Russian networks seen pushing conservative meme
WASHINGTON — Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations are pushing a conservative meme related to the investigation of Russian election interference, researchers say.
The purported Russian activity involves the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo, a reference to a secret congressional report about President Trump’s allegations that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration. A group that tracks Russian-linked social media influence campaigns says the volume of Russian-related #ReleaseTheMemo traffic represents the most coordinated such effort since their website started in early August.
“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it,” said Bret Schafer, an analyst who helps runs the Hamilton 68 dashboard, a project with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. It tracks about 600 accounts that it says are tied to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns.
The underlying #ReleaseTheMemo drama started Thursday after Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., revealed a brief report produced by Republican staff dealing with Trump’s wiretapping allegations. The report stems from a lengthy investigation House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, conducted into the alleged surveillance of Trump transition aides and the revealing of names — or “unmasking” — of Trump aides in classified reports.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted on party lines Thursday to make the three-page report available to members of Congress. But the same Republican members have said they cannot say what exactly the report shows because it is classified — and revealing classified information is a federal crime.
Committee officials who reviewed the documents said they revolve around a dossier on Trump produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and questions over whether it was used to obtain surveillance warrants.
As with previous spikes of coordinated activity tracked by Hamilton 68 — such as one surrounding the NFL national anthem protest controversy — it’s hard to trace back to how it started, and how much the Russian-linked network might simply be mimicking a U.S. trend. “My guess is this started organically,” Schafer said.
Meanwhile, Twitter said in a blog post Friday that it would email nearly 678,000 people in the U.S. to notify them they had followed accounts linked to Russian propagandists or had re-tweeted or liked a tweet sent out by them around the 2016 election. It also said it had found 1,062 new accounts associated with the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. That brings the total to 3,814; Twitter has suspended the accounts.