RUSH: There was a big ballyhooed study that was released I think over the weekend. It was released by Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project, and it argued that fake accounts ads and tweets all clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party and specifically Donald Trump. It was the first we’ve ever heard of this.
It’s late arriving in this whole godforsaken story, and they have this report that they’ve analyzed all kinds of things all over social media, and guess what we found at the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project? We found Russians everywhere! We found Russian fake accounts, we found Russia fake ads, we found Russia fake tweets, and they were all pro-Trump and they were all pro-Republican Party. They’re all from Russia.
My little tech bloggers were having miniature orgasms over this. They just Hoovered it up like it was whatever drug they used. They just couldn’t contain themselves, they were so happy about it. “Finally!” they said. “Proof!” they said. Well, it turns out that the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project is a bunch of “anti-conservative academics” who just got together and put together a bunch of garbage and gave it the imprimatur of their academic credentials to give it some weight.
“The Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project had attacked several conservative outlets as ‘junk news’ in previous studies … Drudge Report, NewsBusters, CNSNews, MRCTV, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Free Beacon … National Review, the Federalist…” Pretty much every conservative website out there, this Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project has been attacking.
“The study on ‘junk news’ drew on ‘a list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that is extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news, and other forms of junk news.’ … Two of the people behind that study, ‘Junk News Consumption,’ were involved in this latest study, ‘The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States 2012-2018.’ Philip N. Howard and John Kelly worked on both projects.
“On Twitter, Howard has posted that he is against the Second Amendment, and repeatedly pushed that Trump supporters and the Trump campaign work primarily through ‘fake news.’ Another member of the group that produced the study, Camille Francois,” Fran-soys, for those of you in Rio Linda, “was a former employee of Google,” which had an office in the Obama West Wing, “working at Jigsaw as a Principal Researcher. In the new study, one of the key findings was that the IRA accounts ‘spread sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news…'”
In other words, you got a bunch of conservative-hating academics publishing their own personal beliefs under the imprimatur of an official academic research project. It is all bogus, and then, “The Washington Post reported that the study was created to analyze the millions of posts ‘provided by major technology firms…'” The Senate Intelligence Committee was in on this. “The Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project is a branch of the Oxford Internet Institute,” and it’s just bogus! The survey and the study are all fake.
But it’s out there now in mainstream media with young, little Millennials just sucking it all up thinking every syllable of it is true.
Related Links