(MENAFN) The United States research group Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) tried to explain its actions on Friday after internal Twitter conversations Matt Taibbi revealed that day questioned the reliability of its Hamilton68 "Russian bot" dashboard.

Employees were aware that many of the accounts featured on the dashboard were neither Russian nor automated. ASD is currently attempting to reframe Hamilton68 as a "nuanced" tool that media incorrectly perceived.

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.

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 United States ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who served as Hamilton68's chief architect, said the following year that he was "not convinced on this bot thing."

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