The political class will do anything to protect their fiefdoms

Twitter Files #15: Twitter knew Hamilton 68, a media source for Russian online activity, was 'bulls**t'

Matt Taibbi just published installment number 15 in the Twitter files series. This one is about a bogus media fraud known as Hamilton 68.

If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as sources.

Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation”. It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.Their influence was everywhere:

What was Hamilton 68? It was a secret list of 644 Twitter accounts which were supposedly linked to Russian activity online. While no one in the media or on Twitter knew which accounts Hamilton 68 was looking at, Twitter was able to reverse-engineer it because Hamilton 68 was using their API to look at those accounts. What Twitter found was a bunch of junk and a bunch of English language accounts not based in Russia:

Twitter was checking to see how many of Hamilton’s accounts were spammy, phony, or bot-like. Note that out of 644 accounts, just 36 were registered in Russia, and many of those were associated with RT.

Examining further, Twitter execs were shocked. The accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to “Russian influence activities online” were not only overwhelmingly English-language (86%), but mostly “legitimate people,” largely in the U.S., Canada, and Britain. Grasping right away that Twitter might be implicated in a moral outrage, they wrote that these account-holders “need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

Twitter’s Yoel Roth called the effort “bulls**t” and pointed out it was falsely accusing right-wing sites of being “Russian bots.”

JOHN SEXTON 4:00 PM on January 27, 2023

continue

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/01/27/twitter-files-15-twitter-knew-hamilton-68-a-media-source-for-russian-online-activity-was-bullst-n526815