Talk about election interference – Twitter just admitted it “buried” nearly 50% of tweets with the hashtag #DNCLeak and 25% of tweets with the hashtag #PodestaEmails during the election, validating the complaints of thousands of users who said they were being censored during the election.
Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a written statement:
Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account.
The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag.
Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches.
As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee
And just 2% of the tweets using the hashtag #DNCLeak came from “potentially Russian-linked accounts,” said Edgett, adding that the company hid the tweets as “part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.”
What’s interesting is that Twitter isn’t hiding behind speculation that the wikileaked emails were altered in any way. Not only has John Podesta confirmed their authenticity several times, EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Wikileaks can be verified using a unique string of letters and numbers stamped into the header of every email, called the DKIM Key. You can perform this verification on any email by going to one of the many verification websites and plugging the DKIM key along with a copy of the entire email. If one word or punctuation mark is off, the DKIM verification will fail. This is why none of the wikileaks have been officially refuted, and we know Donna Brazile lied on national TV.
One has to wonder – since Hillary lost the election despite Twitter’s admitted interference, how badly would she have gotten her ass kicked if the platform respected freedom of speech?
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
Ok, excuse me, is that type of censorship not “interfering in election” by definition? It was Dorsey that actively interfered, not Russians.
Twitter is a private company, and can censor whatever they want in their platform. There are no laws guaranteeing your right to Tweet.
Colluding with the Russians to interfere with the election is also not illegal as best I understand it.
Moonshot – agreed on both points, but it still illustrates how stacked the deck was against Trump.
Pedocon Valley.