Who doesn’t love a good supercut? In this case, the plan was to cut together every mention of Hamilton 68’s dashboard which appeared on a single network, MSNBC. But that turned out to be a pretty massive chore as you’ll see in a moment.

In case you’ve forgotten, Hamilton 68 was the subject of Twitter Files #15. Basically it was a computerized dashboard which tracked a group of 644 Twitter accounts that, according to Hamilton 68, were Russian bots being used to influence US politics. Hamilton 68 was a huge hit with the media and was featured in dozens of news stories published by “NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post.”

But it turns out it was all “bullsh*t.” That was the conclusion of Twitter’s Yoel Roth who reverse engineered the accounts being used to power the dashboard and concluded they were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.” “In terms of substance, this is a nothingburger; it’s just a problem of journalists continuing to lean on deeply flawed tools pushed by people looking to capitalize on the bot media frenzy,” Roth wrote. Many of the people on the secret list were just conservatives who’d never heard of Hamilton 68. In effect, whatever a narrow group of conservatives were talking about on Twitter became what Russian bots were trying to influence in US politics.

27. Consortium editor Joe Lauria too was angered to find he was on the list, which targeted voices across the spectrum: “Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’” pic.twitter.com/KtRKiE7C7G

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023

As Taibbi explains today, the initial plan was to point out to all of the outlets who’d relied on Hamilton 68 and ask that their stories be retracted or, at a minimum, have an editor’s note added. At first Taibbi thought it wouldn’t be too big a job and Matt Orfalea would make a video highlighting some of those stories. But they soon realized it was a very big job indeed. So big that they needed to narrow the focus to get the video done.

Once humorously obsessive Matt Orfalea got going on the project, he quickly fell into a funk. He started just by looking just for video clips of broadcast or cable outlets referencing Hamilton 68, and immediately started racking up ridiculous numbers.

The first time he mentioned he was having a fit/time problem with the video, I was skeptical. Orf wasn’t counting print stories at first, and didn’t venture initially into other incidents beyond Ham68. It didn’t seem possible there could there be too many instances to compile on video. But there were. A large part of his logistical problem involved MSNBC, whose extravagant on-air warnings of Russian bots were fattening his compilation. “I thought, ‘If I could only do this without MSNBC, I could get this down to a manageable size,’” he said.

That led to an idea of making a separate video that only chronicled MSNBC making Hamilton-inspired references to Russian bots. “I was relieved,” he said. “I thought, ‘This way, I might be able to make a video about everyone else.’”

MSNBC’s use of Hamilton 68 was a special case but as Taibbi concludes, MSNBC “have repeatedly refused requests by me and others to” correct the record. He added, “They don’t care, and as Orf shows, they don’t care in high, high volume.”

So here it is, an 11 minute supercut of just MSNBC talking about “Russian bots” based on Hamilton 68’s bogus dashboard. Orfalea has done a really nice job, not only stringing these clips together but comparing them to the McCarthyism of a previous era.