Mreža

Bulgarian Twitter users are apparently getting suspended for talking about YouTube in Cyrillic. Because Russian trolls and bots use the same alphabet. Could Twitter be so sloppy and crude in its bot control measures? Absolutely.

Respond here if you know someone affected.

— Vlad Savov (@vladsavov) May 20, 2018

“Philip Cross” has not had one single day off from editing Wikipedia in almost five years. “He” has edited every single day from 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018. Including five Christmas Days. That’s 1,721 consecutive days of editing.

133,612 edits to Wikpedia have been made in the name of “Philip Cross” over 14 years. That’s over 30 edits per day, seven days a week. And I do not use that figuratively: Wikipedia edits are timed, and if you plot them, the timecard for “Philip Cross’s” Wikipedia activity is astonishing is astonishing if it is one individual:


The operation runs like clockwork, seven days a week, every waking hour, without significant variation. If Philip Cross genuinely is an individual, there is no denying he is morbidly obsessed. I am no psychiatrist, but to my entirely inexpert eyes this looks like the behaviour of a deranged psychotic with no regular social activities outside the home, no job (or an incredibly tolerant boss), living his life through a screen. I run what is arguably the most widely read single person political blog in the UK, and I do not spend nearly as much time on the internet as “Philip Cross”. My “timecard” would show where I watch football on Saturdays, go drinking on Fridays, go to the supermarket and for a walk or out with the family on Sundays, and generally relax much more and read books in the evenings. Cross does not have the patterns of activity of a normal and properly rounded human being.

There are three options here. “Philip Cross” is either a very strange person indeed, or is a false persona disguising a paid operation to control wikipedia content, or is a real front person for such an operation in his name.

Why does this – to take the official explanation – sad obsessive no friends nutter, matter?
Because the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel.

“Philip Cross” has just 200 Twitter followers, but has more MSM journalists following him than are to be found among my 42,300 twitter followers. Despite the fact a large majority of “Philip Cross’s” tweets are mere retweets, with Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen most frequently retweeted. “Philip Cross” has never broken a news story and the few tweets which are not retweets contain no gems of expression or shrewd observation. In short, his twitter feed is extremely banal; there is literally nothing in it that might interest a journalist in particular. Do not take my word for it, judge for yourself.

Why then does James LeMesurier, founder of the “White Helmets”, follow Philip Cross on twitter? Why does ex-minister Tristram Hunt follow Philip Cross on Twitter? Why does Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon, follow Philip Cross on twitter?


Why then do so the following corporate and state journalists follow “Philip Cross” on twitter?
Oliver Kamm, Leader Writer The Times
Nick Cohen, Columnist The Guardian/Observer
Joan Smith, Columnist The Independent
Leslie Felperin, Film Columnist The Guardian
Kate Connolly, Foreign Correspondent The Guardian/Observer
Lisa O’Carroll, Brexit Correspondent The Guardian
James Bloodorth, Columnist The Independent
Cristina Criddle, BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, The Sunday Times
Iain Watson, Political Correspondent, The BBC
Caroline Wheeler, Deputy Political Editor, the Sunday Times
Jennifer Chevalier, CBC ex-BBC
Dani Garavelli, Scotland on Sunday
Prominent Freelancers
Bonnie Greer (frequently in The Guardian)
Mason Boycott-Owen (The Guardian, New Statesman)
Marko Attilla Hoare (The Guardian)
Kirsty Hughes
Guy Walters (BBC)
Paul Canning

Let me recap, The official story is that “Philip Cross” is an obscure and dedicated Wikipedia editor who edits every single day for five years. His twitter feed has never contained any “news”. Yet among the 160 followers he had last week before the media spotlight was turned upon him, were all these MSM journalists, many more than follow anyone but the most prominent individuals, more than follow an activist like me. Plus big figures like Sarah Brown, Tristram Hunt and James Le Mesurier. What does this tell us about who Philip Cross is.

The largest single category of Philip Cross’s historic 160 followers is anti-left and anti-Corbyn twitter accounts, especially those that specialise in making accusations of anti-semitism against left wing or anti-war figures....
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-msm-promotion-operation-part-3/

Hubert de Montmirail wrote:jbg, sasvim je jasno da se protiv Labour vodi nesto vise od obicne kamapnje, to jeste sveobuhvatna akcija koja je umrezila bezbednjake, tajkune, vascelu desnicu, cioniste i ko zna koga sve ne.

Gargantua wrote:Uticajni tviteraš i "čistitelj" specifičnih tema sa vikipedije - "Philip Cross"

https://twitter.com/hashtag/PhilipCross?src=hash

...
It is accepted that MI5 had a long-term interest in Harold Wilson. A file was opened on him in the 1940s after he had travelled to the Soviet Union and developed links with those involved with trade in Eastern Europe. This file gave Wilson the codename ‘Henry Worthington’. MI5had ‘never actively investigated’ Wilson but preserved the file on him on the orders of Director General Michael Hanley whilst any card index reference to it was removed.

But it appears that a scattering of officers believed this was not sufficient. KGB Major Anatoly Golitsyn, who defected to the West in 1961 in a later debriefing, stated that Wilson was a long-term Soviet agent and that the previous leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, had been assassinated by the KGB to pave the way for Wilson. The then Director General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, in 1963 had rejected bluntly the idea of Wilson as a Soviet mole, but this did not convince certain officers in MI5. As Lord Hunt, who conducted an inquiry into the activities of MI5 stated:
I don’t think the group [in MI5] were in any sense evil. They were people on the whole who followed a train of thought: the Russians used to try and entrap everybody, they must have tried with him [Wilson], they must have succeeded.

Faced with the Golitsyn allegations, certain MI5 officers became paranoid about Wilson. Peter Wright’s former departmental head, Alec MacDonald later stated on television that a small MI5 faction all devoutly believed Golitsyn and his allegations. This faction might have been small but it was evident and surprised London CIA officers with its disloyal remarks about Wilson; one of these operatives stated ‘You would never hear CIA officers talking like that in front of foreigners about the President of the United States.’

Indeed, they linked across the Atlantic to the head of CIA Counter Intelligence James Angleton ‘where the secret world was even more detached from reality.’ Angleton’s Special Investigation Group probed Harold Wilson and Angleton remained convinced Wilson was a Soviet agent and also believed the smear stories being put out against Wilson bysome MI5 agents.

A security ‘merrygoround’ became evident – a classic example of the intelligence failure of a closed cycle of the same information being fed and then formally recycled between the CIA and MI5 to reaffirm initial beliefs. (Later, George Kalaris, the new CIA Counter Intelligence head, examined Angleton’s files and ‘was so ashamed at the unacceptable quality of the intelligence he uncovered that he had several dozen of the most egregious examples destroyed as soon as possible.’)

As mentioned, the allegations against Wilson had been rejected by Hollis and this mattered little to a number of MI5 officers. They were presumably strengthened in their belief because Hollis himself later came under suspicion of being a Soviet spy in the fevered atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s. A large-scale investigation into whether there had been penetration of MI5 began (Operation Fluency mentioned previously), which turn ed MI5 upside down in a fruitless search for a ‘super’ mole who never existed. In this fevered context, it seems certain intelligence officers took it upon themselves to move against Wilson. Andrew does not cite at all the book by investigative journalist David Leigh which has an in-depth examination of the politics and plots of the 1970s surrounding Wilson.

Leigh in return is strongly critical of Defence of the Realm: When it comes to the Wilson affair, Andrew’s scholarship appears to slip. He repeats insistently the MI5 party line that there never was misbehaviour against Wilson or his ministers by ‘the Service’, and that it was all mere conspiracy theories. Yet he withholds the fact that the cabinet secretary Lord Hunt authoritatively confirmed the central allegation.
Hunt, who conducted a secret inquiry, said in August 1996:
‘There is absolutely no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5 ... a lot of them like Peter Wright who were rightwing, malicious and had serious personal grudges – gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government.’

As Leigh argues, the evidence in Andrew’s own chapter points to MI5 having a close interest in Wilson, closer than the overall argument of his official history admits and this took extreme form in the (unlawful) activities of a few agents. Before Lord Hunt’s inquiry Maurice Oldfield, former head of MI6 and later Coordinator of Intelligence in Northern  Ireland, had already warned Wilson that an ‘unreliable’ faction existed in MI5. Wilson then called in MI5 head Michael Hanley who apparently confirmed this.

But it was not only MI5 who were leaking against Wilson. Andrew argues that when Wilson thought MI5 was leaking against him it was in fact the retired deputy head of MI6, George Young, an extreme right wing figure who was ‘an embarrassment to his former Service’.

But Young may not have been the only maverick. Dorril in his detailed history of MI6 has Oldfield himself and other MI6 figures leaking against Wilson and others and blaming it on MI5 for various reasons. There were a number of right wing security service members from MI5 and MI6 who raise questions about the personnel in those organisations, questions which Defence of the Realm brushes past.