The choice of whom to censor also tells us whom the Left fears.
Hamilton 68 was one of a long list of efforts to fight “disinformation” by classifying conservatives as Russian bots. For a while virtually any conservative trend could be suppressed by being accused of having been manufactured by Russian bots.
The purported Russian activity involves the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo, a reference to a secret congressional report about President Donald Trump’s allegations that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration. A group that tracks Russian-linked social media influence campaigns says the volume of Russian-related #ReleaseTheMemo traffic represents the most coordinated such effort since their website launched in early August.
“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it,” said Bret Schafer, an analyst who helps runs the Hamilton 68 dashboard , a project with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. It tracks about 600 accounts that it says are tied to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns; most of those accounts were promoting the same meme Friday.
The latest TwitterFiles reveal shows that Twitter’s people were well aware that the Hamilton 68 claims were nonsense. And the list of people that Hamilton 68 was targeting conservatives for censorship.
Including the Freedom Center’s David Horowitz.
Hamilton 68 was about as murky as it gets. It was operating under the umbrella of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is run by lefty foreign affairs types and supposedly dedicated to fighting Russia, which is housed in the German Marshal Fund, originally funded by a grant from the German government, heavily taken over by Russia.
That Hamilton 68 was nonsense was obvious to anyone outside the mainstream media and the D.C. cocktail party circuit. It was indeed even obvious to Twitter’s people, they just kept quiet about it and kept on censoring.
Disinformation was just a buzz word used to make silencing conservatives seem sophisticated and technical.
David Horowitz, as a leading figure in the fight against the Left, would have been a natural target for censorship in what was ultimately another leftist project for silencing its opponents.
Disinformation has never been anything other than a censorship pretext. But the choice of whom to censor also tells us whom the Left feared.
