Thread by @propornot

THREAD: There's a small but telling detail in Mueller's new indictment of the #12Russians.

It mentions "Alice Donovan", a GRU persona that also published articles in the old far-left magazine Counterpunch... Which we highlighted as a Russian propaganda outlet in Nov 2016. /1

The @washingtonpost previously reported, on Christmas 2017, that the GRU was creating entirely fake "journalist" personas to pitch propaganda articles at credulous/complicit useful idiots & assets in the US.

It mentioned "Alice Donovan" as an example. /2 washingtonpost.com/world/national…

Till now, the public didn't know that Russian military intelligence created the "DCLeaks" Facebook page using the EXACT SAME FAKE-JOURNALIST PERSONA they were using to feed propaganda to horseshoe-bottom outlets like @NatCounterPunch... But now we know. /3 washingtonpost.com/world/national…

Note how this technique - Russia creating entirely fake "journalists" to pitch articles to credulous/complicit useful idiots & assets in the US - has not been extensively discussed in Congressional hearings, Facebook/Twitter's Russian propaganda audience counts, etc. /4

Any measure the scale of Russian propaganda's audience in the US would have to include the hits on articles supposedly written by "Alice Donovan", a fake-journalist persona created by Russian spy-propagandists. Here's some of their work here: /5 muckrack.com/alice-donovan/…

Russia's attack is ongoing, & much bigger than just Internet Research Agency-style troll farms (plural) running fake accounts, which Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc have tried to focus on as narrowly as possible.

Here's fake-"Alice"'s Twitter - it's still up: @_alicedonovan_ /6

Russian intel often plants articles in outlets they consider "friendly", so Russian propaganda's use of "anti-war", extremist, & conspiracy outlets like @NatCounterPunch & @WeAreChangeNYC makes sense: They're effectively Kremlin mouthpieces already. This is just more content. /7

In light of their blithely publishing articles by a Russian propaganda fake persona (let's call it "Alice Donovan-gate"), the outrage (OUTRAGE!) of @NatCounterPunch abt "McCarthyism" is especially hilarious in retrospect - they doth protest too much 😆 /8 counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/the…

We would also like to take this moment to relish the extent to which @NatCounterPunch hates us, here at PropOrNot 😇 They have written at least 24 articles about how mad they are at us for correctly saying they're acting as propagandists for Russia: /9 google.com/search?q=site%…

There's more to the story, though! Over a year ago we had a very interesting & seemingly-respectful exchange of emails abt this with @joshua__frank, managing editor of @NatCounterPunch. In an act of preemptive good faith, we removed them from our List. They're going back on. /10

Their response to getting caught "accidentally" spreading propaganda for the GRU was impressive: One of their writers promptly went on (where else?) Sputnik Radio, to, uh, tell their (whose?) side of the story 🤣

Can you believe these people!? 🇷🇺💩 /11

Even now, after everything, they STILL haven't actually admitted they got caught spreading propaganda for the GRU. Instead they just tried to muddy the water & cover it up, by deleting all of "Alice's" articles & writing a mealy-mouth excuse-a-palooza /12 counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/gho…

Instructively, this Alice-Donvan-gate episode inspired Putin's shills across the board to HILARIOUS new heights of mental gymnastics 😆

For example, Justin here heads "Antiwar" (.com), which was founded to support Russia's Serbian proxies in the 90s. /13

We took no end of criticism from all kinds of people, because we correctly called out Counterpunch for doing exactly what they were doing.

The headline of this article is: "No, Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See", here: fortune.com/2016/11/25/rus… 😆 /14

We also took criticism from people who REALLY should know better...

It's time for our critics to do a harsh reassessment of how exactly we got it right, while they so completely underestimated the scale of the threat - & if they don't, for others to do one of them, for them. /15

Some people, like Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) at the New Yorker, were in a very good position to assess the larger scale of the threat - but they just... Didn't. They failed.

There's a lesson in that. Will they learn from their mistakes? The onus is on them. Time will tell. /16

Alice-Donovan-gate raises some significant questions:

1) How many other entirely-fake Russian-propaganda "journalists" do outlets like @NatCounterPunch publish?
2) Why do they think Russia found such fertile ground with them?
3) When can we expect a formal apology? 😇 /17

There's MUCH more to come on all this. What we are seeing, as with the Congressional hearings on Russian propaganda's use of Facebook & Twitter, are just tips of a MUCH larger propaganda (& espionage) iceberg.

There's been a LOT of collusion. /18 nymag.com/daily/intellig…

For example, Counterpunch (that "respectable left-leaning publication") was co-founded by noted Soviet asset Alexander Cockburn, whose dad literally worked for the NKVD back in the 1920s, & betrayed the Spanish Revolution for Stalin's brutal regime. /19 usefulstooges.com/tag/alexander-…

Anybody who has been naughty, & wishes this story would "just go away", is going to have a terrible 2018, & a terrible 21st century... Because this is just getting started.

For genuine patriots, across the political spectrum, though - it's going to be nice. 😎❤️🇺🇸 /END