Russian Election Interference Hysteria Used by Feds to Access Twitter and Influence Policy

On Tuesday, a new batch of Twitter files was released. Twitter succumbed to the intelligence community. Twitter was not considered a key player in Russian disinformation spread during the summer 2017. In October, the company was found responsible for this. “one of Russia’s most potent weapons in its efforts to promote Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton,” Clinton said that it was “time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”

Journalist Matt Taibbi Dropped the Twitter files showing how intelligence community used Russian election interference fear to gain access Twitter and influence policy

Clinton said that the platform was an area of high interest. Russian disinformation, Twitter thought it was appropriate to create a “Russia Task Force” In what was likely a move by Washington to prove that they did not require external regulation, the self-investigators were allowed to investigate.

The “Russia Task Force” started with data shared from Facebook, centered around accounts that were allegedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is an organization known for creating and using divisive social media accounts. However, the search did not yield any results. A single message indicated that the investigation was over. “a lot of benign content” Further investigation was required.

An October 18, 2017 report revealed 15 high-risk account connections, three of which were to Russia Today. Twitter would change its criteria to determine what was suspicious with just one message. “built a new version of the model that is lower precision but higher recall which allows to catch more items.”

There were more suspicious accounts that were reported, but only 32 were discovered and only 17 were related to Russia. ” 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend," One memo was read.

Taibbi also added this. “Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”

The lack of findings from the Russia Task Force put the company in a PR crisis, which led to outlets like Politico attacking Twitter for “Russia may be looking for data that can be deleted.”

Congress then continued to breathe down the neck of Twitter. Taibbi writes, “Twitter was threatened with costly legislation by Congress, and Twitter became more scathing about its Russia problems.”

One email highlights how Twitter’s political advertising may have been impacted by this. A message from Colin Crowell on September 23, 2017 reads: “Hello guys..”

Taibbi writes that Twitter would eventually change its posture after more pressure from both the press and from Congress, saying: “Twitter quickly settled on its future position.”

“It removed content from public places ‘at our sole discretion'” 

“They would be private. “off-board” Anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases