ween @greaterthanWeen

Staying playful like a child. Life is all about finding joy in the simple things ❤️ #fun #playful #bubbles #livelife #innerchild #joy #simplicity #simplethings #breathe #wimhofmethod

25. Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was on the list. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles about British comic @Holbornlolz: “A wind-up merchant… I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.”

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

24. “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” says Oregon native Jacob Levich. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, in a way… designed to undermine rights we hold dear.”

23. “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.”

22.“I’m shocked,” says Sonia Monsour, who as a child lived through civil war in Lebanon. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.”

21. So the “legitimate people,” as one Twitter exec called them, never found out they’d been used as fodder for mountains of news stories about “Russian influence.” Because the #TwitterFiles contain the list, they’ve begun finding out.

20.“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” wrote Carlos Monje, the future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne.

18.Yoel Roth wanted a confrontation. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote. However, there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy.

17.Some Twitter execs badly wanted to out Hamilton 68. After Russians were blamed for hyping the #ParklandShooting hashtag, one wrote: “Why can’t we say we’ve investigated… and citing Hamilton 68 is being wrong, irresponsible, and biased?”

16. Twitter immediately recognized these Hamilton-driven news stories posed a major ethical problem, potentially implicating them. “Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote.

15.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.

14. In layman’s terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.

13.“These accounts,” they concluded, “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 illuminating a massive influence operation.”

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

12. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data. Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them.

11. Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing.

10. The secret ingredient to Hamilton 68’s analytical method? A list: “Our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence activities online,” was how the site put it at launch.

7.The ASD advisory council includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

6.The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).

5.These are quotes by Twitter executives about Hamilton 68, a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.