Note to Philip Bump

The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply

“The thing about censorship, which is total nonsense — he’s referring to this Twitter Files stuff, which has been debunked a thousand times over…”

— Philip Bump, Washington Post columnist, commenting on Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of Donald Trump

Dear Philip,

On February 13, 2018, you wrote an article called “When we talk about Russian meddling, what do we actually mean?” It cited a website called Hamilton 68 as a source highlighting “Russian” efforts to “influence U.S. politics”:

The piece became one of eight Washington Post articles to which corrections would be added because of the Twitter Files. Twitter internal correspondence showed the Hamilton 68 was a fraud, a “dashboard” of 600+ accounts that were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots” but “real people” who’d been falsely “labeled Russian stooges.” This was, Twitter executives says, part of a scheme “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth concluded: “We need to call this out on the bullshit it is.”

Your own editors agreed, which is why there’s now a correction notice at the bottom of your article:

The accounts you identified as pushing “Russian influence operations” actually belonged to people like Consortium editor Joe Lauria, Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas, and a onetime refugee from Lebanon named Sonia Monsour. None had any connection to Russia.

Sincerely,

Matt Taibbi