The latest Twitter Files reveals how the old, Orwellan regime’s quest to find Russian bots spiraled out of control and ended in the wanton censorship of innocent Americans.
Independent journalist Matt Orfalea released Part 21 of the Twitter Files April 25, “How to Find Russians Anywhere.” A Senate Intelligence Committee request to identify Russian agents on Twitter led to false identifications.
“After Twitter's early attempts to identify Russian accounts resulted in such low numbers, they used different methodologies, tallying ever-increasing numbers of ‘Russians,’” Orfalea explained.
Americans wrongly identified as Russians were “unjustly censored,” Orfalea tweeted. They were “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.’” Apparently, the rabid censorship was driven by the mania for finding Russian accounts.
The unreliable Hamilton 68 dashboard led to excessive estimates of Russian activity and false identification of accounts, Orfalea showed. And Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub drove “cyber-scare stories of Russian subversion” and Russian trolls, yet a Clemson expert reportedly admitted lack of certainty about the conclusions, some of which were false. Both Clemson and Twitter itself were “scraping the barrel” and ended up listing Americans among the “Russian bots” list given to Congress.
Twitter had a big role, of course. Orfalea pointed out a Twitter pet project called “Project Osprey,” which happened after “the Senate Intel Committee asked Twitter to identify accounts from Russia's Internet Research Agency” following the 2016 election. As researchers and Twitter “struggled” to identify Russian agents, with only 179 IRA-“linked” accounts, Osprey was launched. Twitter classified Russian accounts on the arbitrary basis of being either “A Priori" Russians, who were identified by outside researchers and "Inferred" Russians (aka is_russian), who were identified through algorithm tracking "signals".
The methodology was sloppy. Orfalea quoted one industry analyst: “‘If you just look for that marker, then everything will look Russian.’” The project’s standards were “overly broad,” by admission of Twitter employees, and accounts such as @Wikileaks and tools like Tor browser were falsely labeled “is_Russian.”
Twitter and outside researchers had “no sure way” to identify Russian accounts, Orfalea said. That didn’t stop left-wing networks like MSNBC from running “hundreds” of “false claims” on the alleged threat of Russian trolls and bots on Twitter, which apparently turned out to be exaggerated hype.
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