January 23, 2018

Top Democrats Urge Facebook, Twitter to Investigate Russia’s Embrace of #ReleaseTheMemo

“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it.”

Tom Williams/ZUMA

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) are urging Facebook and Twitter to investigate potential Russian involvement in the current partisan push to release a Republican-authored memo that reportedly alleges the FBI used unlawful surveillance tactics to target a former Trump campaign adviser. 

The lawmakers’ Tuesday letter comes amid widespread reports of Russia-linked bots propagating the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it,” said Bret Schafer of Hamilton 68, a German Marshall Fund-backed group dedicated to monitoring Russian influence on social media. [Editor’s note: Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance to Secure Democracy, discontinued the dashboard in 2018. The group has since been criticized for refusing to disclose specifics, including which accounts it was tracking and which if any were directly Kremlin-linked.]

“If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors,” the letter, which is addressed to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, read. 

A growing chorus of Republicans have claimed to be shocked by allegations catalogued in the memo. Meanwhile, Democrats say that the classified memo—which was written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)—contains an alarming number of inaccuracies and misleading information and was assembled to undermine the FBI, the Justice Department, and ultimately the ongoing Russia probes.

https://twitter.com/RepEvanJenkins/status/955852066022412288

Nunes has been curiously slow to say whether he’ll in fact publicly #ReleaseTheMemo. He has so far declined to provide a copy to either the FBI or, as Mother Jones revealed on Monday, the Justice Department.

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From the desk of Mother Jones CEO, Monika Bauerlein...

Newsrooms can be funded in many ways. One of the most controversial (and volatile) ways is by a for-profit corporation or a billionaire owner. We see it across the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

When Mother Jones first started publishing 50 years ago, our founders made a critical decision: to be a reader-supported nonprofit. They knew that no corporate owner would be interested in a muckraking newsroom; they also knew that no muckraking newsroom would be interested in following the agenda of a corporate owner.

And so, we’ve been reader-funded for half a century. We rely on contributions from our readers—readers like you—whether it’s $50, or $15 a month, or whatever fits your budget. People give what they can, and every donation makes a difference for our newsroom, which has grown tremendously—in size and reach and renown—since its inception in 1976.

You may be wondering: What does it take to publish an investigation? And what does my donation actually fund? The answers are one and the same: It takes people, resources, and time. And that’s what your donation funds directly.

Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled because of our $50,000 match. So when you make a donation—$5, $50, any amount—it’ll go twice as far.

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