On or around October 31, 2017, Twitter testified about so-called Russian activities related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This and consequent testimonies were slanted to support the Democratic conspiracy theory of “Russian interference.” It might have been prepared together with congressional Democrats.
Even with this understanding, a closer look at Twitter testimonies reveals surprising findings:
- Twitter and the DNC interpreted the word Russian as a reference to the native language and/or place of birth of an individual, not employment by the Russian government or even Russian citizenship. Large part (possibly most) of the so-called Russian-linked accounts belong to American citizens with no relation to the Russian government. At the same time, Twitter elected to disregard accounts making election related tweets from indeterminate locations, and likely to represent foreign governments and other entities.
- Answering questions from senators, Twitter repeatedly used the term automated account as a synonym of a bot, thus dehumanizing Twitter users. The use of automation is allowed and even encouraged by Twitter, which provides a special Application Programming Interface (API) for this purpose. The automation might be as simple as manually scheduling tweets for a later time or auto-responding when the user is away from his or her computer.
Continue reading Twitter Labeled Trump Supporters “Russian-linked,” Mixed Humans with Bots
