Virtually every major media outlet and so-called "fact checkers" like Snopes and PolitiFact cited a dashboard called "Hamilton 68" as evidence that Russian actors were trying to influence Americans on Twitter. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company released pre-Musk internal emails proving that "Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming." The emails also revealed that the old management of Twitter reverse-engineered the dashboard and determined it was "bullshit" but decided to stay silent. Hamilton 68 was formed by a group called the "Alliance for Securing Democracy" and was the brainchild of a former FBI agent and MSNBC contributor named Clint Watts. The Twitter emails also showed that Hamilton 68 was "used to smear people like Tulsi Gabbard as foreign 'assets,' and drum up sympathy for political causes like Joe Biden's campaign by describing critics as Russian-aligned."