Moscow: After internal Twitter messages published the same day by journalist Matt Taibbi questioned the validity of its "Russian bot" dashboard, Hamilton68, the US think tank Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) sought to explain its actions on Friday.

Employees were aware that many of the listed accounts on the dashboard were neither Russians nor bots, according to the communications that have been made public. Hamilton68 is now being reframed by ASD as a "nuanced" tool that journalists mistook for a snarky comment.

The creators of the dashboard, which once claimed to track over 600 Kremlin-linked accounts to give the West an authentic window on Russian "influence operations," insisted in a statement released on Friday that Hamilton68 never claimed the accounts it monitored were under the orders of Moscow, only that they were "wittingly or unwittingly" amplifying Russian narratives.

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The ASD launched the dashboard in 2017 "to track Russian disinformation on Twitter," according to its website, with the help of a bipartisan panel that included Weekly Standard editor and supporter of the Iraq war Bill Kristol, Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who served as Hamilton68's primary architect, acknowledged the following year that he was "not convinced on this bot thing."

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Although its own advisory committee members were quoted as saying in 2017 that "Moscow used [the accounts included in Hamilton68] to discredit the FBI...to attack ABC news...to critique the Obama administration...and to warn about violence by immigrants," the group blamed "members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers" for failing to provide the necessary context explaining that Hamilton68's conclusions were not drawn from actual Russian bots.

Twitter executives reportedly examined Hamilton68's list of 644 alleged Russian bots back in 2017, only to discover that, in the words of the company's head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, "these accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots," according to internal messages between employees that were published by Taibbi.

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As "virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian," Roth advised Twitter to "just call this out on the bulls*** it is."

But Twitter's head of global policy communication, Emily Horne, warned him that "we have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly" and dissuaded him from criticising the group.