Twitter owner Elon Musk agreed with a journalist's claim Monday that Russiagate, the derogatory term for the theory and sprawling investigation into whether Donald Trump and Russia colluded to fix the 2016 election, was "one of the most deranged and unhinged conspiracy theories in modern times."
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, was reacting to an analysis in the Washington Post headlined "Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters," written by Tim Starks.
Greenwald said Russiagate was pushed by the "vast majority of media corporations, ‘scholars,' think tank frauds and NYT/NBC's ‘disinformation units.’"
Musk responded to Greenwald's tweet and said, "true."
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The Washington Post's report focused on a study which found Russian influencers in the 2016 election reached very few users on Twitter, and any who were reached were likely to be partisan Republicans inclined to oppose Hillary Clinton.
Justin Tucker, an author on the report, told Starks that the story "got way overhyped."
"Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump," Tucker said. "And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes."
Major media outlets consistently pushed the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election throughout his presidency. The Robert Mueller investigation dominated much of his first term and was a subject of near-endless hype from liberal media outlets.
The Washington Post corrected reporting that relied on the discredited Christopher Steele dossier that formed the underpinning for some of the Russiagate theories in 2021.
"The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusan American businessman as a key source of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump," Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote at the time.
Executive editor of the Post Sally Buzbee, defended the reporters who co-authored the corrected stories as being "completely ethical."
"What happened in this case was that the reporters involved, the minute that this indictment came out, pretty much came to us immediately. I think we all kind of probably reached a conclusion at the same point. And we decided that we needed to do further reporting. The reporters were completely ethical. They came forward. They said, ‘Hey, this indictment came down. We need to go back and look at that story,’" Buzbee said during a podcast appearance in 2021.
