Russian Twitter Bots Frantically Re-Tweeting GOP Hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo
The frequency with which the (Russian) accounts have been promoting the (#ReleaseTheMemo) hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts' references to the "memo," meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.
http://www.businessinsider.com/release-the-memo-campaign-russia-linked-twitter-accounts-2018-1
Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations have begun promoting the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo.
It's a reference to a document written by Rep. Devin Nunes that purports to show abuse by the Obama administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to an analysis.
The most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.
Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama's administration.
And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.
#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.
The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts' references to the "memo," meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.
The most-shared domain among the accounts has been WikiLeaks, and the most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.
WikiLeaks said on Thursday that it would reward anyone with access to the "FISA abuse memo" who chooses to submit it to the site. The Russia-linked accounts have evidently been sharing the "submit" page to push the memo's release.
#ReleaseTheMemo: Do you know someone who has access to the FISA abuse memo? Send them here: https://t.co/cLRcuIiQXz
WikiLeaks will match reward funds up to $1m sent to this unique Bitcoin address: 3Q2KXS8WYT6dvr91bM2RjvBHqMyx9CbPMN
or marked 'memo2018': https://t.co/lmsmphuH2N pic.twitter.com/j1YEkXqi2S
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 19, 2018
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Hamilton 68 : A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation …
*New Brief: The Methodology of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard* Since Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, many have warned that Putin will be back in 2018 ...
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Hamilton 68 has been working to expose trolls — as well as automated bots and human accounts — whose main use for Twitter appears to be an amplification of pro-Russia themes. The site's mission is to monitor and illustrate the themes that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Americans to be thinking and talking about, including "the failure of democratic governance in the United States."
Bret Schafer, a communications coordinator at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy who tracks the Hamilton 68 accounts, said he "certainly can't remember" the last time the researchers had seen a topic "promoted to this level" by the Russia-linked bots and trolls.
"On a normal day, our top hashtag is typically used around 400 times in a 48-hour period by the network we track," he said in an email on Friday.
"As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10)," he said. "In total, they've easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange's offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls."
Several Republican congressmen — many of whom have been highly critical of the special counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the investigation into Trump's ties to Russia — have released statements calling on the House Intelligence Committee to declassify and release Nunes' four-page memo.
The executive branch would have to review the document before it could be released to the public, but "this could happen real quick," Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News on Thursday. "Chairman Nunes is committed to getting this information to the public."
The document purportedly describes classified information Nunes obtained from the FBI and Justice Department as part of his investigation into whether the Obama administration misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Trump and his associates during the presidential transition.
"The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice," said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has called on Mueller to resign. "The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy."
Rep. Ron DeSantis, who has introduced legislation that would curtail Mueller's mandate and budget, said in a statement on Thursday that "the classified report compiled by the House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation."
'A profoundly misleading set of talking points'
Democrats, meanwhile, have called the Nunes memo grossly exaggerated and misleading.
"The Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation," Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday.
"Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI," Schiff continued.
A source with knowledge of the memo told Business Insider that it was "a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom," adding that it "purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details."
Schiff said the document "may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals."
Nunes began investigating the Justice Department and FBI after he traveled to the White House to view classified information in March without telling his committee colleagues. There, he viewed classified information that he said showed FISA abuse by Obama administration officials.
Nunes would neither confirm nor deny that he got the information from the White House.
"We have to keep our sources and methods here very, very quiet," he told reporters at the time. He told Bloomberg later that the information had come from a "network of whistleblowers."
Nunes briefed Trump on the intelligence, which Nunes said showed that the president and his advisers may have had their communications "incidentally collected" — and their identities "unmasked" in intelligence reports — by the intelligence community after the election.
A source of concern has been why some of Trump's associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, had their names leaked to the press.
But Republican and Democratic congressional aides told reporters in early April — after being briefed on the classified reports — that Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately.
Indeed, the committee under Nunes' leadership made at least five unmasking requests to US spy agencies between June 2016 and January 2017 related to Russia's election meddling, The Washington Post reported last year.
The report came days after Nunes, who would have had to sign off on any committee requests to reveal the identities of US persons mentioned in intelligence reports, called unmaskings "violations of Americans' civil liberties."
Again America is under attack from Russian cyberwarfare, this time with the unwitting or witting help of Tea Party republicans in Congress.
After witnessing their attacks on the likes of Comey and Mueller, one could possibly say that they are doing this 'wittingly' and willingly, in concerto with Trumps ice water pal, Putin.
Trump has had a year to stop all of this, no ?
Has he ever even mentioned it, except to deny it ?
So you're ok with Russia pushing narratives that would cause people to question their own judicial and law enforcement agencies ?
Mighty Patriotic of you.
And where the hell did I say Trump should shut down Twitter, Twit THIS
So you are in favor of Russia methodically subverting US public opinion because "free speech" , is that it?
ever here of a Bi-sexual ?
The government already controls/regulates speech. Where have you been?
Oh I am for free speech. I am also for recognizing the Russian effort for what it is. They want to help Trump in his times of trouble.
OK, I'm fine with that suggestion, and so you're fine with blaming Trump for something, no ?
Well, why don't YOU answer my question posed on post number 4, or it poor form for you to do as much ?
Is this the proper form ?
" you just want to complain and blame trump"
tell US what we think without even posing a question ?
If you're talking about these agencies during the Obama administration, I would say they ought to be questioned. Seems like a bit of illegal hanky-panky was going on.
Why in the world would they want to do that? Hillary would have been a push over and lay down for Putin. You would think he much would have preferred her.
time will tell
time will tell
Seems there are/were a few viners who were Russian bots. Seems that they are here infesting NT now.
Really can you give us some names. If that is indeed going on, shouldn't you report it to Perrie?
Russia and Wikileaks are in cahoots to subvert American democracy and the GOP congressmen are their stooges.
Why is Nunes still even on any damn committee or panel...
' "The report came days after Nunes, who would have had to sign off on any committee requests to reveal the identities of US persons mentioned in intelligence reports, called unmaskings "violations of Americans' civil liberties." '
Nunes is upset with unmaskings and complaining about them, while he is authorizing them...?
Someone please explain if I have misread this, thanks in advance.
What ever happened to COUNTRY FIRST AMERICA ?
233,000%
That’s a lot, right?
probably just a chance coincidence.
.
Is there NOTHING these clowns won't defend ?
"...the partisan tensions bubbled over again Friday, with a skirmish over a report apparently produced by a splinter faction of Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee led by Nunes. The GOP majority voted Thursday night to share the report with colleagues, but not to release it to the general public. By Friday morning, however, Republican members of Congress were demanding the memo be made public—with their calls being amplified by Russian-linked Twitter accounts .
The exact contents of the report are unclear, but it appears to allege wrongdoing on the part of the Justice Department and FBI in handling surveillance. Representative Steve King of Iowa described it as “worse than Watergate.”
But given his recent history of making splashy but unsupported claims, it’s difficult to grant Nunes the benefit of the doubt. In the spring, he made a series of extremely serious allegations against the Obama administration, including improper surveillance of Trump aides. No proof of those allegations emerged, and the Justice Department has since said there was no surveillance. It soon became clear that Nunes was receiving information from White House staffers (who have since been pushed out of the White House), even as he was overseeing an ostensibly independent investigation into the president.
One source told Business Insider ’s Natasha Bertrand that the present memo represented “a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom” and “purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details.”
Schiff accused Republicans who have circulated the memo of carrying water for the White House. “It’s a bit of a hodgepodge of false statements and misleading representations,” he said, and argued that the report sought to mislead the public, relying on the expectation that the classified information that underpins and contextualizes it would never be made public.
“Most of the majority members have not read the underlying materials and have acknowledged as much, so they are voting to release information that they have not read the underlying materials,” Schiff said.
Republican Mike Conaway, a Republican who replaced Nunes as the chief of the Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, told Politico he did not expect the report to become public, but his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why."
And that's all you need to run like your ass is on fire telling everybody that there is a problem in the DOJ and FBI. You are correct on the account that there is a problem in the DOJ and FBI but it's far from the problems you wish (and want) it to be.
Do us all a favor and read the link that Norma-D posted in #9 above. You may learn something. Like on page 25 and 26 where Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, admits they couldn't find anything on the President "doesn't seem to have gotten any business deals". Then ask Chris Steele (via Perkins Cole, the DNC lawers), a person Fusion GPS admits never went to Russia to get information, to find out more.
"Russian twitter bots huh? too damn funny.
LOL
It's not a secret that the vast majority of trumps twitter followers are "bots". Trump has 49 million followers on twitter, estimates put the number of bots following him is close to 20 million. How do we know? Bots cannot "like" a tweet and how many likes does trumps tweets usually get? Usually between 50 and 150k. Now with 49 MILLION followers, every tweet he releases, (one would think), he should be over a million likes pretty easily.
And by the by...trump has 46.9 million followers. Obama? 99.3 million and Obama also had the most liked tweet of 2017...
.
4,610,613 LIKES
If I am not mistaken, the earth moving memo was penned by GOP members. Pasted together with half or cherry picked truths and untruths.
Goebbels would be proud.