No, Foreign Bots Didn't Force Al Franken To Resign
If you've read anything about Newsweek lately, it's probably about how the magazine's owners have ties to a messianic Christian sect with some iffy financial operations and have tried to fire any Newsweek journalists who attempt to report on that fact. But the troubled magazine is also facing a different problem of its own making. On Monday morning, Newsweek published a story alleging that foreign bots played a major role in pushing Al Franken to resign after eight women alleged that he groped them. That story turned out to be majorly flawed — and today, Newsweek officially retracted it.
The theory that Franken had been the victim of nefarious Twitter bots first surfaced in a February 9 Medium post by Mike Farb, the creator of a website called Unhack the Vote. Farb reported that a number of recently-created Twitter accounts with similarly formatted handles and bios were tweeting anti-Franken sentiments using identical language around the time that Franken announced his forthcoming resignation from the Senate on December 7.
At the beginning of this week, Newsweek's Nina Burleigh spun Farb's research into an ostensibly provocative article titled "How An Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken." Burleigh repeated Farb's allegation that the Twitter bots retweeted stories from Japan-base fake news site with — Burleigh implied — ties to Trump operative Roger Stone.
On December 7, just before Democrats started calling for Franken to step down, the freshly minted Japan-based fake sites went to work, and re-published an article by Ijeoma Oluo, a liberal writer urging women and activists to stand down on support for Franken, which she'd posted on a much smaller website, with a reach of 10,000 followers, titled, "Dear Al Franken, I'll Miss You But You Can't Matter Anymore."
Suddenly, thousands of apparently fake Twitter accounts were tweeting the title of the article — but linking back to one of the two Japanese-registered fake news sites created in conjunction with the right-wing anti-Franken campaign. The bot accounts normally tweeted about celebrities, Bitcoin and sports, but on that day, they were mobilized against Franken.
[Newsweek via Internet Archive Wayback Machine]
Burleigh, who also denigrated Franken's first accuser as "Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model Leeann Tweeden," failed to mention that seven other women accused Franken of groping and asserted that the bots "help[ed] the #frankenfondles hashtag and the 'Franken is a groper' meme effectively silence the testimonies of eight former female staffers who defended the Minnesota Democrat before he resigned last year."
There's no question that a website registered in Japan stole the headline "Dear Al Franken, I'll Miss You But You Can't Matter Anymore" from a real American writer named Ijeoma Oluo and that a bunch of bots tweeted out links to that Japanese website. But many of the implications of Newsweek's piece — and the Medium post on which it was based — are simply wrong, as journalists at Snopes and The Stranger soon reported.
The biggest problem with Newsweek's story is that Oluo's post, published on a site called The Establishment, went up after Democratic senators started calling on Franken to step down and after the AP announced that Franken was going to resign. That would make it impossible for the Twitter bots tweeting Oluo's headline to have had any influence on Franken's decision to resign. Snopes also pointed out that the Japanese site that stole Oluo's headline didn't link to or even plagiarize her story, as "the site appears to be nothing more than a clickbait farm that doesn't actually link to her story — the post is just a screenshot of the headline and a featured image to generate clicks and collect ad revenue from doing so."
What's more, there's no evidence that the bots that tweeted links to this Japanese clickbait site actually made much impact on social media users.
What's missing from the story — and from the story of Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election, it must be said — is how much of a role these bots played in driving Franken out of office. Were they really "effective propaganda," as Burleigh wrote? Did they really "silence" the eight Franken staffers who rushed to his defense? Or were they messages lost in the ocean of social media noise?
Oluo told Snopes that she was frustrated not only by the factual inaccuracies in Newsweek's article but also by the implication that Franken's accusers were pawns of the far right.
Basically one dude wrote a Medium article and they turned that into a whole piece in Newsweek with no verification. It really undermines the MeToo movement and makes it seem like all these brave women who talked about the abuse they suffered are just tools. These are actual women who risked a lot and took a lot of abuse to come forward.
[Via Snopes]
The progressive news site RawStory also published an article based on Farb's and Newsweek's reports on Monday morning, but RawStory pulled its story down on Tuesday after outside reporters started asking questions. Newsweek left Burleigh's story up until this morning, when it retracted the story and replaced it with this editor's note:
Newsweek has retracted its story about a conservative botnet effort to force the resignation of Senator Al Franken.
The initial report was based on research conducted by Unhack The Vote, a group examining outside influence in U.S. elections and politics. It alleged that a "decidedly alt-right" botnet "weaponized" anti-Franken stories and amplified pressure on Franken to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct. Newsweek was unable to independently verify their claims after a further review of their work.
Newsweek regrets the error.
[Newsweek]
We all make mistakes, but it seems like this whole snafu could have been avoided if anyone at Newsweek had realized that when someone's been credibly accused of sexual assault by eight people you don't actually need an army of propaganda bots to take them down — they've already taken themselves down.
