Twitter Files Debunk Hamilton 68 Dashboard – (We Did The Same Five Years Ago)

January 28, 2023

The Twitter files continue to confirm our long held suspicion of nefarious anti-Russian influence in mainstream media.

When criticizing the recent fakenews about letter bombs in Spain spread by the New York Times I asserted:

The New York Times, as well as British media with their equally stupid Skripal affair claims, can be credited with giving cover for the anti-Russian propaganda campaign. It was unleashed after, in 2014, Russia reintegrated Crimea and foiled British and U.S. plans for stationing their naval forces in the Azov and Black Sea.

The Times and other media should be held responsible for the deadly consequences its misreporting and lies have caused.

Six days ago the New York Times attributed the letter bombs in Spain to Russian secret service based on 'U.S. officials' assertions. Yesterday the Spanish investigating magistrate refuted those claims:

[T]he evidence suggests Gonzalez acted alone, the judge wrote. He said the suspect's alleged actions showed his intent to alter the public peace and to give the impression they were carried out by people with ties with Russia as retribution for Spain's and the United States' support for Ukraine amid Russia's invasion of the country.

"There is no indication that the person under investigation belongs to or collaborates with any terrorist gang or organised group," the statement said.

The letter bomb campaign, as well as the New York Times false assertions about them, were both part of the public anti-Russia campaign.

The campaign, launched in 2014, was reinforced after the 2016 election when the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, blamed 'Russian influence' for her loss instead of her own ineptitude for any higher government position.

Soon a horde of 'disinformation de-bunking' institutes and lobbies evolved. They all claimed to have some insight into 'Russia's influence campaign' that was allegedly designed to deceive U.S. voters. 'Russiagate', the MI6 operation that created the Steele dossier and the false narratives around it, grew on top of that. Partisan actors in the FBI and CIA jumped in to amplify that stuff despite knowing well that it was nonsense. Irresponsible media sucked it all up and spread it further without any fact checking or logical thought. For so called mainstream journalists it was all easy work that brought in good money.

One of the organization involved in this was the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a part of the the German Marshall Fund (which has by the way little to do with Germany). It created the 'Hamilton 68 dashboard' which listed trending hashtags used by some 600 Twitter accounts which it alleged were 'Russian bots'.

Based on the dashboard mainstream media produced hundreds of stories about trending hashtags that allegedly furthered Russian influence.

But, as I exposed in February 2018, there was nothing there. Just like 'Russiagate' it was just another great scam.

As I wrote at that time:

The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its claimed task is:

… to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.

The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who – according to the NYT – want to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy, wished everyone a #MerryChristmas.

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The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag, …

The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is definitely false:

Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

Matt Taibbi, who was recently given access to Twitter's internal archives, has retrieved and analyzed internal Twitter emails and conversations about the 'Hamilton 68' scam. His thread about his finds is here. His full write can be found here.

Mr. Tweet @elonmusk – 19:48 UTC · Jan 27, 2023

An American group made false claims about Russian election interference to interfere with American elections

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi – 19:44 UTC · Jan 27, 2023

Hamilton 68’s blue-red founding team of Jamie Fly and Laura Rosenberger, told Politico they couldn’t reveal the “dashboard” accounts because “the Russians will simply shut them down.” The real reason? It was bullshit:

Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud
The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork

From the Twitter Files Taibbi found:

The company was concerned enough about the proliferation of news stories linked to Hamilton 68 that it also ordered a forensic analysis. [..] 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.”
…
“The selection of accounts is… bizarre and seemingly quite arbitrary,” wrote [Twitter's Trust and Safety chief Yoel] Roth. “They appear to strongly preference pro-Trump accounts (which they use to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump… even though there’s not good evidence any of them are Russian).”

But fearing a backlash Twitter refrained from going public with the fraud it had found. On background it informed several journalists that the whole thing was bogus. This led to the Daily Beast story linked above. But most media simply ignored Twitter's background information and continued to spread the dashboard nonsense.

Moon of Alabama was one of the few sides that dug into this and called the media out:

The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

Moreover – what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

This is nuts.

Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted:

The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, – CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

How long will it take until people die from it?

It took four years. The public sentiment created by the anti-Russia campaign was one of the conditions for the war in Ukraine. Some 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers, some 20,000 men fighting on the Russian side (source Col. Doug Macgregor) and some 10,000 civilians (UN) have so far died in it.

But the media and politicians who willingly fell for the scam and furthered the anti-Russian disinformation will never acknowledge that they were wrong and are guilty of causing so much deaths.

As Taibbi writes:

I asked for comment from a huge range of actors — from the Alliance for Securing Democracy to Watts and McFaul and Podesta and Kristol to editors and news directors at MSNBC, Politico, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Politifact, and others. Not one answered. They’re all going to pretend this didn’t happen. The few reporters who got this right contemporaneously, from Glenn Greenwald to Max Blumenthal to Miriam Elder and Charlie Wurzel of Buzzfeed to sites like Moon of Alabama, can take a victory lap. Almost every other news organization ran these stories and needs to come clean about it.

I honestly do not feel like taking a victory lap. The Hamilton dashboard, like the Steele dossier, was so obviously fake and dangerous that it did not take much effort to debunk it.

I am just sad that so few called it out and that, in the end, it all achieved the desired nefarious results.

Posted by b on January 28, 2023 at 10:46 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The question often posed is why so many Americans fall for such absolute horseshit as Russiagate and the lies about Ukraine and Russia. I would suggest that there are several reasons for this fact.
First, many Americans do not know enough (or in many cases, any) history of countries outside the US. And only a very small minority know anything about Russian history (including Soviet history). So an American learning of events in Russia or Ukraine approaches those events as a blank slate since he or she knows nothing to begin with.
Second, the US media tend to produce caricatures of foreign leaders. Putin has never been characterized accurately. Someone who tried was Oliver Stone, and he was pilloried for it in the mainstream media. Putin has been demonized almost from the beginning, but increasingly since 2012 and especially since 2014. The heavy drumbeat of allegations of Russiagate had many, possibly most, Americans virtually hypnotized. When you consider that the majority of Americans voted against Trump, the idea that he was foisted on us by a foreign power, one we had already been conditioned to distrust, was more than most people could tolerate. An interesting fact is that the allegations of Russian hacking of almost everyone managed to displace the news of Edward Snowden’s revelations, which, to simplify, were that the US was hacking virtually everyone around the world.
Third, the vast majority of people do not think logically, and it’s hard for them to understand that they are being subjected to faulty inferences, such as non sequiturs, often strung together in a tissue of poor reasoning and frequently based on mere suppositions. Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC, was the master of propaganda of this type. People were told lies about Julian Assange, and because they didn’t know anything about him, they could believe that he might publish emails obtained by Russia by hacking the DNC server. If they had known much about Assange, they would have understood immediately that the whole scenario was implausible. As time went by, it became even less plausible and finally downright absurd. The absolutely propagandistic nature of the allegations was never understood by most, however. And the FBI, CIA, and NSA produced an “assessment” in January 2017 that most never read but which was referred to as proof of the charges made against Assange and Russia. It hardly mattered that the pseudo-assessment had a huge disclaimer near the end that stated that no conclusive proof was available for any of the allegations, nor that nearly two-thirds of the text was a ranting complaint about the programming of RT and had nothing to do with the alleged hack at all.
Fourth, the media simply will not retract their lies, except when they have been caught with the pants down, such as the affair of Jayson Blair The question often posed is why so many Americans fall for such absolute horseshit as Russiagate and the lies about Ukraine and Russia. I would suggest that there are several reasons for this fact.
First, many Americans do not know enough (or in many cases, any) history of countries outside the US. And only a very small minority know anything about Russian history (including Soviet history). So an American learning of events in Russia or Ukraine approaches those events as a blank slate since she knows nothing to begin with.
Second, the US media tend to produce caricatures of foreign leaders. Putin has never been characterized accurately. Someone who tried was Oliver Stone, and he was pilloried for it in the mainstream media. Putin has been demonized almost from the beginning, but increasingly since 2012 and especially since 2014. The heavy drumbeat of allegations of Russiagate had many, possibly most, Americans virtually hypnotized. When you consider that the majority of Americans voted against Trump, the idea that he was foisted on us by a foreign power, one we had already been conditioned to distrust, was more than most people could tolerate.
Third, the vast majority of people do not think logically, and it’s hard for them to understand that they are being subjected to faulty inferences, such as non sequiturs, often strung together in a tissue of poor reasoning and frequently based on mere suppositions. Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC, was the master of propaganda of this type. People were told lies about Julian Assange, and because they didn’t know anything about him, they could believe that he might publish emails obtained by Russia by hacking the DNC server. If they had know much about Assange, they would have understood immediately that the whole scenario was implausible. As time went by, it became even less plausible and finally downright absurd. The absolute propagandistic nature of the allegations was never understood by most, however. And the FBI, CIA, and NSA produced an “assessment” in January 2017 that most never read but which was referred to as proof of the charges made against Assange and Russia. It hardly mattered that the pseudo-assessment had a huge disclaimer near the end that stated that no conclusive proof was available for any of the allegations, nor that nearly two-thirds of the text was a ranting complaint about the programming of RT and had nothing to do with the alleged hack at all.
Fourth, the media simply will not retract their lies, except when they have been caught with the pants down, such as the Jayson Blair affair at the Times and the allegations of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, also of the Times.
Fifth, most Americans are overworked, have little free time, and hardly care enough about countries outside of the US to do much serious research about them. The media simplify the task for Americans WHEN the media even bother to “report” any news from outside the US.
Sad but true.

Posted by: Archie | Jan 30 2023 6:22 utc | 101

[Somehow, parts of my comment got mashed together and make the whole a lot less clear. I’m posting it below as it should have appeared.]
The question often posed is why so many Americans fall for such absolute horseshit as Russiagate and the lies about Ukraine and Russia. I would suggest that there are several reasons for this fact.
First, many Americans do not know enough (or in many cases, any) history of countries outside the US. And only a very small minority know anything about Russian history (including Soviet history). So an American learning of events in Russia or Ukraine approaches those events as a blank slate since he or she knows nothing to begin with.
Second, the US media tend to produce caricatures of foreign leaders. Putin has never been characterized accurately. Someone who tried was Oliver Stone, and he was pilloried for it in the mainstream media. Putin has been demonized almost from the beginning, but increasingly since 2012 and especially since 2014. The heavy drumbeat of allegations of Russiagate had many, possibly most, Americans virtually hypnotized. When you consider that the majority of Americans voted against Trump, the idea that he was foisted on the US by a foreign power, one people had already been conditioned to distrust, was more than most people could tolerate. An interesting fact is that the allegations of Russian hacking of almost every country managed to displace the news of Edward Snowden’s revelations, which, to simplify, were that the US was hacking and spying on virtually everyone around the world.
Third, the vast majority of people do not think logically, and it’s hard for them to understand that they are being subjected to faulty inferences, such as ad hominems or non sequiturs, often strung together in a tissue of poor reasoning and frequently based on mere suppositions. Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC, was the master of this type of propaganda. She would go so far as to lie, labeling Yanukovych, the democratically elected president of Ukraine before the coup in 2014, “a dictator.” People were told lies about Julian Assange, and because they didn’t know anything about him, they could believe that he might publish emails obtained by Russia by hacking the DNC server. If they had known much about Assange, they would have understood immediately that the whole scenario was implausible. As time went by, it became even less plausible and finally downright absurd. The absolutely propagandistic nature of the allegations was never understood by most, however. And the FBI, CIA, and NSA produced an “assessment” in January 2017 that most never read but which was referred to as proof of the charges made against Assange and Russia. It hardly mattered that the pseudo-assessment had a huge disclaimer near the end that stated that no conclusive proof was available for any of the allegations, nor that nearly two-thirds of the text was a ranting complaint about the programming of RT and had nothing to do with the alleged hack at all.
Fourth, the media simply will not retract their lies, except when they have been caught with the pants down, such as in the affair of Jayson Blair at the Times or the “reporting” of Judy Miller and Michael Gordon, also of the Times.
Fifth, most Americans are overworked, have little free time, and hardly care enough about countries outside of the US to do much serious research about them. Americans are lucky just to be able to keep their jobs. The media simplify the task for Americans WHEN the media even bother to “report” any news from outside the US.
Sad but true.

Posted by: Archie | Jan 30 2023 6:41 utc | 102

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Posted by: Yo Desi Serial | Feb 3 2023 15:47 utc | 103

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