Margot Cleveland of the Federalist assesses the latest Twitter Files revelations.
The latest chapter of “The Twitter Files” broke on Friday, with the release of internal communications that provided a takedown of Hamilton 68, which wrongly purported to expose Russian disinformation on social media. The details released, however, prove equally devasting to the corrupt media, dishonest Democrats, and Twitter itself.
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s most recent exposé provided more details of the internal angst at Twitter caused by Hamilton 68, which Taibbi described as “a computerized ‘dashboard’ designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure ‘Russian disinformation.’” As Taibbi explained, former FBI counterintelligence agent Clint Watts conceived of the dashboard, which the Alliance for Securing Democracy think-tank hosted. It then served as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.”
“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,’” Taibbi stressed, adding, “Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.”
But there was a problem — a huge problem: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”
The internal communications revealed that Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and determined the methodology relied on a list of some 644 accounts. Twitter executives then ordered a forensic analysis of those accounts and determined that only 36 were registered in Russia, many of which were connected to Russia Today, the government “news” service.
According to Taibbi, “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.”
