The Astounding Saga Of Hamilton 68 Illustrates Scope Of America’s Institutional Rot

A shoddy propaganda campaign spearheaded by an ex FBI agent was a disaster for the media. Twitter internal understood that the operation was partisan hackery, but did not speak out. This operation was supported by influential ex officials of the government. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent Contribution To “The Twitter Files” That we now have a complete picture of the institutional corruption that occurred in Hamilton 68 is a shocking revelation.

American intelligence operatives have a history in which they used credulous reporters for political purposes to spread disinformation. (Remember when President Nixon’s team Forged Cables about John F. Kennedy, and tried to get them into Life? Or fate Jean Seberg with her baby, thanks in large part to COINTELPRO (and the Los Angeles Times) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.

The result? What is the result?

Neue Information

Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project claimed to be a “dashboard” This Twitter account tracked Russian disinformation.

As Taibbi wrote, “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 files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”

“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” Another employee spoke out. The speech that Hamilton 68 claimed was foreign disinformation was in fact legitimate speech by anti-establishment American Twitterers. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”

The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.

Hamilton 68: Who was the man behind it? Clint Watts, a former FBI Special Agent, created the project. The Alliance for Securing Democracy supported it. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts is a contributor for MSNBC and NBC News. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)

Institutional Corruption

It is worse on three fronts: Big Tech, academia, and media.

Taibbi points out that elite American universities such as Harvard and Princeton promoted the suspect research uncritically. The files also show that Twitter declined to call.