange said. "TOR is an essential tool for civil liberties and privacy communities." pic.twitter.com/i4L2cMk114
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
9/ In the same Osprey document, Twitter notes the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats (which NYT reported was posted a scary 1,700 times on election day) only garnered a microscopic 6,953 impressions—a hydrogen atom in Twitter's vast ocean of tweets. pic.twitter.com/bT9GzyR5il
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
10/ After Twitter's early attempts to identify Russian accounts resulted in such low numbers, they used different methodologies, tallying ever-increasing numbers of "Russians," from 22 to 201 to 2700 to 2,752 to 3,124 (in Osprey), & finally, 3,814. pic.twitter.com/XNhpT323RC
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
Bear in mind, there are approximately 330 million persons living in America. Even if we pretend they are accurately counting Russian agents (don’t laugh), this is not even equivalent to one percent of the American population. Are they so afraid of debate that they can’t win with those odds in their favor?
11/ Even as Twitter began referring openly to "IRA-linked" accounts, the company had no sure way to make such identifications. They were only "potentially connected". pic.twitter.com/6cvKysQZoo
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
12/ As policy chief Colin Crowell explained in late 2017, "we are citing accounts as IRA on the basis of 3rd party assessments," as "we have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis," apart from "educated guesses." pic.twitter.com/NbBCND5Gx9
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
Were any lawyers involved in this process? Because the potential for defamation lawsuits is staggering.
13/ Twitter knew that if they couldn't identify IRA accounts with certainty, outside researchers lacking Twitter's internal data couldn't either.
PART 2 – Russian Troll Hunters
"They just don't have the chops" pic.twitter.com/wbEDQt768l
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
14/ If you look on https://t.co/1XBC7wd75G today, you'll see that MSNBC alone made hundreds of false claims of Russian meddling, citing the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which past #TwitterFiles revealed to be tracking Americans, not "Russian bots and trolls," as claimed. pic.twitter.com/Dofn4KMqSa
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
15/ Outside of Hamilton 68, about which Twitter stayed quiet despite internal knowledge that it was "bullshit," Twitter analysts may have had the most disdain for Clemson's Media Forensics Hub, a major driver of print and TV cyber-scare stories of Russian subversion. pic.twitter.com/z5ER4HCNDo
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
16/ Clemson's "Troll Hunter" profs Darren Linvill & Patrick Warren appeared in one media story after another (sometimes photographed w Hamilton 68 dashboards in the background), even warning that "uplifting tweets" could lead you into the dark clutches of a Russian troll. pic.twitter.com/JPxs0GDTk1
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
17/ When asked how they knew an account was Russian. Warren confessed he can't be "100% sure" but Livill said he was "certain". He wouldn't say how though. "Transparency just isn't possible," he said. pic.twitter.com/yNgkxQGZXD
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
18/ Clemson's most "certain" troll hunter seemed to jump the gun in 2020 when he suggested #BloombergIsRacist could be a “Russian hashtag” bc it started that morning from the account @drkwarlord that “live[s] somewhere in Asia” bc it posts when Americans should be sleeping. pic.twitter.com/Myyc6UnySh
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
Judging by how Elon Musk tweets, they probably think he is a Russian bot, too.
Except it is even dumber than that. Apparently, these galaxy brains didn’t know there was such a thing as people who work at night:
19/ That was false: It started prior to that morning, and not by @drkwarlord, who is an American living in the US, not Asia. When I asked why his sleep sched seemed off, he laughed, and told me, “I’m a nurse at a hospital in Indiana. In 2020, I worked the night shift.” pic.twitter.com/F7D0Y0GPwQ
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
We are so on this list.
20/ This kind of mixup appears to be what Twitter's Aaron Rodericks was referring to when he noted the Clemson professors' "constant tendency to find Russians/foreign interference every time they look for anything." pic.twitter.com/KEwv2dDkK5
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
21/ Another example occurred w the #DCBlackout hoax. As Twitter exchanged emails with the FBI, describing the campaign as "a small-scale domestic troll effort…not a significant bot or foreign angle,” Linvill described the campaign as having employed “a classic Russian move". pic.twitter.com/lUgILae5En
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
22/ After a later Clemson report regarding "inauthentic activity" during Vice Presidential debates, Rodericks decried "their usual unsubstantiated claims of foreign interference," writing they had to "scrape the bottom of the barrel to find foreign interference". pic.twitter.com/vSV4LmYRjv
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
23/ But to the Clemson researchers' credit, they found Twitter was "scraping the barrel" too, having looped in several Americans in a list of "Russian bots" given to Congress. So clearly, Twitter's own false positives didn't stop with its project, Osprey. pic.twitter.com/o8jU3cT05b
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
24/ The Americans found by Linvill & Warren had been unjustly censored—suspended from Twitter without warning or explanation. Thrown in a haystack of suspected Russians, "they lost access to Twitter accounts that they used to maintain social and career connections," wrote Wired. pic.twitter.com/yFU5AbqkT4
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
25/ After years of Red Scare stories (citing the Clemson duo, Ham68, & others) that fueled such awful censorship, Linvill leveled with PBS in 2022: "You know, Russian trolls aren't as common as people think they are." pic.twitter.com/5B3SkzbxlA
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
Great, him and Dr. Fauci doing untold damage and only now admitting that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Can we stop blindly trusting so-called experts, please? Especially when freedom is involved?
26/ PART 3 – HOW TO FIND DISINFORMATION EVERYWHERE
To be continued…#TwitterFiles21 co-authored w @mtaibbi and help from other #TwitterFiles researchers
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
27/ The Clemson professors' comments to Racket News pic.twitter.com/dx55itaZrG
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
And like a real journalist, when he did make mistakes, he issued corrections:
Corrections:
The last number in the sequence is 3841 (not 3814)
Seems the order went from
22 to 201 to 3,124 to 2700 to 2,752 to 3,841So not every tally went up but it usually did
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) April 25, 2023
And is apparently it for now. Naturally, we will be monitoring for the next episode of the Twitter files.
Still, we will remind you, dear reader, that this prolonged ‘Russian panic’ is what justified the wholesale suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which might have changed the outcome of the last election. That should be troubling to any person who cares about this republic.
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