Always click SHOW ALL to inspect and download individual files. This thread being free material, social media users are welcome to repost, but I’d appreciate a link somewhere in the thread. https://www.racket.news/p/cti-files-4-the-hamilton-68-connection #CTIFiles #4: ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE The #CTIFiles are notable among other things because the documents show a number of connections with people involved with infamous fake news episodes, in particular the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” purporting to track Russian bots that was exposed in the Twitter Files. As the Twitter documents showed (and as detailed below), Hamilton 68 didn’t actually track Russians, but a collection of ordinary accounts, mostly Western and with no connection to Russia. The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was designed by a “technologist” from a company called New Knowledge named Jonathon Morgan, and fronted by a former FBI agent and MSNBC analyst named Clint Watts. Renee DiResta, a Stanford Internet Observatory researcher and a leading voice in the two cross-platform content moderation programs Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, was the research director of New Knowledge during the Hamilton 68 period. The co-founder of the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), Sarah-Jayne Terp (S.J. Terp), has extraordinary ties to Morgan, Watts, and DiResta; USHAHIDI? In February 2014, two new employees joined an obscure Kenyan software company/open-source intelligence group called “Ushahidi.” One was the future founder of the Cyber Threat Intelligence or “CTI” League, Sarah-Jayne “SJ” Terp. A whistleblower brought #CTIFiles documents to Public, where Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I began writing stories about them last week. Another new Ushahidi employee in 2014 was the future CEO of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan. Here’s the Ushahidi team today, followed by the LinkedIn pages for the two future anti-disinformation warriors. UPDATE: A friend of Racket passed along a valuable new nugget on this front, in the form of Ushahidi’s announcements of new hires, showing Terp and Morgan arriving at the same time. Terp is listed as 3. NEW KNOWLEDGE Morgan’s firm would later become famous, then infamous, then be renamed, then disappear from cultural memory entirely in the wake of a series of scandals. Lacking any kind of real work history, the new company burst onto the scene in 2018. In 2018, after the Parkland school shooting, Morgan’s name suddenly appeared in a New York Times story, “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced.” Introduced by the Times as “chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns,” the paper added that he was “one of the researchers who worked with the German Marshall Fund to create Hamilton 68, the website that [supposedly] monitors Russian bot and fake Twitter activity.” Hamilton 68, a “dashboard” that purported to track Russian online influence campaigns, was the sole source for the Times report that Russians were trying to “widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult” by highlighting hashtags like #ParklandShooting and even #guncontrolnow. 4. Morgan after the Parkland shooting was also interviewed by Chuck Todd on MSNBC, who threw up his hands at the news that Russians were meddling with American discourse. “Whatever these companies are doing, it doesn’t work,” Todd grumbled. “What’s happening here?” Tossed this softball, Morgan argued social media platforms hadn’t solved the “systemic problem” of disinformation. 5. “GREW UP IN THE NSA” Not long after, in August 2018, New Knowledge announced the receipt of $11 million in startup capital to “protect companies from covert coordinated disinformation campaigns.” Investors included funds with military contracting ties, including GGV Capital, Lux Capital and Moonshot Capital, with VentureBeat pointing out that “what further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA... Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department”: 6. “PROPAGANDA WAR AGAINST U.S. CITIZENS” Less than a half year from this initial announcement, New Knowledge — after “laboring in secret for months,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review — produced a much-heralded report for the Senate Intelligence Committee called “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” detailing a “propaganda war against U.S. citizens” by Russia, as NPR put it. The report produced an outpouring of ecstatic headlines and TV reports, with Politico saying it showed a “sweeping effort to sow divisions, support Trump” on the part of Vladimir Putin, the Washington Post noting Russia had not only tried to help Donald Trump but targeted the saintly Robert Mueller, the Wall Street Journal noting Russia targeted black voters, and so on and so on. To get a sense of how promiscuously the New Knowledge report was spread, watch this condensed clip of a mortified Mika Brzezinski rattling off report conclusions then tossing, Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance style, to a parade of MSNBC commentators: from hurrumphing Joe Scarborough to puppyish Willie Geist, who then hands off to eager-beaver Matthew Miller, then later it’s stentorian Jon Meacham, and finally old sad-sack Boston bar-crawler Mike Barnicle mouthing the required pieties about Donald Trump working “hand in glove” with what “Vladimir Putin has set out to do.” Again, the source for this is all analysts hired by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chief among them New Knowledge: “WAY TOO MUCH FUN” Mere days after this orgy, news came out that New Knowledge was involved with a fake news scheme in which fictional Russian social media accounts were made to follow Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, after which reporters were alerted to the “connection.” In an extraordinary display of shamelessness, Times writer Jim Rutenberg — the author of the influential 2016 article “Trump is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” in which it was argued reporters faced with the Trump threat needed to be more worried about being true to “history’s judgment” than mere truth — described the Alabama incident as an unfortunate development that the Russian government had “way too much fun with,” allowing them to claim the incident “seems to cast Democrats’ Russiagate accusations into further doubt” (no shit!). Rutenberg incredibly then quoted Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy as saying the development was “awful for democracy,” despite the fact that Schafer and the ASD had a direct tie to Morgan and New Knowledge — Morgan and New Knowledge helped design Hamilton 68, which the ASD funded. Even the Soviets didn’t write things this dumb: The funder of one fake news operation said the discovery of another fake news operation was sad news, our very serious sources say. Rutenberg also noted parenthetically that “New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee,” omitting the important end clause, “a report we at the Times hyped the living fuck out of”: “THE BULLSHIT IT IS” The #TwitterFiles uncovered that Hamilton 68 was a fraud as well, as according to internal Twitter correspondence, Morgan’s “dashboard” was not “tracking Russian propaganda” and “Russian disinformation,” but a group of 600-odd accounts overwhelmingly composed of ordinary people in places like the U.S., Canada, and Britain. “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” said Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. While the Hamilton dashboard was designed by Morgan (with some help from former Global Engagement Center contractor J.M. Berger), the frontman of the operation was former FBI agent Clint Watts, who was (and remains) an MSNBC contributor. The impact of Hamilton on the domestic news landscape almost can’t be calculated. It was used to make assertions about Russian interest in everything from a memorandum about FISA abuse written by Republican Devin Nunes to the Parkland shooting to the spread of the term “Deep State” to the #WalkAway movement to countless other themes. And it was all a lie. Our own Matt Orfalea counted 279 times MSNBC invoked the site: “THE CHAIRMAN” One of the bizarre things we discovered, when researching the people involved in Hamilton 68, was a video graphic novel series authored by Watts and both funded and produced — this is not a joke — by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. The “Resilience Series” featured full-scale animated features with plots whose sheer paranoia levels make Reefer Madness seem like When Harry Met Sally. In the clip below, a young woman who has a father bearing a remarkable resemblance to Clint Watts sees her old man “ambushed” by “attackers” who’ve been “incited to violence by disinformation,” believing “there’s a link between 5G and Covid-19.” (As will be clear in a moment, the 5G tale was a major fixation of CTIL, which seemed to think the whole world was in its thrall — one Facebook page had a whole 82 shares at the time of the analysis!). Through tears, the daughter-protagonist in “Resilience” decides to stand up to the disinformation scourge and “fight back.” In as bizarre a scene as you’ll ever see anywhere, in any film or video ever produced, our heroine reports to a “Chairman” of indeterminate species — a sort of metallic wolf, who maybe represents someone like former Time editor and GEC chief Rick Stengel, or maybe Laura Rosenberger of the Alliance for Securing Democracy? The chairman warns her: “We don’t have much time”: “SHIT LIST” First of all, Clint Watts is all over the #CTIFiles. Not only are there links to a page with the first draft version of the Resilience series, there are numerous references to the “Clint Watts matrix,” another taxonomic threat-charting graph, which are described and commented upon by other anti-disinformationists. On one hand, it’s important to remember that these charts are supposed to map what the “bad guys” do, so entries like “Shit list: add target account(s) to insultingly named lists” or “Ad hominem: make insults and accusations” should not be understood as instructions. It’s also true however that CTIL members are on videos saying things like, “Basically, we’re using many of the same techniques as the bad guys.” So that should be taken into consideration, too: “ASK GOFUNDME TO INVESTIGATE” Just to take an example, CTIL incident reports and instructional papers regularly list possible “counters” to disfavored themes. In the pair of frames below, for instance, CTIL members are warned about examples of the terrifying 5G conspiracy, and “we can ask gofundme to investigate” and “ask Facebook to go after the original” are listed as possible solutions: “SNIFF HAMILTON68 DASHBOARD FOR THEMES” The CTIL docs also repeatedly refer members to Ham68 as a source and even suggest they “sniff Hamilton68… for themes,” which is odd given that CTIL was supposedly about Covid, not Russians: “MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT INCLUDE PROPAGANDA” The CTIL “Big Book of Disinformation Response” contains multiple references to Hamilton68 as a source/data feed. Remember that CTIL started in 2020, after New Knowledge and CEO Jonathon Morgan had been exposed in the Alabama mess: “PARKLANDTEENS”: The CTIL framework also includes a number of “incident reports sourced to Hamilton68, sometimes by way of popular media (the “ParklandTeens” report below takes text from a Vanity Fair story, “Russian Bots Are Using 2016 Tactics to Hijack the Gun Debate on Twitter”). One of the odder details about these episodes is that the “counters” to Hamilton68 stories for some strange reason don’t recommend takedowns or removals. The tone is diagnostic: “Presumed goals: Divide the American public on the issues of guns, race, generational politics and activism. Method: Amplification via sockpuppet and cyborg accounts,” they write. “Counters: None / Media exposure.” “COUNTERS: NONE” In another report titled KAVANAUGH sourced to Hamilton 68, the #CTIFiles this time tag a Quartz piece that quotes SJ Terp’s long-ago co-worker, Jonathon Morgan: “Morgan, who is currently tracking a set of around 1,000 accounts he believes are tied to Russia, says the Kavanaugh hearings have unleashed more US domestic-focused propaganda from foreign-linked networks than his firm has seen in months.” The analysis includes lines like “Presumed goals: Divide the American public on gender and party lines; Harass and intimidate anti-Trump voices” and “Promote ‘both sides’ relativism” and “alter ‘ground-truth’ resources, such as Wikipedia.” Under “Counters,” it again reads: “None/Media exposure.” Counters: None / Media exposure “DISINFORMATION… A CHRONIC DISEASE THAT CAN BE MANAGED, NOT CURED” It’s important to remember that the main precursor organization to CTIL, MisInfoSec, included none other than Twitter Files star Renee DiResta, of Stanford Internet Observatory, Election Integrity Partnership, and Virality Project fame. DiResta crucially was also Research Director at Jonathon Morgan’s New Knowledge when it was cranking out informational bogosity like Project Alabama and Hamilton68. In a Medium report about an early MisInfoSec working group meeting, she’s quoted saying something that had to be delight to contractors’ ears: “Disinformation is a not a problem that can be solved. It’s like a chronic disease that can be managed”: ALSO STARRING… CLINT WATTS: MisInfoSec also cited the research of Clint Watts, who said, “The goal is to take an approach that will anticipate changes in threat behavior and proactively disrupt nefarious activity rather than reactively respond to it.” THE ORIGINAL DISCUSSION ABOUT THIS” In an early podcast interview, the future drivers of CTIL, SJ Terp and Pablo Breuer, talk about funding. The “original discussion about this,” Breuer says, was funded by the Donovan Group, a firm tied to the Department of Defense Special Operations Command: COUNTERATTACK… LIMITATIONS” In another MisInfoSec paper, Watts is quoted complaining that Russia has an informational advantage over the United States because it can make use of the “cybercrime underworld,” which the U.S. cannot because it doesn’t have “plausible deniability”: IN SUM: In sum, the gang’s all here. The principals from New Knowledge (Morgan and DiResta) and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (Watts), all key figures from Hamilton68, all also have ties to Terp, CTIL, and MisInfoSec, operations which openly embrace the idea of the pre-emptive, “left of boom” informational strike, yammering repeatedly about “psyops” and the need to “proactively” interrupt speech that is “not desired.” Maybe it’s chance that the authors of high-tech fakes like Hamilton68 just happen to cross-pollinate over and over with this DHS-endorsed program. It’s early days and we’re still spotting these connections, but sometimes, when a surplus of coincidence looks wrong, it is. More to come: From a MisInfoSec paper The following was formerly at the top of this page: Note to readers: Over the course of the Twitter Files, many of us who worked on the project got used to the social media thread format as a convenient, speedy way to deliver document-based reports. Now that I’m joining Public to report on the #CTIFiles (and also have more UK Labour documents on deck to deliver), I still believe the thread is a good format, or at least one good format, for delivering documents to the public expeditiously and in bulk. However, I’ve got a problem. Twitter and Elon Musk are sadly stepping on Substack sites like my own to such an extreme degree that it’s actually counter-productive to post there. Even when I don’t post links to Substack, as was the case with the initial #CTIFiles posts put out last week, the material scarcely circulates, suggesting I continue to be denylisted on that site. Because of all this, I’ve decided to do “threads” here on Substack. I’ll still announce them on Twitter/X in addition to Notes, Facebook, and Instagram, but there no longer seems to be any point in swimming upstream on platforms where I’m being suppressed. I’m not doing this out of pique or to throw anything in Elon’s face — it’s already clear that approach doesn’t accomplish anything — but just as a concession to reality. Like a lot of Substack contributors (and other independents in similar situations), I need to find new ways to get the word out, as the era of one-stop marketing on Twitter/X is over. The new formula will be Threads on this site, followed by explanatory livestreams. Tonight’s will be at 5:00 PM (click here to join). This thread being free material, social media users are welcome to re-post, but I’d appreciate a link somewhere in the thread. Regular news and features by award-winning author and investigative reporter, Matt Taibbi. A Neocon Monster: The Singular Evil and Deceit of Bill Kristol. Racket Matt Taibbi Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi 27 January 2023 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 Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: 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 a source. A small sample of Hamilton 68-sourced stories. 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. Twitter avatar for @mtaibbi The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham: The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked “to Russian influence activities online.” It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first “reverse-engineered” Hamilton’s list in late 2017. The company was concerned enough about the proliferation of news stories linked to Hamilton 68 that it also ordered a forensic analysis. Note the second page below lists many of the different types of shadow-banning techniques that existed at Twitter even in 2017, buttressing the “Twitter’s Secret Blacklist” thread by Bari Weiss last month. Here you see categories ranging from “Trends Blacklist” to “Search Blacklist” to “NSFW High Precision.” 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.” Other comments in internal company emails: “These accounts 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 evidence of a massive influence campaign.” Declared Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth: “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” The two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue-and-red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio Jamie Fly and Hillary for America Foreign Policy Advisor Laura Rosenberger, told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because “the Russians will simply shut them down.” Tchya, right. One look at the list reveals the real reason they couldn’t make it public. This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming. As Roth put it, “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” There were three major classes of account on the Hamilton list: a thin layer of obvious Russians (e.g. https://twitter.com/RT_America), then the larger pile of real people from Western countries, followed by a percentage — somewhere between a fifth and a third — of “low user state,” “near dead,” “spammy” accounts that didn’t accumulate followers and “do not have a very wide reach on the platform.” Twitter executives observed that the zombie accounts were not amplifying the real accounts. Instead of, say, a group of Russian accounts boosting Trump messaging, it was the reverse — a bunch of real Trump accounts simulating Hamilton’s assertions about Russians. “The selection of accounts is… bizarre and seemingly quite arbitrary,” wrote 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).” Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was listed. The names ranged from well-known media figures like David Horowitz to conservatives like Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like Consortium editor Joe Lauria. It’s crucial to understand that the list captured not just Trump supporters but a range of political dissidents, including leftists, anarchists and humorists. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles, upon seeing the name of British satirist @Holbornlolz: “A wind-up merchant,” he wrote. “I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.” These people never knew they were used for years to drive hundreds if not thousands of media headlines about supposed Russian bot infiltration of online discussions: about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, the #ReleaseTheMemo affair, the Parkland shooting, Donald Trump’s election, the #WalkAway and #IStandWithLaura hashtags, U.S. missile strikes in Syria, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the “Blexit” movement to peel black voters away from Democrats, calls to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation, and countless other issues. Last week, I began contacting people on the list. Reactions have rested between blind fury (“Motherf*ckers!”) and shock (“I am a 73-year-old snowbird in Florida… how could I be a Russian bot?”), with a few noting that the news was outrageous but unsurprising. “Sadly, I’m not surprised but I am angered that we are once again falsely accused of spreading ‘Russian disinformation,’ this time on Twitter,” said Consortium’s Lauria. “Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’” “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution,” says Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas. “How I made a list like this is incredible to me.” “I’m listed as a foreign bot?” says Lynch. “As a proud taxpaying citizen, charitable family man, and honest son of a US Marine w/a Purple Heart, I’m hurt. I deserve better. We all do!” As a child, Sonia Monsour lived through civil war in Lebanon, in a town that was taken over by a Christian militia. Her father counseled her then to dispose of some leftist books that they kept at home, so that her political beliefs would not be held against her. Upon being told she was on the Hamilton 68 list, she recalled that childhood story. She moved to the West to get away from such problems. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online,” she said. Oregon native Jacob Levich (@cordeliers) was one of the few people on the list who knew what Hamilton 68 was. “I recall that it was some sort of spooky NGO that was involved in identifying accounts that were thought to be subversive,” he said. Informed he was on their list, he said, “I can tell you that there is absolutely no sense in which I'm subject to any kind of Russian influence.” Levich went on: “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” he said. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, and in a way designed to undermine rights we hold dear.” Levich’s tale is at the heart of what is so sinister about the Hamilton 68 campaign. This was digital McCarthyism, taking people with dissident or unconventional opinions and mass-accusing them of “Un-American activities.” The peculiar twist of the Hamilton 68 version of McCarthyism is that instead of targeting leftists (although there are several self-professed left-leaning accounts on the list), the bulk of the real accounts involved conservatives, with handles like ULTRA MAGA Dog Mom and @ClassyLadyForDJT. Even at Twitter, where there were basically no open conservatives in the email record, it was recognized that Hamilton 68 (and at least two other research institutes using similar methodology) were simply taking organic Trumpish chatter and describing it as Russian scheming. The site “falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots,” as Roth put it, getting “traction around partisan trends, to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source. Perhaps most embarrassingly, multiple elected officials promoted the site. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. Watts, who clearly knew how to play up the melodrama of his role, gave dire warnings to the Senate Intelligence Committee, telling them they should “follow the dead bodies” if they wanted to get to the bottom of the Russian interference problem. Though it is easy to see how it could be infuriating to be put on such a list — one veteran I spoke with had to leave the room and take a deep breath before coming back to the phone — the broader damage was to society, which was subject to near-daily news reports using this “The Russian Bots Are Coming” format. These stories are still having a huge impact on American culture and politics and played significant roles in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, placing downward pressure on the Sanders, Trump and Gabbard campaigns while boosting the likes of Joe Biden (frequently depicted as a “target” of Russian bots). In the wake of any online controversy, be it the Colin Kaepernick saga or gun control debates after mass shootings, reporters raced to claim “Russian bots” were trying to “sow division,” often using Hamilton or an outfit like it to bolster their claims. Worse, the site pioneered a new form of fake news, which reporters at organizations like Mother Jones, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC ate up for two reasons. One, they tended to be politically simpatico with the site’s conclusions (the Daily Beast didn’t need a push to claim Russian bots were pushing Trump flash mobs “in 17 cities”). Two, it was easy content. “Here’s what Russian trolls are promoting today,” read a piece in Mother Jones by Kevin Drum, all but announcing that reporters could make headlines as quickly as instant coffee in the Ham68 age. By early 2018 — perhaps after a talk with Twitter, whose execs pondered the upside of “educating Clint” — Watts was publicly questioning his own methodology, saying, “I’m not convinced on this bot thing.” Not long after, another key figure associated with Hamilton 68, Jonathon Morgan of the “cyber security firm” New Knowledge, was outed for faking a Russian influence operation in the Alabama Senate Race. He used Hamilton-like tactics to create online chatter about Republican Roy Moore having Russian bot support, got caught, and suffered the indignity of having what he called a “small experiment” described as a “false flag” operation in the New York Times. Even after his “experiment” was outed, and even after Watts expressed doubts about the “bot thing,” the flood of “Here come the bots” news stories continued. News organizations had fallen in love with a new trick: research institute makes invented bot claims, reporters toss said claims at hated targets like Devin Nunes or Tulsi Gabbard, headlines flow. The scam needed just three elements: credentials of someone like “former FBI agent” Watts, the absence of any semblance of fact-checking, and the silence of companies like Twitter. On the third point, Twitter is not guiltless. Though people like Roth wanted to go hard at the fabulists — “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote — ultimately people like future White House and National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne advised caution. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote. Carlos Monje, future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, concurred. “I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” Monje decided. Even if Twitter had pushed back, it wouldn’t have mattered. As it was, when company spokespeople urged reporters off the record to stay away, they didn’t — just as Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal didn’t, when Twitter tried to warn them that “Russian bot” stories were fake. Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. “Reporters are chafing,” she wrote, adding, “it’s like shouting into a void.” 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. The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s “bullshit” stories in volume. This is one of the more significant Twitter Files stories. Each one of these tales explains something new about how companies like Twitter came to lose independence. In the U.S., the door was opened for agencies like the FBI and DHS to press on content moderation after Congress harangued Twitter, Facebook, and Google about Russian “interference,” a phenomenon that had to be seen as an ongoing threat in order to require increased surveillance. “I do very much believe America is under attack,” is how Hamilton 68 co-founder Laura Rosenberger put it, after watching the tweets of Sonya Monsour, David Horowitz, and @holbornlolz. The Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing “Russian interference” worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could only speculate. Now we know: the “Russian threat” was, in this case at least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red Menace. Jayson Blair had a hell of an imagination, but even he couldn’t have come up with a scheme this obscene. Shame on every news outlet that hasn’t renounced these tales. “Outfits like Hamilton 68 don't have to agree with us,” says Lauria. “But they should just leave us the hell alone.” Hamilton 68: Brief Addendum 29 January 2023 Comparing their response Friday to the site's original mission statement Hamilton 68 responded to a #TwitterFiles thread Friday with a series of claims, including that their site was always intended to be understood as “nuanced,” that they always maintained that “witting or unwitting” accounts could be on their list, and that “some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users.” They could also have inserted the disclaimer added to the new Hamilton 2.0 page, which as a helpful reader noted this morning, includes in red font a blaring warning to all that it would be INCORRECT to label anyone or anything that appears on their dashboard “as being connected to state-backed propaganda”: Thank heaven for the Wayback Machine. Here’s what was written on the original Hamilton page: These accounts were selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns, and not because of any domestic political content. We have monitored these datasets for months in order to verify their relevance to Russian disinformation programs targeting the United States. …this will provide a resource for journalists to appropriately identify Russian-sponsored information campaigns. High on that original page, the Hamilton founders explained they monitored two types of accounts: There are two components to the dashboard featured here. The first section, “Overt Promotion of Content,” highlights trending content from Twitter accounts for media outlets known to be controlled by the Russian government. The second section, “Content Tweeted by Bots and Trolls,” highlights themes being pushed by Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns. The Hamilton list tracked overt Russian media on the one hand, and “bots and trolls” on the other. Note the difference between that language and the language Friday: “Some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users.” That Hamilton Friday was also trying to distance itself from headlines about “bots” is particularly grotesque, given that it was so overt in identifying the composition of its list this way at the start. I encourage everyone to read language from the original site, then look at Friday’s ironically named “Fact sheet,” and compare for yourselves. Finally I want to note a passage from the Friday “fact sheet” I somehow overlooked: Individual accounts were algorithmically selected based on analytic techniques developed by J.M. Berger that were used to identify the most influential accounts within those networks. The Hamilton 68 team did not individually review or verify all accounts because the focus of the dashboard was to analyze behavior in aggregate networks, not specific accounts. Translating: individual accounts were chosen through a method developed by J.M. Berger, a writer and think-tanker whose usual specialty is extremism (he’s written about ISIS and domestic white nationalism in the U.S.). Still, it wasn’t even Berger’s fault that ordinary Americans ended up in the list, since said people were chosen “algorithmically.” The Hamilton 68 team also “did not individually review or verify” all the names, because their “focus” was “aggregate networks,” not “specific accounts.” So, nobody looked at the list. The list that was “the fruit of more than three years of observation and monitoring.” Sounds solid.