Twitter Files: Is it Okay to Lie About Trump Supporters?

Brandon Straka was smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#WalkAway" from the Democratic Party. Internal Twitter documents suggest he and his followers were set up

Every one of these stories is wrong. Is that okay?

In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative Mesha Mainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” campaign, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021. WalkAway is led by a former New York actor named Brandon Straka, who became famous as an activist after Trump’s election, infamous as an alleged Russian proxy heading into the 2018 midterms, then still more infamous after a 2021 arrest related to his presence outside the January 6th riots.

The Twitter Files contained a wealth of material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory internal analyses that contrasted with coverage by everyone from CNN to Stephen Colbert to Salon.com, who described #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” Hamilton 68, the digital dashboard that purported to track “Russian influence operations” but was exposed in Twitter Files as “bullshit,” figured heavily in #WalkAway’s story. I was preparing to release all this as the project ended, but never did, for which I must apologize. A new Twitter Files thread is out with much of the material, most of which covers a roughly eight month period after the group’s founding in 2018. To spare weary Racket readers of another trip deep into the email weeds today, the documents show three things: