Here's what we know about Hamilton 68, the Russian online influence tracker called into question by the 'Twitter Files'

• A recent "Twitter Files" drop revealed deep concerns among Twitter executives about a database that claimed to track Russian propaganda in "near real time."

• The now defunct database, Hamilton 68, was widely cited by media outlets, including Insider, before it was shut down in 2018.

• Conservatives have accused it of having a left-wing bias, while its creators say the dashboard's data was often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Selectively leaked emails that appear to show internal discussions between Twitter executives have raised doubts about a prominent database used to track Russia's online influence campaigns.

The controversy surfaced in late January when the journalist Matt Taibbi published a lengthy Twitter thread as part of the so-called "Twitter Files," an ongoing series publicizing Twitter's internal content moderation debates.

It included photos of emails in which a former Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, expressed concerns about Hamilton 68, a now defunct public dashboard that tracked hundreds of Twitter accounts to monitor the spread of pro-Russian propaganda online. But now neither Taibbi nor Roth are willing to talk about the controversy, and architects of the tracker did not respond to a request for the list of accounts it had tracked.

When Hamilton 68 was launched in 2017, its creators at the Alliance for Securing Democracy wrote that the tool "seeks to expose the effects of online influence networks and inform the public of themes and content being promoted to Americans through a near real-time look at Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts online."

But in the months after the dashboard went live — and after a slew of media outlets, including Insider, NBC News, and The New York Times, cited it in articles about Russia's online influence efforts —  Twitter executives became skeptical of Hamilton 68, according to Taibbi's thread.

In one photo Taibbi posted, Roth, then Twitter's head of Trust and Safety, claimed in an email to have used internal analytics to reverse-engineer the list of roughly 600 accounts that the dashboard tracked. He wrote that based on his analysis, Hamilton 68 "falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate, right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots."

Which accounts were on the list and the basis for their inclusion remains murky.

Here's what you need to know about the controversy:

What Hamilton 68 claimed to do

The dashboard was originally created "to depict the hashtags, links and issues being amplified by Russian influence operations," co-creator J.M. Berger, who is now a researcher with VOX-Pol studying violent online political extremism, told Insider in a statement.

The dashboard claimed to track three broad categories of Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations: overtly pro-Russian and Russian government-affiliated accounts like RT and Sputnik; bots and human accounts run by Russian troll factories; and accounts from humans around the world "who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly," according to an archived version of the website from August 2017.

The third category is now at the crux of the controversy, as Taibbi and other critics claimed Hamilton 68 "barely had any Russians" and "simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming."

The Alliance for Securing Democracy declined to provide comment for Insider's story, but it has publicly defended the Hamilton 68 dashboard and pushed back on some of the criticism, arguing that the inclusion of American and other non-Russian accounts was warranted to see how they repeated Russian propaganda or were promoted by Russia-controlled accounts.

The think tank has since published a "fact sheet" addressing common criticisms and explaining that the dashboard's goal was to analyze content from accounts that "reliably amplified Russian propaganda and disinformation, either wittingly or unwittingly."

Hamilton 68 included accounts belonging to Americans "not because they were labelled by analysts as being a bot or even Russian, but because the analytic techniques used identified them as being a part of a network that either promoted or engaged with Russian propaganda targeting American audiences," ASD has said.

The organization has also conceded that Hamilton 68's data was often "misunderstood or misrepresented," and became fodder for headlines like "After Florida School Shooting, Russian 'Bot' Army Pounced," or "The Russian Bots are Coming. This Bipartisan Duo is On It." Insider has corrected three posts that initially described the dashboard as exclusively tracking Russian bots.

The full and complete list of the approximately 600 Twitter accounts that comprised the dashboard has not been released publicly, a point Taibbi and others have criticized Hamilton 68 for.

Berger and ASD did not respond to a request to provide Insider with the list of accounts Hamilton 68 tracked. Roth and Taibbi did not respond to requests to view the reverse engineered list.

But Berger told Insider the dashboard's creators "intentionally refrained from making any characterizations of individual users, including whether or not they were aware that they were interacting with a networked influence operation."

"We kept the accounts confidential so that other people would not make such characterizations," he added. "We believed and still believe it would be irresponsible to disclose the user list and attempt to characterize the motives or opinions of individual users."

Twitter's reaction to Hamilton 68

Taibbi's thread features multiple photos of emails in which Roth, who spearheaded Twitter's efforts to combat propaganda on its platform, castigated Hamilton 68.

In addition to accusing the dashboard of labeling "a bunch of right-leaning accounts" as "Russian bots," he dinged Hamilton 68 for not publicly releasing the list of accounts it tracked. "It's so weird and self-selecting, and they're so unwilling to be transparent and defend their selection that I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is" he wrote, according to a photo Taibbi posted.

Roth also claimed, after reverse-engineering the list of accounts that Hamilton 68 tracked, that they were "neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots." He added that the dashboard's methodology was "deeply flawed," according to another photo, and said there was a "major unmet opportunity to try to educate our comms and gov partners about the flaws with tools like Hamilton."

However, as the database's creators and other experts have noted, Hamilton 68 did not claim to track accounts that were located in Russia, and bots and automated accounts made up only a small portion of the roughly 600 accounts it tracked.

"The purpose wasn't to see what individual accounts were tweeting, but rather to take the temperature of networks in which known pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation circulated on a regular basis," Caroline Orr, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland who studies online misinformation campaigns, recently wrote. "In other words, if you frequently engaged with content produced by RT, Sputnik, TASS, or any number of Russian proxy sites like SouthFront, your account could have been flagged as exhibiting behavioral indicators of Russian influence activity."

Insider found several American accounts, which Taibbi reported had been included in the dashboard, whose tweets from 2017 and 2018 had been embedded in RT and Sputnik articles, which the dashboard likely deemed to be "part of a network that either promoted or engaged with Russian propaganda."

The Alliance for Securing Democracy shut down Hamilton 68 shortly after the 2018 midterm elections and appears to have taken steps since to address some of the main criticisms of the original dashboard.

In September 2019, the organization introduced Hamilton 2.0, a new dashboard that claims to provide "a summary analysis of the narratives and topics promoted by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government officials and state-funded media on Twitter, YouTube, state-sponsored news websites, and via official press releases and transcripts published by their respective ministries of foreign affairs."

One key difference between the two dashboards: Hamilton 2.0 has a publicly accessible list of accounts, and every account is directly linked to the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments, diplomats, and state-sponsored media outlets.

The new dashboard "displays outputs from sources that we can directly attribute to the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments or their various news and information channels," ASD said.

It added: "These channels and accounts often engage with topics, hashtags, URLs, and people that are in no way affiliated with the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments. It would therefore be INCORRECT to, without further analysis, label anyone or anything that appears on the dashboard as being connected to state-backed propaganda."

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