WRONG

Julian Assange Blasts ‘Neocon’ Daily Beast, Mangles Facts

The WikiLeaks founder tried—and failed—to disprove a claim about fake news and the Catalan separatist crisis.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday attacked The Daily Beast over a story documenting how Venezuela and Russia teamed up to push pro-Catalan fake news, tweeting: “How to get your country’s fake news into the US: just say ‘Russia’. Example from the neocon Daily Beast. A brazen false allegation (left) claiming a study (right) shows 97% of tweeters about #Catalonia come from Russia+Venezeula. Study states the opposite.” But in fact, the study found—as the Daily Beast reported—that just 3 percent of social media messages about Catalonia at the height of the separatist conflict were posted by real profiles, and its author concluded that Russian media sites had used bots to “invade” the “digital conversation about a regional political crisis in Spain.”