Just
when you thought we’d hit peak ‘Russian meddling’ claims,
there’s a whole new fear-mongering report in town. The Sunday Times
has released an ‘investigation’ linking a pesky Russian bot army
with Labour’s June election gains.
Heaven
forbid British voters may have been swayed by a lack of leadership by
the Tories...
The
Sunday Times exclusive, but apparently not in-depth, joint
investigation with Swansea University claims that 6,500 ‘Russian’
Twitter accounts sent messages of support for the British Labour
Party in the seven weeks before last year's snap general election,
sharing "mass-produced" and "orchestrated"
political messages.
Given
that politicians and multi-billion dollar corporations spend
exorbitant amounts of money trying to influence public opinion, it’s
extremely hard to imagine how recently-created, thinly-veiled bot
accounts could possibly garner enough of a following to somehow
influence millions of voters across the UK within mere weeks. That
logic didn’t stop the Times, though.
Among
the handpicked accounts sampled in the study, nine out of 10 messages
were in support of the Labour party while 9 out of 10 messages
mentioning the Conservative party were critical. In addition, some 80
percent of the "automated accounts" were created in the
weeks prior to the June, 2017 general election. Notably, the list of
Twitter accounts ‘studied’ by the paper and university have not
been released, nor have they outlined just how many followers (which
is generally a good barometer of the potential reach of a tweet) the
accounts had.
The
‘revelations’ fall neatly in line with the ongoing scapegoat
narrative across the mainstream media: Russia is supposedly
influencing everything from the 2016 US presidential election to the
Brexit vote to potentially meddling in the German elections and the
Catalonian independence referendum. While time and time again the
narrative fails due to blatant lack of evidence, it is seemingly
irresistible to Western MSM and politicians alike.
Just
this week, the US House Intelligence Committee “found no evidence
that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the
Russian government.” Yet the narrative persists.
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