BREAKING: TWITTER FILES #15: ‘It was all a lie…” Democrats’ ‘Russian bot’ scam is finally EXPOSED!

By
Anneta Griffee
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As promised, Friday afternoon, journalist Matt Taibbi released the latest edition of the “Twitter Files,” uncovering perhaps one of the most disturbing assaults yet on innocent American citizens and conservative influencers.

Taibbi is one of the select group of journalists which Twitter owner Elon Musk has allowed to search through the documents and correspondence that occurred prior to his takeover of the company, uncovering disturbing accounts of how Twitter colluded with top government officials and lawmakers to push their desired narrative, and censor conservative voices.

In Friday’s release, titled “Twitter Files #15,” Taibbi exposed a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence, was funded by a liberal think-tank organization and headed up by a former FBI counterintelligence official.

“It was all a big lie,” Taibbi announced on Friday, revealing that the long list of about 600 “Russian bots” put forth on the Hamilton 68 digital “dashboard” was actually just ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.

Yet the “Hamilton 68” dashboard “was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years,” Taibbi reported.

Directly impacted by this release is our own DMLNewsApp and TeamDML.com founder, Dennis Michael Lynch, who is one of the people included on the list of alleged “Russian bots.”

Below is the entire, just-released thread of Twitter Files #15:

1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15
MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD

2.“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.”

3.“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”

4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Taibbi announced that Dennis Michael Lynch is also on the list:

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!”

DML posted a video statement in response to learning he was on a list of alleged “Russian bots,” and wrote, “My response to being on the discredited list. I also should thank @elonmusk for allowing Matt and team to reveal the truth about what’s been happening behind the ugly curtain.”

WATCH BELOW:

“I am very mad, but even more upset, that I am on a discredited list. And when I spoke to @mtaibbi he did not mention to me about the #ParklandShooting. Maybe that’s how I got on the list? I worked with the families to get school safety bills passed. Outrage!” DML added in another tweet, in response to the Twitter Files release.

DML shred a video of an interview he held with Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was one of the victims of the Parkland school shooting.

“I’m on the so-called list; I tweeted about my interviews w/Parkland parents and how we got school safety bills passed. Let me tell the world, and the list markers, that working with #ParklandShooting parents ain’t Russian disinformation. It’s fucking raw and real!” DML wrote.

Taibbi continues….

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.’”

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.

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…

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.

31.Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter:

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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:

38.This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source:

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.

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.

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.

42. For more on this story, read the detailed new story at http://racket.news

And a special thanks to @0rf for putting together video for this segment – much more to come.

BELOW ARE LINKS TO PREVIOUSLY-RELEASED TWITTER FILES:

PART 1 – Dec 2 – Journalist Matt Taibbi released details on censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story just prior to the 2020 election.

PART 2 – Dec. 8 – Journalist Bari Weiss published details of how Twitter held back the reach of many conservatives, including Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and even the Twitter account Libs of TikTok.

PART 3 – Dec. 9 – Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed behind-the-scenes details on what led to then-President Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter in January 2020.

PART 4 – Dec. 10 – Journalist Michael Shellenberger outlined the way Twitter executives manipulated the platform’s rules in order to blacklist former President Donald Trump on January 7, 2020.

Part 5 – Dec. 12 – Journalist Bari Weiss revealed the process of removing Trump from Twitter after Jan. 6.

Part 6 – Dec. 16 – Journalist Matt Taibbi released details on Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary

Part 6B – Dec. 18 – Journalist Matt Taibbi posted a supplemental thread on the FBI’s efforts to control Twitter

Part 7 – Dec. 19 – Writer Michael Shellenberger released details on how the FBI and intelligence community “discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.”

Part 8 – Dec. 20 – How Twitter ‘directly assisted’ U.S. military’s influence operations, posted by journalist Lee Fang

Part 9 – Dec. 24 – Vast web of coordination between tech giant and CIA, State Dept, other agencies, published by journalist Matt Taibbi

Part 10 – Dec. 26 -How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate, released by journalist David Zweig

Part 11 – Jan. 3, 2023 – Twitter Files Part 11: How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In, by Matt Taibbi

Part 12 – Jan 3, 2023 – Twitter Files Part 12: “Twitter and the FBI Belly Button”, and the scoop on Schiff, by Matt Taibbi

Part 13 – Jan 9, 2023 – Twitter Files #13 – How Pfizer board member secretly urged Twitter to hide posts, by Alex Berenson

Part 14A – Jan. 12, 2023 – Twitter Files #14A – Russiagate Lies and The Fake Tale of Russian Bots

Part 14B – Jan. 13, 2023 – Twitter Files #14B – Emails show Schiff’s routine efforts to get posts taken down

The Dennis Michael Lynch Podcast is available below. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show by downloading The DML News App or go to Apple Podcasts.

 

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16 COMMENTS

  2. DML on a liberal bot list. Bro, you had nothing to worry about all along. Now, hire the best attorneys and get rich off a liberal’s dime.

  3. It’s as bad as it gets, using lies by politicians to sway the American way of thinking. The people involved in this plot, deserve every bad thing that’s going to happen to them ! The American Press is DEAD ! Not one news agency took the time to see if any of it was true !

  4. The fact that these criminals are allowed to exist today is truly amazing. Your level of compassion is something I’ll never understand. The people responsible for these lies, manipulation, and malfeasance are disgusting and reprehensible. They will never admit guilt and can never be rehabilitated. Removal from the population is a just response.

  7. Lest we forget, John Podesta is not just a close personal friend of the Clintons but also good buddies with Chris Ruddy who owns Newsmax.

  8. Well now all of us that were called conspiracy theorists and delusional shall be redeemed. All of my conspiracies or what I call and educated guess have all come true. I wont hold my breath for an apology because it wont ever come and the damage these asshats have done is not redeemable or forgivable.

  14. DML, you’ve been unfairly smeared by the lying and disloyal Clinton media machine. I recommend that you and the others join in a class action suit against the Alliance to Secure Democracy to seek damages for this slander against your good name.

  15. Trying to remain skeptical here, hopefully this wakes up the masses and they actually start thinking for themselves, doing their own research prior to trying to elect the right person. If they spent a third of their time doing as much research as they do for their favorite sports thugs we might stand a chance of turning America back to a great country. And for the resident idiot on here there is nothing wrong with wanting your country to be great.

  16. Knowing what Podesta has done/been involved in before…HOW is he allowed to influence ANYTHING? He’s still working in government…if what I read was correct! Does he have a security clearance? From Trump on down…all these people have been maligned, had their character assasinated, have had financial harm done to them! Finding a constitutional judge to take their case should be a given… but who can ANYONE trust anymore? Unbelievable how truly bad this has been…and how deeply they transferred HATRED of Trump to millions, over absolute lies…is unprecedented! Do they not understand the laws of God…and the laws of nature…you will receive from that which you plant?

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