TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#Walkaway" from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to “#Walkaway” from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021.
washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…
3. The #TwitterFiles contained material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory Twitter analyses that contrasted with coverage describing #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” These documents should have been published earlier. I apologize to @BrandonStraka.
4. On May 26, 2018, little-known New York actor Straka launched #Walkaway, a Facebook group for disappointed Democrats ready to “walk away” from their party. Straka’s first video quickly went viral:
5. By June 30, #WalkAway had 16,000 members on Facebook. Straka was scheduled for a week of appearances with the likes of @TuckerCarlson and @LauraIngraham. The group was gaining renown.
Then things took a bizarre turn.
6. On July 1, 2018, a firm called New Knowledge tweeted, “The #walkaway campaign is an excellent example of how organic discussions about divisive topics are co-opted by domestic extremists,” adding the site was “amplified by foreign actors for maximum disruption.”
7. New Knowledge cited the Hamilton 68 dashboard in declaring #WalkAway “by far the top hashtag amplified by the network of Russia-linked Twitter accounts.” New Knowledge did not mention that its CEO, Jonathon Morgan, designed the Hamilton dashboard.
8. New Knowledge identified a handful of obvious fake images culled from the clip-art site Shutterstock, declaring some of #Walkaway’s accounts “clearly fake.”
Straka was horrified. “They were definitely bots, but had nothing to do with us. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’”
9. New Knowledge’s complaints about #Walkaway were retweeted that day by a UK site, the Integrity Initiative. A day later, the Washington Post wrote there was “little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of…even thousands.”
10. Within Twitter, future Pete Buttigieg aide Carlos Monje wrote to fellow execs, “We’re getting some incoming qs on #walkaway from House Intel” – the minority office of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) where Adam Schiff was ranking member.
11. Analysts quickly concluded #WalkAway was real. “Surprisingly, there’s only a small amount of fake engagement,” said one analyst on July 11th, adding, “The majority of users that are using #Walkaway are legitimate users.”
12. Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth concluded, “On the whole, while there are a very, very small number of accounts tweeting with this hashtag that look suspicious (several hundred out of ~200k overall), the overall volume... seems legitimate and US-based.”
13. Of the suspicious accounts, 19 tweeted “28 times about #Walkaway.” This looked like a small group of actors inserting conspicuous fakes. The firm found a suspicious spike from between June 23 and July 4 – when #Walkaway was first accused of being “amplified” by Russians.
14. Monje, the future Buttigieg aide, thanked the team for its work and announced he would have to bring the news to congress. “We owe HPSCI a call about it.”
15. However, Twitter neither pushed back hard with congress nor went public. The firm had been through episodes with Hamilton 68, the press, Schiff, and the same House Committee. Had it spoken out before, #WalkAway and others would not have faced accusations of “foreign” collusion.
16. As noted in previous Twitter Files reports, Roth exposed the Hamilton 68 method as “bullshit” in October of 2017. The “dashboard” that purported to track 600 accounts linked to “Russian influence was actually “pure bluster,” tracking ordinary people, not Russians.
17. Hamilton accounts “strongly preference pro-Trump accounts… to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump.”
It was a scam: Gather pro-Trump users. Declare them Russian. Then, watch topics the accounts follow/share. Finally, announce: “Russia loves Trump!”
18. Therefore, when Twitter in early 2018 received questions from Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) claiming Russia was boosting hashtags like #SchumerShutdown and #ReleaseTheMemo, Twitter knew they were bogus.
19. CRY RUSSIA Some Twitter execs wanted to go public: “The sooner we can get it out there that this was an organic movement, the better… It signals to other members that they will look foolish if they cry ‘Russia!’ every time something happens on social media that they don’t like. :)”
20. But senior executives realized neither HPSCI nor Hamilton’s sponsor, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, was interested in hearing their reports. True or false, the Russia bot story was a public relations boon for everyone – “a comms play for the members,” Monje said.
21. “It’s also a comms play for ASD,” said Horne, a future National Security Council spokesperson under Joe Biden. They wanted to tread lightly: ASD’s advisory council contained former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and DHS, John Podesta, and future Biden security chief Jake Sullivan.
22. Execs talked about confronting congress and the ASD with “our knowledge” – that the Hamilton dashboard was fake – and trying to “reorient” all parties to more “accurate” statements. Most of all, “We should reach out privately to maintain the relationship,” Monje said.
23. Neither congress nor ASD “reoriented.” With #WalkAway, congress sent questions citing Hamilton 68, and Roth snapped: “This feels like we’re continuing to give Hamilton68 too much ground on the issue… almost like we’re acknowledging that there’s something to it.”
24. No sooner did Twitter decide not to push back than CNN, on July 17, 2018, released a new story, citing Hamilton 68 to call #WalkAway “pure propaganda, a psychological operation.” By then, #Walkaway had over 100,000 real members.
25. Steven Colbert did a #WalkAway bit: “Russian trolls make things trend!” His source? A Daily Dot article relying on Hamilton 68, showing Straka over a headline: “Russian trolls on Twitter pose as ex-Democrats for #WalkAway movement.”
26. Attention bred more complaints. On October 11th, Twitter received a “massive” spreadsheet of 38,000 suspected inauthentic accounts from ther Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), including #Walkaway
27. Tired of saying no to influential politicians, one Twitter official urged they “confirm” the requests, saying: “We would love to be able to confirm this and land a positive example of our partnership to silence the… critiques” about refusing too many removal demands.
28. Twitter then received a letter from Mother Jones, asking them to confirm research by , which labeled #WalkAway “38% bot activity” and asked “what Twitter is trying to do to curb this kind of unhealthy user activity.” The firm did work w/the DNC. Factcheck.Me
29. Factcheck and Botcheck were two related companies begun by a pair of Berkeley students named Rohan Phadte and Ash Bhat, whom Wired praised as the College Kids who “will do what Twitter won’t”:
30. Twitter regarded the firms in the same light as Hamilton 68, with Roth writing:
“The Botcheck people use a similarly flawed methodology... this is truly a nothingburger... journalists continuing to lean on deeply flawed tools... capitalize on the bot media frenzy.”
31. Policy chief Pickles added:
“Doesn’t publish data, does sell consultancy. Definition of monetizing the problem.”
32. Bhat when originally contacted strongly disagreed with Twitter’s assessment, said his methodology was sound, and suggested some news outlets confused terms like “bot” and “bot-like.” (More to come on that at Racket.)
33. By December, 2018 it was such a given that #Walkaway was Russian-affiliated that even a former high-ranking Homeland Security official like Suzanne Spaulding described Straka’s group as an attempt by Putin to divide America, adding of too-online Americans:
34. On December 19th, two days after submitting a high-profile report on Russian bots to the Senate, New Knowledge and Morgan were outed by the New York Times in a scheme that involved funneling fake Russian accounts to the campaign of Senate candidate Roy Moore:
35. The scheme induced press outlets to write scare headlines about Russians and Roy Moore. Twitter received press queries about Moore bots, similar to the ones about #Walkaway.
36. Meanwhile, the UK-based Integrity Initiative, #Walkaway’s other early accuser, exploded in scandal when the hacker Anonymous leaked its classified plans for global speech-control initiatives.
37. The Integrity Initiative was investigated because it listed itself as a Scottish charity. Scottish authorities concluded it was not one, among other things because its “purposes were not entirely charitable.”
38. It came out the group bashed Jeremy Corbyn as a “useful idiot” for Russia, saying his “open visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause... as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”
Red-baiting was used against left and right.
39. Despite the collapse and exposure of New Knowledge and (eventually) Hamilton 68, accusations of Russian ties to #WalkAway stuck. No press outlet has apologized, nor did anyone at Twitter ever tell Straka or others accused by Hamilton about the dubious claims.
40. Straka would go on to be arrested for being outside the Capitol on January 6th. To some, this will always mean CNN, Steven Colbert, and others were entitled to lie about him.
But make no mistake: the Russia and bot accusations were a fraud, and they’re owed a correction.
More soon at Racket.News