Right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich claimed recently that HBO has “killed” a documentary about the the cyber vulnerabilities of American elections:
This claim was further elevated by former Trump campaign spokeswoman and senior adviser Katrina Pierson:
Cernovich @Cernovich
Here is HBO in May 2020 promoting a documentary they produced on election hacking. They claimed it’s easy! They hosted Democrat Senators and House members. Kill Chain was the title. Good luck finding the film, HBO seems to have killed it. https://t.co/LE0W6pCLZlRep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also suggested that HBO had “pulled the plug” on the documentary after the 2020 election:
Cernovich @Cernovich
Here is Politico reviewing HBO’s documentary on election hacking. Kill Chain. Do read this, especially the part about Georgia. https://t.co/ffVlubDxzGDespite what Cernovich and the others have suggested, Kill Chain is still available on HBO’s website and HBO’s YouTube channel, and can be rented on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.
The Dispatch Fact Check emailed Cernovich about his claims, alerting him that we were “currently looking into claims of yours that HBO has removed their documentary Kill Chain from their website. The documentary is still available there, and is also available to rent from several other websites. I wanted to give you the chance to comment before my article is published.”
Cernovich responded: “Where did I say it was removed from their site? Click on the link from my post and you’ll see that the video is unlisted. ‘Unlisted’ means the video has been hidden unless you have the link. You are lying about what I posted.”
HBO’s YouTube channel hosting the video as “unlisted” is not a new phenomenon: The video has been unlisted since at least August 10, 2020, the earliest version of the page archived in the Wayback Machine. Unlisted videos can't be found through searching for them and are only accessible if you have the link.
In a followup email, Cernovich stated: “You wrote: ‘I'm currently looking into recent claims of yours that HBO has removed their documentary Kill Chain from their website.’ I did not claim that in my post. My exact post: ‘Watch HBO’s documentary on election hacking, which they made in 2020 and then stopped promoting (can’t imagine why they wouldn’t watch their film more widely seen 🤔), before it’s taken down totally.’”
Cernovich is referring to a separate tweet that followed his original, broader claims.
Greene later corrected herself in a tweet, though she still left her original tweet online.
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I'm not sure how I'd rate this one. Saying it is hidden appears to be accurate. "Kill" could mean hidden or removed, or destroyed. So depending on how you interpret the word kill, it could be true or false. Taken both together, the claim seems true. I also don't see a time stamp (just a date stamp) on the two tweets, so I wouldn't know which one came first. I ignored Greene's posts, as I really don't care about hers.
First, I cannot believe I am writing something that defends in any way something said by Marjorie Taylor Greene — a person I believe to be a dangerous crackpot. However, I am not really convinced by this explanation. The substance of what is being said, perhaps not as precisely as you would like, is that HBO is burying a documentary it did on cyber vulnerabilities in elections. On balance, I think making something “unlisted,” as described, meets that standard. I have no idea why HBO is doing that (maybe the documentary is boring or wrong), but the assertion that HBO is burying it seems relatively well substantiated.