> Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...]
> Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024.
> In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve.
While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.
I read it as implying, go check for yourself!
So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.
Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory.
Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
> It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
bullshit. the only reason you have an 8 hour work day and a semblance of worker protections is because a lot of people fought and died for them.
it's the only reason 8 year olds don't go down into the mines, or lose hands working in factories.
Jan 6th made a serious run at congressional officials; the VP of the US basically had to hide or get lynched. this could have been a thing, but didn't go all the way.
DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group.
Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin.
77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
I have the feeling that would probably be more effective, not sure though.
> ...
> At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected.
There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But:
> This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.
So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.