Latest 'Twitter File' Release Reveals Company's Skepticism About Russian Bot Claims

(@FahadShabbir)

Latest 'Twitter File' Release Reveals Company's Skepticism About Russian Bot Claims

The latest release of the so-called Twitter Files shared by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday revealed internal skepticism and criticism of the claims made by Hamilton 68, a group claiming to track Russian influence online

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2023) The latest release of the so-called Twitter Files shared by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday revealed internal skepticism and criticism of the claims made by Hamilton 68, a group claiming to track Russian influence online.

Hamilton 68 "falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots," former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth said in an email shared by Taibbi. "I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is."

Roth urged Twitter to get ahead of Hamilton 68's "nonsense," noting that they accuse any conservative conversation on Twitter of having Russian links, the emails also said.

Hamilton 68's dashboard was run by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts and funded by "neoliberal" think tank Alliance for Securing Democracy, Taibbi said. The group's advisory council included former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, writer Bill Kristol and ex-Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta.

News outlets cited Watts and Hamilton 68 for years to back claims of Russian involvement in certain social media causes, Taibbi said. The group claimed to have a list of 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence activities, although they never released the list, Taibbi said.

A Twitter analysis that reverse engineered the list based on data requests by the group concluded that the accounts were "neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots," Roth said in a February 2018 email.

Roth suggested Twitter offer Hamilton 68 an ultimatum: either release their list or Twitter will, another email said. However, Twitter at that time did not decide to release the list due to concerns about upsetting the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Taibbi said.

Following the release of the Twitter Files, which contains the list, accounts have begun finding out that Hamilton 68 was characterizing them as Russian bots, Taibbi said.

"I've written a book about the US Constitution. How I made a list like this is incredible to me," Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas is quoted as saying.

The latest Twitter File release comes following a number of other releases on matters including coordination between Twitter and the US government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and cooperation with the US military to boost psychological operations accounts.