37. Roth said two of the five accounts were a “small Indonesian content farm… just commercial spam. (Would suspend but don’t want to throw fire on the NK report by making anyone think they’re correct.) Becca account is an American and not at all suspicious.”

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38. Twitter’s Nick Pickles: “New Knowledge’s pitch... pick accounts that they have deemed to be IRA controlled, and then spin up bigger macro analysis... stories about ‘2000 Russian accounts tweeting about Kavanagh/Walkway/Caravan’ [were] often based on media activity from NK.”

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40. Particularly egregious: a New Knowledge report to the Senate on Russian interference was leaked just days before it was outed in a scheme to fake Russian influence in an Alabama election, and no media outlets issued retractions.
No SSCI staff have commented, either.

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41. Foreign cyber-threats exist, and there are sophisticated ways of detecting them. But GEC and its subcontractors don’t use those, instead deploying junk science that often lumps true bad actors in with organic opinion.

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43. The Washington Examiner just profiled a GEC-funded NGO in the UK that algorithmically scores media outlets by "risk."

How does downranking the Daily Wire to help the New York Times get more ad revenue counter “foreign” disinformation?

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45. Twitter comms official Ian Plunkett wrote years ago that “misinformation, like [countering violent extremism, or CVE] before it, is becoming a cottage industry.”

Disinformation is the counterterrorism mission, rebranded for domestic targets.

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46. Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year. Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?

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47. The #TwitterFiles were prepared by a third party, so material may have been left out. Thanks to our team, we’ll have more on this all month.

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48. NOTE: Just before publication, Graham Brookie of DFRLab wrote to clarify about the 40,000 India names: “We didn’t publish this from a former researcher because we lacked confidence in its findings.”

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49. I asked Brookie if he’d made this lack of confidence clear to the Reuters reporter whose story based on that research is still live and uncorrected online:
https://www.reuters.com/article/facebook-accounts-india-idINKCN1RD1R2

He hasn’t replied.

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