{"id":31930,"date":"2018-03-05T08:02:40","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T13:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31930"},"modified":"2018-03-05T08:02:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T13:02:40","slug":"stop-blaming-russian-bots-for-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31930","title":{"rendered":"Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/hgroup>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not convinced on this bot thing,\u201d said one of the men behind the Russian bot thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n

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BuzzFeed News; Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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By now you<\/b> know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what\u2019s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found \u2014 Russian bots.<\/p>\n

Russian bots were blamed<\/a> for driving attention to the Nunes memo, a Republican-authored document on the Trump-Russia probe. They were blamed<\/a> for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama\u2019s special election. And here they are<\/a> wading into the gun debate following the Parkland shooting. \u201c[T]he messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult,\u201d wrote<\/a> the New York Times in a story following the shooting, citing little more than \u201cTwitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is, not to mince words, total bullshit.<\/p>\n

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard<\/a>, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.<\/p>\n

But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it\u2019s become totally overblown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not convinced on this bot thing,\u201d said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative \u201coverdone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts \u201clinked to Russian influence efforts online,\u201d according to its own description<\/a>, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. \u201cThey are not all in Russia,\u201d Watts said during a phone interview last week.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything \u201cI\u2019m not convinced on this bot thing,\u201d said one of the men behind the Russian bot thing. BuzzFeed News; Getty Images By now you know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what\u2019s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[16456,19081,19080,7844,19082,694,15282,827],"class_list":["post-31930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-bots","tag-buzzfeed","tag-charlie-warzel","tag-donald-trump","tag-miriam-elder","tag-russia","tag-russiagate","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31931,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31930\/revisions\/31931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}