4. “Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
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5. These are quotes by Twitter executives about Hamilton 68, a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.
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6.The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).
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7.The ASD advisory council includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security.
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8. News outlets for years cited Watts and Hamilton 68 when claiming Russian bots were “amplifying” an endless parade of social media causes – against strikes in Syria, in support of Fox host Laura Ingraham, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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9.Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like “deep state” or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others.
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10. The secret ingredient to Hamilton 68’s analytical method? A list: “Our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence activities online,” was how the site put it at launch.
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11. Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing.
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12. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data.
Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them.
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Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them.
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13.“These accounts,” they concluded, “are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.”
“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.”
“Hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.”
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“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.”
“Hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.”
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14. In layman’s terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.
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