Matt Taibbi replies in detail to Hamilton 68’s belated response:
“A group of not-very-bright people rolled out a “dashboard,” hyped it as a magic Russian influence barometer to a stampede of willing reporters, and basked in every opportunity to speak on TV and to newspapers and at schools and think tanks and even congress, offering themselves as primary witnesses for a tale about ongoing “cyber attacks.” Then, once they caught blowback from Twitter and a reporter or two about the contents of their magic box, they retreated to an “attributable” model, but only after roughly 18 months of outright fakery. Now they’re trying to say they were misunderstood. To quote Yoel Roth, bullshit.”
[Added Jan 29]
Hamilton 68 is the sordid story that keeps on giving: Hamilton 68 refused to discuss its grift with Matt Taibbi before Taibbi released his reporting. After Taibbi excoriated Hamilton 68 for operating its bullshit machine, it then released a statement indicating 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
Keep in mind that Hamilton 68’s fraudulent pronouncements served as the basis for hundreds of news media stories blaming “the Russians” for America’s largely self-imposed dysfunction.
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.
Hamilton 68’s false Russian bot stories led to a climate of panic in the U.S. Chris Hedges connects the dots from Hamilton 68 to the self-destructive proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
