The FBI’s challenge to Twitter in 2020, to submit to the ‘Russiagate’ perversion of the political process in the United States, began with Oxford University’s “Oxford Internet Institute” (OII). The FBI’s July 20, 2020, email to Twitter, effectively instructing Twitter to ignore the evidence in their data and get in line with the demonization of Russia (and China), included the FBI’s citation of five ‘authoritative’ sources as to the online perfidy of both Russia and China. The list was headed by OII. (And OII was the only source listed more than once.)
The head of OII at that time, Philip Howard, had testified two years earlier to the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence (8/1/18) that the government should have social media companies provide “a regular flow of data about public life to election administrators, researchers, and civil society groups” as “the best way to ensure that social media firms make good decisions and design their platforms to support and defend, rather than undermine and expose, our democratic institutions.”
Listen in to this hired gun, a would-be Big Brother, as to his ‘unbiased competency.’ He first speaks of the “Project on Computational Propaganda” that he led, funded by the European Research Council for the previous eight years. His “research team was the first large-scale, dedicated effort to study the role of disinformation and social media manipulation in public life... We coined the term ‘computational propaganda’.” Amongst other things, the “term encompasses political content falsely packaged as news, the spread of misinformation on social media platforms [… and] the exploitation of social media platforms for foreign influence operations.”
