A Twitter Files footnote (8)

Matt Taibbi has renamed his TK News site Racket. On Saturday he posted “Responding to Hamilton 68” — his analysis of the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s “fact sheet” on the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” that he exposed as a fraud in the fifteenth installment of the Twitter Files (the link is to my notes on it). Taibbi summarized his response to the fact sheet in the subhead: “After refusing to answer questions pre-publication, Hamilton 68 and Clint Watts printed a response to the Twitter files that’s both laughable and damning.”

I found the full text of Taibbi’s response limited to subscribers and subscribed in order to read it. It is devastating. I wanted to summarize it for interested readers myself, but the editors of the New York Post have saved me the trouble and done better than I could have. They write here (the links are in the original):

Racket’s Matt Taibbi eviscerates Hamilton 68’s pathetic response to his Twitter Files exposé, which showed the group falsely treated hundreds of real Twitter users as Russian bots, prompting countless bogus “news” stories. Hamilton is pretending reporters simply misunderstood the research, but the outfit’s principals routinely did media hits claiming they were tracking “bots” and “never complained about all the headlines” like “The Russian Bots Are Coming.” Fact is, “the Hamilton 68 people” took “ordinary accounts with opinions [they] deemed to be in sync with Russia, and called them part of a ‘network’ that was ‘engaged with Russian propaganda.’” Then they “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.’”

Yesterday Taibbi added “Hamilton 68: Brief Addendum.” It shows ASD’s concealed revisions of the software’s mission statement.

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