Some were described as “trolls” or “bots,” while others, including the Maine GOP opposition research account, were described as “weird.” Some Twitter accounts backing Brakey were flagged for retweeting the edited video. The Twitter spreadsheet provided the account names and the purpose for flagging them. The spreadsheet posted by Taibbi contains three tabs, including one for suspicious Twitter accounts and another for Facebook. “If we still lived in a just society that valued the Bill of Rights, Angus King would be too ashamed to file for re-election after these revelations of political thuggery,” Brakey said in a statement. He described his supporters’ accounts being flagged as “compiling black lists of dissidents for censorship” and compared it to the “tactics of kingpins and mob bosses, not public servants.” Maine Public has requested a copy of the unpublished list, as well as any written correspondence that might exist between King’s campaign and Twitter officials.įelling said the accounts were flagged by the campaign but not necessarily for the purpose of having them banned.īrakey, King’s Republican opponent, didn’t view it that way. “They flagged it to Twitter for an internal review, in much the same way that false campaign ads are flagged for scrutiny when aired on TV.”įelling said Twitter’s content staff then invited King’s social media team “to share any additional activity moving forward that had raised alarms.”įelling said the campaign responded by sharing two lists “flagging misleading information coming from both sides of the political spectrum, not just from conservative sources as has been previously reported.” “As I understand it, Senator King’s 2018 campaign team identified a doctored and misleading video that had been posted to Twitter and was being shared widely,” Felling said. He said the invitation came after King’s campaign staff flagged an edited video circulated by the campaign of Republican challenger Eric Brakey that attempted to show the independent senator comparing Russian interference in the 2016 election to the terrorist attacks on Sept. Matthew Felling, a spokesman for King, said the spreadsheet was submitted to Twitter at the invitation of its content staff. King’s office is framing the release of the 2018 spreadsheet as an example of Musk and Taibbi using information to fit the conservative censorship narrative. Such claims are refuted by Twitter’s internal research, as well as a review of Facebook, showing that conservative accounts have outsize reach on the platforms. The sporadic release of the so-called “Twitter Files” by Taibbi fueled that belief among conservatives, some of whom compared the King campaign’s spreadsheet of suspect accounts to former President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.”Ĭritics of the “Twitter Files” counter that the documents are being selectively released without context to further a broader assertion that conservative voices are being suppressed on social media.
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