Big Brother and the Bots

I don’t know about you, but when I first heard how nefarious governments (read: “Russia”) were turning us all into red automatons via Twitter, I just couldn’t figure how they got inside my shoe phone to do it.

Luckily, a tech-savvy friend explained so it made sense. Not surprisingly, it sounds much like the same old way government and corporate media have been twisting our culture for generations – just higher tech.

That explanation follows and is succeeded by a three-part package that delves further into the massive disinformation campaign waged against 334,000,000 of our fellow citizens:

Part 1) An excerpt from a Chris Hedges essay describing why phony bots and the “Russiagate” hoax matter.

Part 2) VFP member and former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, tells how Americans are prepared for war with Russia via manipulation by a non-existent bot army, or in the case he cites, by phony “sweeping and systematic” interference with a U.S. election.

Part 3) Matt Taibbi runs down what the “Twitter Files” reveal in terms every geek will love.

The Explainer:

As more of us communicate through digital means – email, social media, and texting – our connection to people on the other end weakens. We may build relationships with people we never see or hear. This can be a beautiful thing, but it can also be exploited by criminals leveraging sophisticated impersonation techniques, including computer programs called “bots” that mimic human speech and behavior.

Hamilton 68, a project of the Orwellian “Alliance for Securing Democracy,” is cited by numerous mainstream media outlets as providing the research that proves social media accounts posting dissident political content are not actually operated by people, but by “bots” acting under the direction of nefarious foreign governments. Fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politico perpetuate this fiction as do trusted news sources like the New York Times and Washington Post.

There’s just one problem: the cited research is bunk. Using documents culled from the “Twitter files” – a cache of internal communications documents released in December – Matt Taibbi found that most of the Twitter accounts monitored as bots by Hamilton 68 were, in fact, operated by living, breathing human beings. Twitter employees were aware of the fraud behind Hamilton 68 but decided not to go public.

Groups like the “Alliance,” run chiefly by state department officials and intelligence agency stooges, are manufacturing new tools to silence and repress any views that conflict with their bloodthirsty foreign policy agenda. Using programs like Hamilton 68, they seek to inoculate the average person from considering pro-peace viewpoints by insisting that such perspectives can only come from bots and those duped by them. – Sean Nestor

Part 1) Chris Hedges

Excerpted from Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong

When you read this excerpt, recall the “Two Minutes Hate” Orwell wrote about in 1984, an outpouring of emotion scheduled daily by the Party to control people’s emotions. Instead of focusing on their own unhappiness and taking it out on the Party leaders, Oceania citizens are trained to get out any passion in these two minutes, unite in hatred of their enemies – Eurasia and Eastasia — and in love for Big Brother. At the end of the Hate, the telescreen presents the three important Party slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

“Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.” (emphasis added)

Part 2) Ray McGovern

“Sic Transit Gloria, Mueller”

Ray, and the group he co-founded, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have courageously let evidence-backed data speak for itself, exposing administration lies even prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Part 3) Matt Taibbi

“Meet Hamilton 68, the new king of media fraud”

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork.