A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files.
The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office.
The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former conservative activist Bill Kristol.
The latest Twitter Files disclosure, the 15th so far, revealed how Hamilton 68’s Russian bot dashboard repeatedly insisted there was widespread and deep Russian penetration of social media and unveiled that Twitter executives frequently challenged those claims internally.
“I think we need to just call this out on the bulls–t is,” Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Rothwrote in an October 2017 email. “Hamilton dashboard falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots,” he added in January 2018.
No comments:
Post a Comment