NBC News has made its big contribution to Russiagate by publishing 200,000 tweets reportedly posted by "Russian trolls." Nevermind the fact that many are unrelated to politics, and some even hate on Russia.
On Wednesday, the news network published the database in an apparent effort to provide a bizarre service to its readers and add to its overwhelming coverage of alleged “Russian meddling.”
"Twitter doesn't make it easy to track Russian propaganda efforts — this database can help," the news agency wrote on their website.
The released database was created with the powers of "three sources familiar with Twitter's data systems" to cross-reference a partial list of names released by Congress with tweets from the accounts that Twitter suspended earlier for alleged association with ‘Kremlin trolls’.
NBC states that Twitter has linked the tweets - all 200,000 of them - to "malicious activity" from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 presidential election.
A link is included in NBC's article which allows readers to examine some of the tweets in a Google document.
After reading the database, one may reach a shocking revelation – the tweets do not show anything that cannot already be seen online every single day, and do not receive any attention whatsoever.
Most of the tweets are political (what a shock - politics being talked about on social media during a major US election), however, they take on both candidates and parties.
Some were pro-Trump, with one tweet saying "Sorry, Hillary: Trump's policies are clearly better for blacks." Another said that "Donald Trump has huge support from women" but "the media will never show this." Others criticized Trump: one said that "66% of voters are still voting against Trump," and was followed by smiling and winking emojis. Another called Trump an #AssClown, and included a link to "how Trump got his party to love Russia." Sound familiar?
But many talked about mundane stuff: "#ShopSmall with good friends for gifts and laughter." #SurvivalGuideToThanksgiving. Unless Thanksgiving is code for "meddling" or "collusion," NBC's exact angle remains unclear.
The news outlet's claims get even weirder when you look at how anti-Russia some of the tweets were. One of them even says that "Hillary tried to warn us about Trump/Russia in the third and final debate." Seems like a weird tweet to be published by a "Russian troll" which is presumably supposed to be pro-Trump and pro-Russia.
Yet another tweet says "Donald Trump met Russian ambassador during election campaign." One has to wonder why a "Russian troll" would be so keen to cast a shadow on the relationship between Trump and Moscow, considering the Kremlin has adamantly denied having ties with his campaign.
And from the mainstream media viewpoint, Russians will also meddle in 2018 elections. NBC spent much of the article relaying the laments of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats who along with his colleagues repeated many, many times that Russia interfered in the elections, and is planning to, but gave no proof.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world awaits even a shred of evidence which can prove that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. But considering nothing has turned up yet, the rest of the world cannot be advised to hold its breath.