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

The Washington Post acknowledged 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. New York University studies support the admission. Find it “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,” After the news cycle achieves its intended purpose, they will only admit the truth.

The Russian Bots Story – How it Followed Playbook

Robby Mook was the campaign manager for then-Clinton in 2016. launched The conspiracy theory was that Trump, then-candidate, was in collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The Clinton campaign commissioned one dossier of bunk allegations. Later, the entire media establishment and a politicized intelligence agency were running the Russia collusion hoax.

One of many conspiracy theories was that Russia was trying to influence American voters through social media. This included armies of Russian soldiers. “bot” accounts. Joy Pullmann, my co-worker, has done it. Not notedThis claim was made by U.S. intelligence agencies with an “intelligence community assessment” January 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 repeated the same narrative before and again after that assessment that was later proven 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 states that December 2016 is the date.

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 their platform.

31.Twitter was soon settled on its future positions.

Publicly, it removed the content “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.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023

Hilariously Tim Starks Same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” On the election, had written a piece for Politico in 2019. Title “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was