Twitter Suspends Researcher Who Exposed Antifa-Journalist Connections
By Allum Bokhari
Twitter has suspended the account of Eoin Lenihan, a researcher who mapped out connections between mainstream journalists and the violent far-left Antifa movement on Twitter, following a mass-reporting campaign by left-wing activists.
Lenihan published the results of his research at Quillette, where he explained the twofold objective of his project — first, to discover the journalists who were most closely linked to Antifa via social media. Second, to discover if those journalists covered the extremist movement favorably or negatively.
via Quillette:
In October 2018, my research partner and I decided to investigate the truth of this impression by using a mix of network mapping and linguistic analysis to see which prominent journalists who covered Antifa also were closely connected to leading Antifa figures on social media. We then inspected the Antifa-related stories these journalists had written.
We created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified Antifa seed accounts. Using a software tool that analyzed the number and nature of connections associated with each individual account, we winnowed the 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts down to 962 accounts. This represents a core group of Twitter users who are connected in overlapping ways to the most influential and widely followed Antifa figures. Of these 962 accounts, 22 were found to be verified—of which 15 were journalists who work regularly with national-level news outlets.
The journalists included contributors to The Guardian, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.
Unsurprisingly, Lenihan’s analysis of the journalists who mingle with Antifa on Twitter found that none of them covered the movement critically:
That correlation turned out to be quite pronounced: Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.
Since he published his findings, Lenihan has had his account mass-reported on Twitter. Mass-reporting is when an account is swarmed by trolls who abuse the “report” button with the hopes of tricking a tech platform’s algorithms into automatically suspending them. Of course, with much of Silicon Valley now categorizing ordinary conservative speech as violations of their terms of service, this is an increasingly easy task. Lenihan’s account has now been suspended by Twitter for more than two days.
Breitbart News has previously covered the mainstream media’s sympathy for Antifa (see CNN: Antifa’s Violence Against ‘Bigots’ is ‘Right’ and New York Times Glorifies Antifa With Style Guide, Tactical Advice) as well as the violent movement’s allies in Silicon Valley (see Wikipedia Editors Seek To Downplay Antifa Violence and Far-left Ideology and Damore Lawsuit Highlights Google’s Links to ‘Antifa’ Domestic Terrorists).
Breitbart News has reached out to Twitter for comment.
Brennan: I’m Still Waiting For Republican Rats To Realize The Trump Ship Is Sinking
By Tim Hains
Former CIA Director John Brennan warned Republicans who support President Trump that they are on a sinking ship, in an appearance Wednesday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I’m waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one,” he said.
“There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate themselves from Trump. They do so at their own peril. They need to fulfill their obligations, irrespective of their political affiliations. This is now the presidency and institutions of government we rely on to keep us safe and secure.”
MIKE BARNICLE: Last week, there was another continued swipe ordered by the president of the United States, who whatever he says is a megaphone and resonates throughout the country because of the way it is carried, in which he basically said that people like you and several other people in the intelligence community were responsible for trying to participate in a coup, to undermine the presidency of the United States and to remove the president of the United States. What does it do — nevermind to you personally — what does it do to institutions like the NSA, the CIA, the FBI.
JOHN BRENNAN: It continues to show Mr. Trump’s disdain for the intelligence and law enforcement communities, who are trying to do their jobs irrespective of political winds that might be blowing in Washington. It really is demoralizing for Mr. Trump to continue to say there is this “deep state” that tried to launch a coup, and that he is trying to “clean the swamp,” while in fact, it is those professionals within the intelligence community, law enforcement community, who are trying to carry out their duties and responsibilities to the American people. Mr. Trump just continues to go down this road. I think it is having a very damaging impact.
WILLIE GEIST: What do you think, Director Brennan, happens from here? I think people watching want to know. They say, okay, Mueller didn’t like how the report was characterized by the attorney general. Fine, on the issue of obstruction of justice. Now, what? Is it Mueller sitting before the Senate and answering specific questions about what is inside the report? What is the outcome of this?
JOHN BRENNAN: Barr has to be interrogated.
WILLIE GEIST: That starts this morning at 10:00.
JOHN BRENNAN: And then Bob Mueller has to get in front of Congress, then Congress has to do its job.
And I’m still waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one. There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate themselves from Trump. But they do so at their own peril. And they need to fulfill their obligations, irrespective of their political affiliations. And to do it now rather than to allow this continued sinking of not just the presidency, but of these institutions of government that we rely on to keep us safe and secure.
As obsession with Trump tanks CNN ratings, network doubles down
The pioneer cable news network is getting crushed in the ratings, coming in below Home and Garden TV, and has recently downsized and changed freelance payment terms – but shows no interest in changing the tone of its programming.
Both CNN and MSNBC have allowed themselves to be defined by hostility to both the administration and President Donald Trump personally since the 2016 election, breathlessly pushing the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory.
While this strategy has largely worked for MSNBC – at least until special counsel Robert Mueller was forced to admit Russiagate was bogus – CNN has struggled to attract an audience beyond those trapped at hospitals and airports.
‘You’re called fake news’: Lavrov shoots down CNN’s ‘fake question’ on Venezuela
Nielsen TV ratings for May show Fox News dominating for the 35th straight month with 1.3 million total day viewers, MSNBC lagging behind with 909,000, and CNN in the eighth place with 552,000.
CNN wasn’t even in the top 15 primetime spots (for comparison, HGTV came in fifth), and its three main primetime shows – hosted by Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon – ranked 25, 26, and 35, respectively.
Could this have anything to do with the network’s obsession with Trump and his administration that no longer bothers hiding naked partisanship? No way, says CNN leadership, insisting they are “real news” and claiming to be victims of Trump’s “attacks” on “free press.”
In the real world, CNN offered buyouts to 100 or so people at its Atlanta, Georgia headquarters, earlier this month, including CNN International executive vice president Tony Maddox. Since then, it has also laid off a number of people from its Health division and drastically cut back production at its London bureau.
Furthermore, the network’s parent company Warner Media recently sent out a notice to contractors that it is changing payment terms beginning in June, from 30 days to 90 days – essentially asking anyone it contracts to wait three months to get paid.
But hey, have you heard that the US government now owns a condominium in New York City’s Trump Tower, because of the Mueller probe? Priorities, people!
The twist is that CNN boss Jeff Zucker is laughing all the way to the bank, because CNN’s annual profits have doubled to $1.2 billion during his tenure. Some 70 percent of the network’s revenue comes not from advertisers but from carriage fees charged from cable and satellite operators. Some 90 million US households pay these fees every year, effectively subsidizing CNN and giving the network very little incentive to change its ways.
YOU THINK YOU’VE SEEN CRAZY? HOLD MY BEER
The ultimate liberal funny farm video
by Darrin McBreen
Check out this collection of video clips proving once again that liberalism is indeed a mental disorder.
They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!
‘Putin has a Mueller pee tape!’ Waiting for the most insane takes from Special Counsel’s statement
After Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered a public statement standing by the findings of his final report, liberal commentators began reading between the lines. How long before Putin is accused of getting to Mueller?
Mueller delivered his public statement on Wednesday, and offered very few surprises. His final report, which cleared President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia in 2016 and found insufficient evidence to bring obstruction charges against the president, “speaks for itself,” Mueller said. The Special Counsel also stated that Attorney General William Barr has already “made the report on our investigation largely public,” and that he would not testify on anything beyond the publicly available information.
Pulling a Comey: How Mueller dog-whistled Democrats into impeachment of Trump
So a bland statement of Justice Department policy? On the surface, yes. But that didn’t stop Democrats from clamoring for further investigations, or viewing Mueller’s declination to prosecute as a dog-whistle for impeachment.
Journalist Mark Ames joked that “Putin has a Mueller pee tape,” a reference to one particularly lurid tale presented in the ‘Steele Dossier.’ Ironically, the Steele Dossier – though completely uncorroborated – was used by the FBI to justify surveilling the Trump campaign and played a central role in kick-starting the investigation that Mueller eventually took over.
Ames added: “If Maddow doesn’t air a segment tonight claiming Putin has a Mueller pee tape, it can only mean one thing – Putin has a Maddow pee tape.”
Actually, the idea that Maddow would air such a segment on Mueller is not a far-fetched one.
In the two years since Mueller took over the ‘Russiagate’ investigation, Maddow has flung dung-heaps of conspiratorial Russian nonsense at viewers every night. There was her warning that the Kremlin could “flip the off switch” on the US power grid and freeze Americans to death last winter, the suggestion that Trump personally paid for the services of “Russian hackers,” and the insistence that Vladimir Putin would use the (then debunked) ‘Pee Tape’ to force Trump to withdraw US troops from Eastern Europe (the exact opposite happened).
Fake news takedown: Journalist shreds Rachel Maddow’s Russiagate conspiracies
Of course, Maddow is not the only peddler of Russian hysteria out there. Nor is MSNBC the only outlet to do a little mind-reading in its coverage of Mueller’s statement.
“He seems to think that the president committed a crime,” one talking head offered on Wednesday, adding that perhaps “future prosecutors” should re-examine the president’s conduct once he leaves office.
CNN correspondent Sara Murray weighed in with her own Mueller lip-reading: “Mueller was telling everybody ‘Look at what I’m saying, I couldn’t do it (prosecute), because the law would not allow me to, but, even if the law did not allow me to charge him, I still could not clear him and I am telling you that.”
No idea is too wild or unbelievable for Maddow or the CNN talking heads to entertain. Tune in, but bring the tinfoil hat and the rubber sheets.
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