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Elon Musk Puts Egg On Adam Schiff’s Face, Tells Him Who Duped Him Into Believing Russia Hoax

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Elon Musk just put egg on Adam Schiff’s face by revealing who duped him into buying into a fake Russia story that Adam used to bully Facebook and Twitter and censor Americans.

Musk exposed that a group called “Hamilton 68” was behind the fraud. Reporter Matt Taibbi said the group is “a computerized dashboard designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure Russian disinformation.”

Taibbi quotes former Twitter executive Yoel Roth saying the group “Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots. Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”

Taibbi writes: 

“Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

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

“Perhaps most embarrassingly, multiple elected officials promoted the site. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders.

“These stories are still having a huge impact on American culture and politics and played significant roles in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, placing downward pressure on the Sanders, Trump and Gabbard campaigns while boosting the likes of Joe Biden (frequently depicted as a “target” of Russian bots).

“In the wake of any online controversy, be it the Colin Kaepernick saga or gun control debates after mass shootings, reporters raced to claim “Russian bots” were trying to “sow division,” often using Hamilton or an outfit like it to bolster their claims.

“Worse, the site pioneered a new form of fake news, which reporters at organizations like Mother Jones, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC ate up for two reasons.

“One, they tended to be politically simpatico with the site’s conclusions (the Daily Beast didn’t need a push to claim Russian bots were pushing Trump flash mobs “in 17 cities”). Two, it was easy content.

“Here’s what Russian trolls are promoting today,” read a piece in Mother Jones by Kevin Drum, all but announcing that reporters could make headlines as quickly as instant coffee in the Ham68 age.

“By early 2018 — perhaps after a talk with Twitter, whose execs pondered the upside of “educating Clint” — Watts was publicly questioning his own methodology, saying, “I’m not convinced on this bot thing.”

This is what Schiff wrote to Twitter and Facebook in 2018

“The response from Facebook fails to indicate whether the company has conducted any analysis of the issue we raised concerning possible Russian-affiliated attempts to amplify calls to release a misleading, classified memo written by Republican staff on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (an online effort we will refer to broadly as the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign). 

“And as more fully described below, Twitter inexplicably confined its response to “original content” and neglected to answer the question of whether Russian sources were actively engaged in promoting the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, as illuminated by the Hamilton 68 dashboard of the German Marshall Fund.

“As that dashboard made clear in the findings we asked you to investigate: “Content is not necessarily produced or created by Russian government operatives, although that is sometimes the case. 

“Instead, the network often opportunistically amplifies content created by third parties not directly linked to Russia.” 

“By failing to address whether Russian-tied online accounts on Twitter or Facebook were – or still are – amplifying the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign and related messaging, we are no closer to understanding Russia’s continuing interference in our democratic affairs,” Schiff wrote.

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