Matt Taibbi, who is well-known for his articles exposing Wall Street corruption, just did a stirring defense of Brietbart, who is under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He claims that it’s free speech as an issue to defend, but somehow strangely overlooks the fact that Brietbart, InfoWars, and other sites may have ignored the use of bot operations by Russian intelligence to amplify the negative stories against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party, and others in the Republican party.
Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.
The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections.
Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article139695453.html#storylink=cpy
This isn’t a freedom of speech issue. This is an issue dealing with the use of bots, and psyops by Russian intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections. I am not sure why Matt Taibbi overlooks this point.
The minimization of Russian influence in our elections by writers like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and others on the far left is rather curious…..it’s like they don’t want us to dig further, because the evidence of Russian interference in our elections is growing further, and further, and it might eclipse them.