What it said
The dashboard was a public web page. It showed, in near real time, the hashtags, topics, and links that a monitored network of roughly 600 accounts was sharing. The list of accounts was kept confidential. The product's name and framing told readers what the network was: the launch post on 2 August 2017 was titled Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter. The German Marshall Fund said the name honored Federalist No. 68, where Alexander Hamilton wrote about protecting elections from foreign meddling.
Reporters did the rest. On 19 January 2018 Axios, citing the dashboard, reported that the monitored network's use of #ReleaseTheMemo had risen 233,000 percent in 48 hours. Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Adam Schiff asked Twitter and Facebook for a forensic look at the hashtag, writing:
If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process
The Daily Beast soon reported a source saying Twitter's internal analysis had found the hashtag organically American
.
Who made it and why
Hamilton 68 was not a government program. It came from the Alliance for Securing Democracy, launched in July 2017 at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and directed by Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and Jamie Fly, a former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio. Its advisory council included Bill Kristol, Michael Morell, and Michael McFaul. The Foreign Policy Research Institute credited its fellow Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent, and colleagues with the launch; BuzzFeed named Watts and J.M. Berger among the founders; Matt Taibbi later wrote that Jonathon Morgan of New Knowledge designed it.
The published method sorted accounts into three groups: openly pro-Russian and Russian-government-affiliated accounts such as RT and Sputnik; bots and human accounts run by troll operations; and people anywhere who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly.
Suspected automated accounts were picked out with Berger's "Influence-Outlier" metric, which flags accounts unusually engaged with the network for their follower count. The Alliance was explicit about a limit:
The Hamilton 68 team did not individually review or verify all accounts because the focus of the dashboard was to analyze behavior in aggregate networks, not specific accounts.
Berger said the team deliberately did not characterize individual users and kept the list private so others would not either.
What it got right or wrong
The third category is where the method met real Americans. A network defined partly by people who repeat certain themes "unknowingly" will include ordinary citizens with ordinary opinions. That is a defensible research design for studying how messages move. Under a Russian-disinformation banner, with the list hidden, it became something else in print: a chart that newsrooms could caption as Russian bots, and that nobody outside could check.
The builders did warn people. On 28 February 2018 BuzzFeed's Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything traced most "Russian bot" stories to the dashboard and quoted Watts: I'm not convinced on this bot thing.
In April the Alliance's communications director, Bret Schafer, told the Daily Caller that headlines such as "Russian bots are pushing X" were inherently inaccurate
because bots are only a small portion of the network that we monitor
. FAIR reported that outlets kept citing the dashboard after its own team had cautioned them. The Alliance's later fact sheet said Kremlin-oriented accounts likely represented a very, very small percentage of the overall engagement
with #ReleaseTheMemo.
Meanwhile, Twitter knew more than it said. According to material released in 2023, Yoel Roth, later head of trust and safety, reconstructed the list in October 2017 from the dashboard's requests to Twitter's API and found 644 accounts. The internal review counted 36 registered in Russia, found 86 percent were English-language, and concluded most were "legitimate people" in the United States, Canada, and Britain. It said the accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots
. Roth wrote internally that the tool falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots
, and in January 2018:
Real people need to know they've been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.
He proposed telling the Alliance you release the list or we do
. Neither Roth nor anyone else at Twitter said this publicly at the time. Tablet's account counts that silence as part of the problem: the company held evidence that might have cooled a national story and kept it inside while members of Congress were citing the story.
Is this "fraud," as Taibbi argued, or honest network research that journalists misread, as the Alliance and a Sinclair national-desk piece maintained? The record does not settle it. The Alliance says Twitter's review tested a claim it never made, that the accounts were Russian or bots. That is a fair point about the method paper. It is a weaker point about the name, the launch framing, and the confidential list, which together made the misreading easy and the correction hard. On 18 May 2023 the Washington Post said a review found some imprecision
in seven articles and a newsletter that described Hamilton 68, and corrected them.
No statute, but a duty to the people labeled
No statute was involved. A private think tank published a private analysis, newspapers repeated it, and a private company kept its doubts to itself. The First Amendment protects all of that, and it should. The liberty question lies elsewhere: what a free society owes the people who get labeled.
A secret list under a foreign-influence heading gives the person on it no notice and no way to answer. Taibbi named some of the accounts in 2023; Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News, was on the list and said such organizations are in business to enforce an official narrative
. Critics came from both directions. James Carden wrote in The Nation in August 2017 that the project seeks to police and narrow the scope of acceptable political discourse
; Reason, Taibbi, and The Federalist pressed the case from the libertarian and conservative side. When writers on the left and the right object to the same thing, it is worth paying attention.
The concern grows when the output is used in government. A letter from a senator and a congressman, built on press reports drawn from a dashboard whose own staff were urging caution, is how a private label starts to shape public policy about speech. Due process is a constitutional idea about the state. The habit behind it, that a citizen should be able to see the charge and answer it, is worth keeping when the accuser is private and the audience is Congress.
Its legacy
The Alliance retired Hamilton 68 at the end of 2018. From 2019 its Hamilton 2.0 dashboard tracked messaging by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state media and government officials, which is to say named, accountable accounts rather than a hidden list of private users. On 27 January 2023 Taibbi published the internal Twitter material as the fifteenth Twitter Files thread, and the Alliance answered with its fact sheet. On 4 December 2025 the Alliance and ISD-US announced a merger under the ISD-US name, effective 1 January 2026.
Russia's state media used the episode too: Sputnik attacked the dashboard in August 2017, and RT greeted the BuzzFeed piece as vindication. Foreign influence operations were real; the House Intelligence Committee's 2018 report reproduced Facebook pages the Internet Research Agency ran while posing as American groups (the committee's exhibit). That is a different operation on a different platform, and the point is the difference: a named, documented operation can be answered, while an unpublished list cannot. Set this case beside the government programs of the same years, the State Department's Global Engagement Center and the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, and the common thread is the question of who gets to call a citizen's speech foreign, and whether the citizen gets to see the evidence.
Sources
- FRAME case study "Hamilton 68: the Russian-influence dashboard and its secret account list" (propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/hamilton-68-dashboard/), for the chronology, counts, and quotations on this page.
- Alliance for Securing Democracy: Hamilton 68 launch post (2 August 2017); The Methodology of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard; How to Interpret the Hamilton 68 Dashboard; Fact sheet: Hamilton 68 Dashboard (2017-2018); Hamilton 2.0 Methodology & FAQs.
- German Marshall Fund launch notices; Foreign Policy Research Institute announcements (August 2017); ISD, merger announcement (4 December 2025).
- Axios, 19 January 2018; Feinstein and Schiff letter (Feinstein press release; House Intelligence Committee Democrats); Daily Beast on Twitter's internal hashtag analysis.
- BuzzFeed News, "Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything," 28 February 2018; FAIR, 5 April 2018; Daily Caller, 9 April 2018.
- Matt Taibbi, Twitter Files thread, 27 January 2023, and "CTI Files #4" (Racket); Reason, 27 January 2023; Insider via Yahoo News; Tablet; The Federalist, 31 January and 1 February 2023; Consortium News, 27 January 2023; Sinclair/KATV.
- The Nation, James Carden, 7 August 2017; Washington Post, corrections notice, 18 May 2023; RT, March 2018.
- FRAME collection object: 'Russian Ads on Facebook' (House Intelligence Committee exhibit, 2018).