Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks

Source: Business Insider | January 19, 2018 | Natasha Bertrand

Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama’s administration.

And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.

#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts’ references to the “memo,” meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.

The most-shared domain among the accounts has been WikiLeaks, and the most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks’ “submit” page.

WikiLeaks said on Thursday that it would reward anyone with access to the “FISA abuse memo” who chooses to submit it to the site. The Russia-linked accounts have evidently been sharing the “submit” page to push the memo’s release.

Hamilton 68 has been working to expose trolls — as well as automated bots and human accounts — whose main use for Twitter appears to be an amplification of pro-Russia themes. The site’s mission is to monitor and illustrate the themes that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Americans to be thinking and talking about, including “the failure of democratic governance in the United States.”

Bret Schafer, a communications coordinator at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy who tracks the Hamilton 68 accounts, said he “certainly can’t remember” the last time the researchers had seen a topic “promoted to this level” by the Russia-linked bots and trolls.

“On a normal day, our top hashtag is typically used around 400 times in a 48-hour period by the network we track,” he said in an email on Friday.

“As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10),” he said. “In total, they’ve easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange’s offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls.”

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