Integration test

I continued my movie attendance to fill my cultural calendar. Today’s movie was The Shape of Water. I enjoyed it, though a couple times I closed my eyes to the violence. Elisa, the main character, cannot speak, so when she communicates she does through sign language. The Amphibian Man (as listed in the credits) also cannot speak, so Elisa teaches him a few signs. Both Elisa’s friend and her co-worker interpret her signs and there is an important moment when she knows the other person does not understand her signs.



For a week now there has been a story about a classified memo that people are clamoring to have released. It supposedly documents something shocking (shocking, I tell you!) that would force the end the Mueller investigation. This is supposedly “bigger than Watergate.” Dems say it is nothing but hyped up blather.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos tells the story behind the story.

By Thursday evening a week ago this memo was all over conservative news with talking heads gushing about how damaging it was. On Friday morning came a Twitter storm with the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo – and most of these accounts didn’t have a human behind them. GOP lawmakers used the news stories and Twitter storm as “proof” of their earlier accusations.

Sumner says it wasn’t hard to figure out the author of the memo is Rep. Devin Nunes, who has a history of trying to stir up chaos to protect the nasty guy and do so with false statements. Because Nunes wrote it rather than, say the FBI, it isn’t actually classified. GOP members call for its release – which they can do any time they want to. Which means the GOP is getting more mileage out of a document they say they can’t release than they would out of the document’s contents.

As for that Twitter storm, well the Russians have been carrying out social media tests for quite some time now. Which leads Sumner to conclude this whole episode was an integration test.

* Republicans pushed a story to traditional media, planting the seed that there was some underlying fact.

* Fox News punditry played up the importance of the story, giving it visibility on the right, and providing ominous, open-ended statements that there was more to come.

* Russian bots launched into the story in coordination with prominent social media accounts on the right, creating a “trending” story

* The apparent strength of the story in social media brought it back to the attention of traditional media, which treated both the Republican claims and the social media outcry as if there was a real demand.

The GOP, conservative news, and Russian bots will likely further integrate their coordination and will have such a system in full operation well before November's election.

Commenter The George disputes the success of this test. Russian influence was known within 12 hours. Within 72 hours Nunes was known as the author. And, most importantly, mainstream media ignored it.

But perhaps testing the technique was enough. Inflaming the base is a nice benefit.