Twitter quietly revised its public database of ‘Russian bot’ accounts earlier this month, removing 228 accounts it previously said were “connected to Russia”— but the admission has gone almost completely unnoticed by the media.

Bloomberg reported on the “burst of activity” from the bot accounts and claimed that Russia's “social-media trolling operation” was “stepping up its Twitter presence to new heights.”

Fast-forward to 2019 and Twitter has removed 228 of these accounts from the database, saying they had “initially misidentified” them as being linked to Russia, but nobody in the media seems to have noticed.

In fact, Bloomberg is the only major US outlet which bothered to correct the story to reflect reality, admitting that Twitter’s changes to the dataset “invalidate central portions” of its original report and that there was “no surge” in this so-called Russian bot activity at the time in question. Oops!

Pivot to Venezuela!

Interestingly, the highlighted accounts have now been linked to Venezuela, another country the US government just so happens to have bad blood with.

In a tweet, Twitter’s “head of site integrity” Yoel Roth said that the company can now “more confidently associate” the 228 accounts with Venezuela. Roth’s short tweet thread on the misidentification was met with little interest receiving only a few retweets and no attention from media figures who supposedly actively follow any and all news remotely related to Russian activity online.

…more…

https://www.rt.com/usa/452503-twitter-backtracks-russian-bots-media/

fr keks

https://twitter.com/AnaheimFire?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1100432966445031424&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F452584-anaheim-fire-department-broken-windows%2F

When a video of a rear-driving car cruising around Russia’s Stavropol region appeared online recently, one TV channel tweeted to ask Elon Musk what he thought. When Musk replied, people joked that he might be a Russian spy.

“How do you like this?” asked the NTV channel in a tweet, prompting a response from Musk (in Russian): “Haha awesome.” Naturally, the exchange triggered some joking online about how the billionaire might be a secret Russian spy — the key word there being “joking.”

RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan even commented that “Agent Musk” had been busted

But the light-hearted (and definitely not serious) speculation was all a bit too much for Polygraph, the “fact-checking” outfit of the US government-funded Radio Free Europe, which sprung into action to investigate.

“No, Elon Musk is Not a Russian Spy,” the headline confirms, as though responding to some kind of serious speculation that the US-based South African entrepreneur might actually be an agent of Moscow.

Why investigate such a ridiculous claim?

The fact that many Russians had used the word “Nash” (ours) in their posts about Musk gave Polygraph “a base” for the fact-check “even if the claims seemed to be mere jokes” (which they definitely were).

The word “ours” is not just any old “innocent” word Polygraph explained, because the phrase “Krim Nash” (Crimea is ours) was used a lot on social media in 2014 after the reunification of Crimea with Russia.

The phrase “Trump Nash” has also been jokingly used on Russian social media in reference to hysterical speculation in the US that Donald Trump is a Russian agent who “colluded” with Moscow to win the presidency — a fantastical claim for which there is no actual evidence.

…more…

https://www.rt.com/usa/452599-elon-musk-russian-spy/

https://twitter.com/vicderbyshire/status/1100696063344869381?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1100696063344869381&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fuk%2F452563-begum-isis-shooting-range%2F

>>5426971

got roughed up and tolled to play