The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example.
Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime.
> 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.
The vibe I got was the whole article was a tutorial on how to consume a dataset for the purpose of breaking a story. An example story that would be great to break is Scot lying.
So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.
"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."
