Censorship Files: "We Have Very Little Evidence About What Works"

Do "anti-disinformation" tactics work? Listen to the experts themselves

On April 11, 2021, the University of Washington’s Kate Starbird sent a letter to former FBI agent Clint Watts, whom Racket readers will recognize as the face of the ill-fated Hamilton 68 dashboard. Funded by the Alliance for Security Democracy, whose board contains former heads and deputy heads of agencies like the CIA, NSA, and DHS, Hamilton 68 spawned hundreds of incorrect stories about alleged Russian bot activity. In the Twitter Files, we found executives reverse-engineered the “dashboard,” discovered it was full of people unconnected to Russia, and argued it should be called out for “the bullshit it is.”

Watts in early April 2021 had invited Starbird to join in a “Societal Resilience Roundtable” after being asked by the “new administration” to gather a “special group of experts” for an off-the-record roundtable: