HAMILTON 68 / ALLIANCE FOR SECURING DEMOCRACY

Institutional Archetype

THE ATTRIBUTION ORACLE — Hamilton 68 was a public dashboard that pronounced, in real time, which conversations on Twitter were “Russian influence.” It did not show its work. The 644 accounts it tracked were never disclosed, so no outside party could check the label against the accounts wearing it — the reader saw only the verdict: Russians are pushing this. That is the archetype. Not a censor and not a platform, but an oracle: a device that converts a private, unfalsifiable list into a public attribution the press can cite as fact. The hazard scored here is the mechanism, not the motive — a “foreign influence” instrument whose output, on the operator’s own internal reading, described mostly real Americans talking to each other. Fully exposed and defunct, it is a lower live risk than an operating apparatus; it is preserved here as the cleanest documented specimen of the form.

Mandate & Origin

Hamilton 68 launched in August 2017 as a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), itself a program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Its stated mandate was to track the online activity of accounts ASD linked to Russian state-directed influence operations, and it claimed to monitor 644 Twitter accounts on that basis. ASD presents itself as a bipartisan, transatlantic body countering authoritarian interference in democracies.

The tell is what was never released: ASD did not make the 644-account list public, on the stated ground that disclosure would tip off the operators. The result was an attribution no one outside ASD could audit.

Funding & Backers

ASD sits inside the German Marshall Fund; the dashboard’s authority came less from a funding diagram than from its advisory roster, which was stacked with former national-security principals across both parties. Its founding directors were Laura Rosenberger (a former Clinton campaign foreign-policy adviser) and Jamie Fly (a former counselor to Senator Marco Rubio); its advisory council was reported to include Michael Chertoff (former DHS Secretary), Michael Morell (former acting CIA Director), Rick Ledgett (former NSA Deputy Director), John Podesta, and Bill Kristol.

ASD’s own supporters page says: “ASD receives funding primarily from philanthropic foundations and individual donors. ASD does not receive any financial support from social media companies,” and notes that its list of major supporters “does not include any donors who do not wish to disclose their charitable giving” (ASD, Supporters).

The bipartisan, ex-intelligence composition is the mechanism, not a scandal: it is what let a private, unpublished list be received by newsrooms as an authoritative reading of Russian activity. The credential did the work the methodology could not.

Institutional Voice & Intent

The dashboard wrote in the register of a public early-warning service, with a methodology note attached. At launch on 2 August 2017 Laura Rosenberger and J.M. Berger wrote: “Americans deserve to know what messages Russian disinformation networks are pushing,” and described the product as “a near real-time look at Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts online” (ASD, launch post, via GMF). Where the voice states its own limits, it does so in four places:

• On who is on the list. Berger’s methodology note of 7 August 2017: “The dashboard monitors the activities of 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence efforts online. Accounts were selected for their clear connection to Russian influence, but not all of the accounts are directly controlled by Russia” (ASD, methodology, via GMF). The launch post: “Some of these accounts are directly controlled by Russia, others are users who on their own initiative reliably repeat and amplify Russian themes.”
• On the sites the network links. “We emphasize it is NOT CORRECT to describe sites linked by this network as Russian propaganda sites” (methodology).
• On withholding the list. “We are not willing to publicly attribute even one specific account incorrectly,” and “If we identified the users in the dataset, they would certainly change their behavior and render the dashboard essentially useless.” The note puts the list’s accuracy at “at least 98 percent accurate, but that leaves as many as 12 accounts that may not be relevant” (methodology).
• On the aim. The year-one report by Bret Schafer: “The objective was not to unmask, dox, or shutdown accounts,” and the term “Russian-linked” is an imperfect description because “accounts that regularly promote Russian narratives do not necessarily have links, per se, to Russia itself” (GMF, A View from the Digital Trenches).

Stated intent: An aggregate view of a network of accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts,” built for journalists, researchers and the public, with the accounts withheld so the network could not adapt (methodology).

Observed intent: A public label on an unpublished list. The label in the dashboard’s name and press coverage was “Russian”; the methodology note’s own population was three networks, one of them openly pro-Russian users and one of them accounts that “engage in automated behavior (bots),” and it says some accounts “may or may not understand themselves to be part of a pro-Russian social network.” The project retired the account list in favor of attributable accounts: Hamilton 2.0 “is the second iteration of ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was retired at the end of 2018” and tracks “more than 140 diplomatic and media accounts on Twitter” (GMF, 4 Sep 2019).

Gap: Two measurements of one population sit side by side. ASD’s note claims the list is “at least 98 percent accurate” as a network of accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns, “knowing and unknowing”; the Twitter Files account counts 644 accounts of which 36 were registered in Russia. The first measures participation in a network, the second a registration country, and ASD’s note does not claim that accounts were Russian-registered. Only the list could settle which reading the accounts fit, and ASD says it will not publish it; Twitter’s internal analysis reaches the public only through Taibbi’s reporting.

• Social accounts and feeds. No Hamilton 68 account exists on the pages read: the dashboard was a web page. ASD’s former address (securingdemocracy.gmfus.org) returned HTTP 522 to every request on 23 October 2026; the site now answers at securingdemocracy.org and its Hamilton pages name no Hamilton 68 account. The German Marshall Fund’s pages link @gmfus on X and gmfus.bsky.social (GMF).

Position in the Apparatus

• A project of a project. ASD calls itself “a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF)” (ASD policy blueprint, printed in S. Hrg. 115-397). Its year-one report says Hamilton 68 “is a collaboration between the Alliance of Securing Democracy and four outside researchers: Clint Watts, J.M. Berger, Andrew Weisburd, and Jonathon Morgan” (GMF).
• It ran on one platform’s data. The Twitter Files account says the platform was in a position to recreate the list “by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests” in late 2017, and that the platform’s staff compared the accounts against its internal spam and bot categories (Racket, Twitter Files #15). See Yoel Roth and Matt Taibbi.
• It reached Congress through ASD’s own paper. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 1 August 2018 hearing record, with Rosenberger as witness, prints an ASD blueprint that says “The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s (ASD) Hamilton 68 Dashboard noticed a spike in activity from the Russian-linked accounts it tracks” in the 2017 anthem protests, and recommends: “Projects like ASD’s Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, and StopFake have been groundbreaking in exposing disinformation campaigns across the transatlantic space in real time” (S. Hrg. 115-397). The same hearing heard the CEO of Graphika and Renée DiResta as witnesses.
• Its successor changed the population. Hamilton 2.0, launched 4 September 2019, “captures content from more than 140 diplomatic and media accounts on Twitter, four state-sponsored news websites, RT’s television news broadcasts, and RT America and RT UK’s YouTube channels,” and was “developed in partnership with DeBunk.eu, VidRover, and Atlas Public Policy” (GMF). ASD’s current Hamilton 2.0 page says it covers “Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, state-sponsored news websites” and that “as of April 1, 2025, Hamilton 2.0 displays data for only the past 30 days” because of “increased costs to operate the dashboard” (ASD, Hamilton 2.0).
• The sponsor ended. ASD’s managing director David Salvo wrote on 4 December 2025: “Though this marks ASD’s end as a formal initiative,” and the announcement says ASD and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue-US “are merging under the ISD-US banner, effective January 1, 2026” (ASD, merger announcement). ASD’s own fact sheet of 27 January 2023 dates the end of the dashboard itself: “in December 2018, ASD discontinued the dashboard as it shifted its approach to analyze the overt information space” (ASD, fact sheet).
• The parent’s money. GMF’s Form 990 for calendar 2024 reports contributions and grants of $29,550,039, of which government grants were $15,037,202, total revenue of $38,434,390 and total expenses of $42,777,756; the filing text does not name ASD or Hamilton (IRS Form 990, TY2024, via ProPublica). GMF’s 2024 donor page lists, among others, the Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Sandler Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the European Commission and Global Affairs Canada (GMF, Our Donors); it does not break funding out by program.
• A court record names it once. In Missouri v. Biden, Jim Hoft’s third supplemental declaration (Doc. 399-1, filed 29 October 2024) states: “In August of 2017, The Gateway Pundit was also targeted by a group called Hamilton 68” (W.D. La., Doc. 399-1). It is a party declaration in a case against the federal government; Hamilton 68 and ASD are not parties.

Actions & Leadership Choices

The stated register was “securing democracy against foreign interference.” The deeds, read against the operator’s own internal record, describe an attribution machine whose output did not match its label.

• The costly-signal receipt: the platform’s own T&S head debunked it internally, and the platform said nothing. Twitter’s Head of Trust & Safety, Yoel Roth, reverse-engineered the secret list and concluded, in internal communications reported in the Twitter Files, that the accounts were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” and that the dashboard was “actively damaging and promotes polarization and distrust through its shoddy methodology.” Matt Taibbi, publishing the Twitter Files, called it “a scam.” Twitter did not say so publicly for years — contradicting the Russian-bot narrative carried a political cost the company declined to pay. This is the load-bearing evidence: the company whose data the dashboard purported to analyze had privately assessed it as wrong, and the assessment cost nothing to make and something to publish.

• What the list actually tracked. Per Roth’s analysis as reported in the Twitter Files, only 36 of the 644 accounts were registered in Russia; Taibbi characterized the dashboard as having “simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The finding is the gap between the label (“Russian influence”) and the population the operator’s own analysis described (largely real Americans).

• Media amplification, then quiet corrections. The dashboard’s outputs were cited as authoritative by outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Mother Jones, and Business Insider; by Taibbi’s count, Mother Jones alone ran at least 14 Hamilton 68 stories. After the Twitter Files disclosures in January 2023, the Washington Post appended corrections to multiple “Russian bot” stories. ASD, for its part, defended its methodology: its fact sheet of 27 January 2023 disputes the “scam” characterization and says it “had many very frank and ultimately constructive debates with Yoel Roth’s team” (ASD, fact sheet).

Leadership choices. The dashboard was wound down and rebranded as “Hamilton 2.0,” a broader state-media-monitoring tool that continues on ASD’s archive site, now limited to 30 days of data since 1 April 2025; the original account-list methodology was never published, and ASD’s public position remained a defense of the work rather than a disclosure of the list. The sponsor then ended: ASD merged into the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (US) on 1 January 2026. The one actor positioned to correct the record early — the platform holding the data — chose silence over cost.

CONDUCT: ATTRIBUTION LAUNDERING — REAL AMERICANS BRANDED AS FOREIGN BOTS. Hamilton 68 was a lawful nonprofit product with a bipartisan national-security imprimatur that turned an unpublished, unauditable list into a public “Russian influence” verdict the press repeated as fact — while the platform whose users it described had, internally, concluded it was wrong. Defunct and fully receipted; the mechanism is the hazard, not the roster.

Alliance Map

These ran at once, and none was hidden except the list. A small project inside a Washington think tank ran on Twitter’s data; a bipartisan council of former officials stood behind it; the project’s blueprint went into the Senate record while its list stayed out of the public one; and the parent’s funders, public and private, are on its donor page. The record shows ASD publishing its methodology, its accuracy claim and its limits, and withholding only the accounts. The overlap is the finding: the credential was fully public and the evidence was not.

Reach Assessment

Institutional: The dashboard’s audience was newsrooms and Congress: ASD’s own blueprint carried it into a Senate hearing record, and ASD’s year-one report built on “several million tweets” from tracked accounts. Memetic: The name outlived the product: ASD’s materials present it as an early-warning tool, and the Twitter Files of January 2023 made it the example of an unpublished list.

Legacy: What persists is the record, not a service: the dashboard has been off since December 2018, ASD closed as a formal initiative on 1 January 2026, and Hamilton 2.0 is a 30-day window on an archive site. The reach that remains is the coverage it seeded, the Senate hearing record that carries ASD’s blueprint, and the Twitter Files account that made the unpublished list a standing example.

Counted: ASD’s launch materials give 600 accounts; the Twitter Files account gives 644 on the list the platform reconstructed, of which 36 were registered in Russia and 86 percent English-language. The dashboard ran from 2 August 2017 and was “retired at the end of 2018,” by GMF’s account; Hamilton 2.0 followed on 4 September 2019 with “more than 140 diplomatic and media accounts.” The parent’s TY2024 filing gives $38,434,390 in revenue (GMF, launch; GMF, year-one report; Racket; GMF, Hamilton 2.0; IRS Form 990).

Sources: Twitter Files, Part 15 — Matt Taibbi, “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68” (Racket News); Twitter Files (index) — Substack; Reason — “Twitter Employees Knew the Media’s Favorite Russian Bots List Was Fake”; InfluenceWatch — Hamilton 68; Alliance for Securing Democracy — Hamilton Dashboard (ASD/German Marshall Fund); Alliance for Securing Democracy — homepage; ASD — About Us (live page 500s to bots; Wayback receipt) (archived); German Marshall Fund of the United States; FIRE — the FBI’s relationship with Twitter.

Further sources: GMF — Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter (Rosenberger and Berger, 2 Aug 2017); GMF — The Methodology of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard (Berger, 7 Aug 2017); GMF — A View from the Digital Trenches: Lessons from Year One of Hamilton 68 (Schafer); GMF — The Alliance for Securing Democracy Launches Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard (4 Sep 2019); U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — S. Hrg. 115-397, Open Hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms (1 Aug 2018); IRS Form 990, TY2024, German Marshall Fund of the United States — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer; GMF — Our Donors (fiscal year 2024); Missouri v. Biden, Third Supplemental Declaration of Jim Hoft, Doc. 399-1 (W.D. La., 29 Oct 2024); FARA registrant lists — efile.fara.gov; ASD — Fact Sheet: Hamilton 68 Dashboard (2017-2018), 27 Jan 2023; ASD — ISD-US and ASD Announce Merger, 4 Dec 2025; ASD — Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard; ASD — Supporters.