PerspectiveRandom Toxicity? What’s Going on in @benjaminwittes’s Mentions

Published 4 March 2020

Benjamin Wittes, the editor of Lawfare, had supported Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 nomination to the Supreme Court early on, said nice things about him, and defended him against allegations he thought were spurious. But though he publicly changed his position after Christine Blasey Ford came forward and testified, he writes that ever since, every twit of his, regardless of its topic, is responded to with hundreds or even thousands of angry twits, with practically identical wording, accusing him of having been a “Buddy of Kavanaugh.” Matters only got worse when he supported, albeit tepidly, the appointment of Bill Barr for Attorney General. Who is behind these thousands of similar twits?

Benjamin Wittes, the editor of Lawfare, had supported Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 nomination to the Supreme Court early on, said nice things about him, and defended him against allegations he thought were spurious. But though he publicly changed his position after Christine Blasey Ford came forward and testified, and he wrote a lengthy article opposing the nomination, he writes that “a strange thing happened: Almost whenever I tweeted, and almost no matter on what subject, large numbers of people would remind me that I had supported Kavanaugh. Very large numbers of people.”

Wittes and Jacob Schulz write in Lawfare that

Over the past few weeks, I have developed—in cooperation with several other people—a collection of interesting data about the way people react to me on Twitter. I did not do this because I am self-involved but because for the past year and a half, the reaction to me on Twitter has been ringing alarm bells about disinformation, and the more recent reaction to others has heightened concerns. I don’t pretend to know what this data really suggests. I don’t know how much of the pattern I describe below is automated. I am not making any allegations against anyone. I’m putting the following out in public as a preliminary indication that something weird is going on that warrants examination—examination I am not qualified to do.

(This story, for reasons that will become clear, needs to be told in my voice—that of Benjamin Wittes—but much of the analysis below was conducted by Jacob Schulz; hence the joint byline combined, somewhat awkwardly, with an article written in the first person singular. It also draws significantly on work done by Christopher Bouzy, creator of the Bot Sentinel tool.)

Wittes and Schultz write that strangely, the very large number of twits seemed all too frequently to be using the exact same lingo.

Then came the Bill Barr nomination. Wittes notes that his support was far less energetic than my initial support for Kavanaugh, but no matter: “Yet again, my Twitter mentions were full of reminders—in remarkably consistent verbiage.”

Why was the language in thousands of different twits so similar to each other? And who was behind it?