"The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged “Russian influence” into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false “Russian bots” and “divisiveness” narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, – CNN, Wired, the New York Times –  are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public. How long will it take until people die from it...?"

The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to produce fake results.

See for example these three stories:

• CNN - Russian bots promote pro-gun messages after Florida school shooting
• Wired - Pro-Gun Russian Bots Flood Twitter After Parkland Shooting
• New York Times - After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced

Russian bot with ancient regalia

From the last link:

SAN FRANCISCO — One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its claimed task is:

... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.

The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy, wished everyone a #MerryChristmas.

The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these  accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag, ...

The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is definitely false:

Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found (Dutch, English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands. In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council. It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.

Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account, had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself says:

[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

This is nuts.

Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted:

The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times -  are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

How long will it take until people die from it?

Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

The invasion of Iraq was unforgivable. It remains unforgivable. It will always be unforgivable. Its architects should be tried in The Hague and imprisoned, and nobody who helped inflict that unfathomable evil upon our world should ever be employed anywhere they could do any more damage or mislead anyone else. All behaviors of the mainstream media, US intelligence agencies and US defense agencies should be viewed through the lens of those unforgivable lies and murders forevermore, and nobody should ever take them at their word about anything ever again.

Instead what has actually happened is that nothing whatsoever has changed since the invasion, Americans still take it on faith that Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Un are world-threatening enemies in sore need of ousting, and bloodthirsty psychopaths like Max Boot who have been consistently wrong about everything are still hailed as experts worth listening to.

Oh yeah, and now they’re being adored as progressive heroes.

Max Boot: No responsible medium would give any space to a dangerous malignancy like this, but then again the New York Times and the rest of the US media are far more pieces of the ruling class propaganda machine than legitimate sources of news.

Boot, who is a PNAC signatory and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (which tells us something about this den of criminals and sociopaths—eds), published an article yesterday in Foreign Affairs which perfectly matches the newfound love of progressivism in his neocon soulmate Bill Kristol. The article, titled “2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege”, details in halting, equivocation-laden prose the months-long journey into awakening that this lying warmonger claims to have experienced during the Trump administration.

This spectacularly evil man, who wrote an essay titled “The Case for American Empire” just weeks after 9/11 in which he called in plain English for America to “unambiguously to embrace its imperial role,” is now seeing his latest essay shared eagerly by Democrats everywhere enthusiastically exclaiming “Look! See? This conservative gets it!”

I’m seeing some progressives arguing that Boot’s sudden public recognition of his white male privilege is intrinsically worthy of praise and acceptance, and that the proper response is to applaud him for it, not spit in his face. These people are wrong. Max Boot did not have some personal epiphany about race and gender dynamics which he felt like sharing in Foreign Policy magazine (the obvious place everyone goes for publication of their enlightening insights into privilege and inequality); Max Boot is courting Democrats because his war-hungry ideology is being increasingly rejected by Republicans.

If you want to see why neocons are courting Democrats with increasing desperation, check out the response to Boot’s latest essay by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who has come to align with the popular anti-interventionist sentiments of Trump’s base, or Carlson’s debate with Boot on his show back in July:

Max Boot will say anything if they just let him invade Iran. https://t.co/M6MxBpr8oW

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 27, 2017

Meanwhile what have Democrats been doing? Supporting escalations with Russia based on accusations with no evidence that are reported as fact by the mainstream media in the exact sort of manic, violent, fact-free climate we saw in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (an invasion that Max Boot says nobody needs to repent for). Resistance hero Keith Olbermann says he owes George W Bush and John McCain an apology for the times he disagreed with them, and MSNBC’s Joy Reid openly admitted that she prefers people like Boot as allies instead of actual leftists and progressives:

One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]
~ Joy Reid

Reid’s comments are typical of the way the cult of anti-Trumpism has mainstream Democrats swooning over Bush-era neocons like they’re the Kennedys reincarnated instead of a bunch of child-butchering war profiteers. Just check out the top comments under this “Gosh I’m so woke all of a sudden!” tweet by neocon psychopath Bill Kristol:

In reality, nothing Trump has done in his administration so far is anywhere remotely close to as evil as the invasion of Iraq. The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become.

It was just in 2012 that these same Democrats were laughing along with their president at the Russia fearmongering of Mitt Romney.

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]eoconservatism first rose to prominence in the 1970s, and right off the bat one of its key principles was an opposition to detente with the USSR. This never changed. Not when neocons moved from the Democratic party to the Republican party, not when the Soviet Union fell, and not when neocons began migrating back from the Republican party to their old home in the Democratic party. Neocons have always been fixated on the world-threatening agenda of aggressively crushing Russia, and today the Democrats have picked up that flag and run with it right alongside them.

Which is why now we have depraved psychopaths like Max Boot and Bill Kristol acting out the bizarre performance of suddenly woke progressives. Their new Democratic buddies have already helped them resurrect the cold war on the same amount of evidence as was needed to manufacture support for the Iraq invasion, and with a little tweaking they hope to eventually convince them to help satiate their bloodlust in Iran and Syria as well.

The neocons don’t oppose Trump because he is evil, they oppose Trump because he isn’t evil enough. The slight bit of inertia he’s been placing on their death cult has been enough for them to pivot full-scale toward the Democratic party, which they hope to rebuild and lead into power with full sympathy for all the wars on their infernal wish list.

The extremely influential neocon think tank Project for a New American Century’s most well-known publication, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century”, argued extensively in the year 2000 that America’s victory in the Cold War against the USSR means the US must step into a planetary leadership role and maintain that leadership role by any means necessary, including military force.

“As the 20th century draws to a close,” PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principlesreads, “the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”

The answer to this question came after 9/11: yes, yes it does. The New American Century has seen an immense increase in military interventionism across the globe to ensure the hegemony of the US dollar and prevent Russia and China from climbing the global power ladder unchecked.

That’s all we’re seeing here in Woke Max Boot and Woke Bill Kristol. Neoconservatism has always been an ideology/military-industrial complex war profiteering scheme which advocates bullying and sabotaging all governments that could pose a threat to the planetary dominance of the US power establishment, and lately rank-and-file Republicans have been proving less useful in facilitating that agenda than rank-and-file Democrats. So they’re saying and doing whatever they need to in order to win the approval of the Dems.

And by golly, it sure looks like it’s working.

It’s not okay to be a neoconservative. In a healthy world, being a neocon would carry as much social weight as being a child molester or a serial killer. These people should not be embraced, they should be recoiled from. Always.

Until Democrats turn away from neoconservatism, the fact that they don’t should be pointed to at every opportunity. The correct response when any Democrat tries to tell you about Russia or Syria is “Get out of here with that Saddam-has-WMDs filth, neocon.”

That omnicidal death cult deserves nothing but our most sincere revulsion.

__________

Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, bookmarking my website, throwing some money into my hat on Patreonor Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Facebook just found $100,000 in ads aimed at Americans during the 2016 election and secretly linked to a Russian propaganda mill. But it won’t release them to the public!

Tell Facebook: Release the Russian “troll farm” ads to the public!

SIGN THE PETITION

patrice,

Facebook just announced it found $100,000 in incendiary ads aimed at Americans during the 2016 election, run by hundreds of fake accounts linked to a shadowy Russian “troll farm.”¹

Depending on the wording of the ads, the Russian agents may have violated laws banning foreign nationals from attempting to influence U.S. elections – but Facebook is refusing to share copies of the ads with the public.

Sign the petition to Facebook: The public deserves to get to the bottom of the attacks on our democracy in 2016. Publicly release the content of the ads secretly sponsored by Russian nationals.

Foreign nationals or governments are strictly banned under federal election law from contributing to U.S. candidates or making expenditures to influence U.S. elections. It’s also illegal for Americans to solicit or coordinate with that activity.

Many of the ads Facebook just uncovered were geotargeted to specific locations and many mentioned candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton by name. And they were all linked to a notorious, Kremlin-linked “troll farm” in Russia named the Internet Research Agency.

These ads seem very likely to cross the legal line, but it all depends on the content of the ads, exactly what Facebook won’t release.

The content of these ads would be invaluable for legal experts, reporters, and public interest groups working to get to the bottom of the attempts to undermine our elections – and to help protect our democracy from future attacks.

Tell Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Publicly release the recently uncovered Facebook ads secretly sponsored by Russian agents.

These shocking revelations come after Facebook denied for months that Russian nationals had run any paid ads through their system to influence the election.²

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even called it a “pretty crazy idea” to think misinformation on Facebook played any role in the campaign result!³

In June, Demand Progress’s Rootstrikers project delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the Federal Election Commission calling for an investigation into whether Russian hacking and social media activity violated federal election laws, and whether the Trump campaign illegally colluded with their efforts.

Now, as an organization representing internet users, we’re calling on Facebook itself to step up.

After positioning itself as an online “town square” where Americans should spend much of their democratic life, Facebook should act to help the country get to the bottom of the recent attacks on our democracy.

Sign the petition: Facebook must publicly release the ads it uncovered that were secretly sponsored by Kremlin-linked Russian nationals.

Thanks for taking action,

Kurt Walters
Campaign Director
Demand Progress

Sources:
1. Washington Post, "Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election," September 9th, 2017.
2. The Verge, "Why we can’t trust Facebook’s story about Russian ads," September 8th, 2017
3. The Guardian, "Facebook's fake news: Mark Zuckerberg rejects 'crazy idea' that it swayed voters," November 10th, 2016.

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