On
January 26th I received an email from “Mother Jones”
in which Denise Clifton wrote about the relationship between
Russian hackers and FOX News, especially its star anchor Sean
Hannity. In an article entitled “Sean Hannity Is Now A favorite
Weapon of Russian Trolls Attacking America,” Clifton reports on
how “Kremlin propagandists are piling on the Fox News war against
the Mueller investigation.” (1) Here, then, is the article in
its entirety:
“Soon
after Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn
agreed to a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller on Dec. 1,
Kremlin-linked trolls began ramping
up their social-media attacks on
the Russia investigation. They tweeted out dozens of articles from
Fox News and far-right outlets aimed at undermining the credibility
of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the so-called deep state.
And Vladimir Putin’s trolls would soon have a new vein of material
to exploit.
As
Christmas approached, a drumbeat against the FBI grew louder in
certain quarters of Congress: GOP Rep. Jim Jordan led the
attack, claiming
on Fox News that
the FBI had conspired against Trump’s 2016 campaign. President
Trump himself launched
broadsides against
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and “leakin’ James Comey.”
And on December 20, Fox News star Sean Hannity tweeted “CONSPIRACY:
GOP Lawmakers Says FEDERAL CONSPIRACY to Prevent Trump Presidency.”
That
day, Hannity’s website ranked
among the top 10 shared by the network of Twitter accounts linked to
Russian influence campaigns and tracked by the nonpartisan Alliance
for Securing Democracy on
its national security project, the Hamilton
68 dashboard.
Hannity content had not registered much previously—but since
December 20, links from Hannity’s site have appeared frequently on
the dashboard, often ranking among the top 10. “It’s now up there
with other top most-shared domains,” says Bret Schafer, an analyst
who monitors the dashboard for the Alliance.
Another
storm kicked up last week when House Republicans began calling for
the release
of a memo produced
by Rep. Devin Nunes, purportedly
alleging surveillance abuses by
the FBI and the Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation.
On January 18, Hannity inveighed against Mueller specifically: “I
have a message tonight for the special counsel, Robert Mueller,” he
said at
the outset of his Fox News prime time report on the memo. “Your
witch hunt is now over. Time to close the doors.” By the end of the
following day, the hashtag #releasethememo had been tweeted about
3,700 times in 48 hours by the 600 accounts monitored on Hamilton 68,
boosted in part by a tweet from WikiLeaks offering a reward for the
memo. Hannity also posted “#releasethememo” to the top of
Hannity.com.
On
Tuesday, as #releasethememo sat among the top hashtags of the
Hamilton trending list for the fifth day in a row, senior
congressional Democrats called on Twitter and Facebook executives
Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to investigate the extent of the
Russian influence campaign happening on their platforms in real time.
“If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack
by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors
directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process,”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff wrote
to the tech leaders.
Former
senior CIA official John Sipher says the smear campaign by Fox News
and Trump’s allies in the House plays directly into Kremlin hands.
“A weak FBI is in the Russian interest. They will use all the tools
at their disposal to pile on and amplify the negative messages,” he
told Mother Jones.
“At the very same time that we should be coming together to defend
ourselves, partisan supporters of the president are attacking the
institutions that are protecting us. There needs to be a level of
trust and awareness that [FBI and DOJ] are working on behalf of the
people, and are not partisan hacks. While it might be in the
immediate, short-term interest of a few right-wing politicians, they
are helping our enemies and risk doing long-term damage to our
democracy.”
Since
the Hamilton dashboard launched last August, Fox News in general has
often appeared on the trolls’ most-shared list. “Anecdotally, Fox
is the go-to news source for breaking news,” Schafer says. But the
more recent Hannity links seized upon by the Russian trolls echo a
deceptive style seen with content from far-right conspiracy sites
like Gateway Pundit and True Pundit. One recent example: a
Hannity.com link headlined, “KNIVES OUT: Elizabeth Warren GOES
AFTER Oprah Winfrey over 2020 run”—leading to a story quoting
Warren as praising Winfrey for a “fabulous speech.” Another
Hannity link shared by the trolls recently carried
a headline claiming
“Fusion GPS says FBI likely funded ‘Trump dossier’ author”
and crediting Breitbart News. The Hannity links shared this week
continued to demand the release of the Nunes memo and hammered at the
freshest conspiracy theory, the alleged
disappearance of
FBI officials’ allegedly biased text messages.
Hannity
did not respond to a request for comment about his rising popularity
among the network of Russian-linked accounts.
“Because
Russian accounts promote a certain political position is not evidence
of coordination” between the trolls and Trump partisans advocating
for the release of the memo, Schafer notes. The key takeaway with
#releasethememo, he says, “is that Kremlin-oriented trolls have
used that hashtag to promote divisiveness, distrust, and to
negatively influence our public discourse.”
Former
FBI special agent Clint Watts pointed out Tuesday that attacks on the
FBI have been increasing as the Russian investigation continues to
accelerate. After reports
Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
James Comey had been interviewed by Mueller’s team, Watts
tweeted:
“Interviews are getting closer to the top & suddenly attacks by
@GOP on FBI have increased.”
The
600 Kremlin-linked live Twitter accounts that Hamilton 68 monitors
are separate from the 2,752
accounts Twitter revealed last fall that
were operated before the 2016 presidential election by the Russian
Internet Research Agency. Last Friday, Twitter
updated that number to 3,814 IRA-linked accounts—plus
more than 50,000 automated bot accounts linked to the Russian
government. Twitter
says it is sending emails to
677,000 users to notify them that they interacted with the Russian
accounts.
Republican
Sen. John Cornyn, who has been involved in the Trump-Russia
investigation via the Judiciary Committee, called
on Mueller in
December to “clean house” of partisans. Cornyn tweeted
Saturday that
Twitter had notified him that he had shared content from or followed
known Russian accounts.
“Finally
social media is waking up to manipulation of public opinion by our
adversaries,” he wrote. But he seemed to downplay the role of
Congress: “All of us need to step up to meet this challenge,” he
said, “especially the Press.” (2)
There
you have it. Russian bots and trolls picking up upon and amplifying
the dubious and scurrilous 'conspiracy' theories of the tin-had idiot
wrong, and boosting “FOX and 'friends' profiles in the anti-social
media, all the while sowing discord, divisiveness, and distraction.
Fox
News, is either a knowing or unknowing accomplice serving nothing but
the interests of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. FOX News
is Russian Affiliated Television—RAT television, doing its worst to
subvert the rule of law if not the constitution itself.
“an'
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh.
Impeach
and Imprison.
_____________________
- ibid
No comments:
Post a Comment