Thread by @JewhadiTM

Who needs the Russians when we have the Democrats?

Secret Democrat Experiment in the Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics; Experiment “Likely” Didn’t Influence The Outcome Of The Hotly Contested Election nyti.ms/2GtEkuw

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore.

It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report.

He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.

Mr. Morgan said he could not account for the claims in the report that the project sought to “enrage and energize Democrats” and “depress turnout” among Republicans, partly by emphasizing accusations that Mr. Moore had pursued teenage girls when he was a prosecutor in his 30s.

“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have *almost* no impact.”

The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records.

“Some will do whatever it takes to win,” said Dan Bayens, a Kentucky-based Republican consultant. “You’ve got Russia, which showed folks how to do it, you’ve got consultants willing to engage in this type of behavior and political leaders who apparently find it futile to stop it”

There is no evidence that Mr. Jones sanctioned or was even aware of the social media project. Joe Trippi, a seasoned Democratic operative who served as a top advisor to the Jones campaign, said he had noticed the Russian bot swarm suddenly following Mr. Moore on Twitter.

But he said it was impossible that a $100,000 operation had an impact on the race (oh, really... proof?)

Trippi said he was nonetheless disturbed by the stealth operation. “... if somebody... uses the dark arts of bots and social networks and it works, we’re in real trouble.”

The Alabama project brought together some prominent names in the world of political technology. The funding came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has sought to help Dems catch up with Republicans in their use of online technology.

The money passed through American Engagement Technologies, run by Mikey Dickerson, the founding director of the United States Digital Service, which was created during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology.

Sara K. Hudson, a former Justice Department fellow now with Investing in Us, a tech finance company partly funded by Mr. Hoffman, worked on the project, along with Mr. Morgan.

A close collaborator of Mr. Hoffman, Dmitri Mehlhorn, the founder of Investing in Us, said in a statement that “our purpose in investing in politics and civic engagement is to strengthen American democracy”...

And ... that while they do not “micromanage” the projects they fund, they are not aware of having financed projects that have used deception. Mr. Dickerson declined to comment and Ms. Hudson did not respond to queries.

Mr. Morgan reached out at the time to Renée DiResta, who would later join New Knowledge and was lead author of the report on Russian social media operations released this week.

Apparently, Dems think “fighting fire with fire” means using the same Russian tactics (the ones they’ve been red-faced and yammering about for 3 years) so THEY can interfere in our elections

**“I know there were people who believed the Dems needed to fight fire with fire”**

DiResta said Mr. Morgan simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worth testing. “My understanding was that they were going to investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news,” she said.

Mr. Morgan confirmed that the project created a generic page to draw conservative Alabamians — he said he couldn’t remember its name — and that Mac Watson, one of multiple write-in candidates, contacted the page. “But we didn’t do anything on his behalf,” he said.

The report, however, says the Facebook page agreed to “boost” Mr. Watson’s campaign and stayed in regular touch with him, and was “treated as an advisor and the go-to media contact for the write-in candidate.’’

The report claims the page got him interviews with The Montgomery Advertiser and The Washington Post.

Mr. Watson never spoke with the page’s author or authors by phone, and they declined a request for meeting. But he did notice something unusual: his Twitter followers suddenly ballooned from about 100 to about 10,000.

The report does not say whether the project purchased the Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly began to follow Mr. Moore. But it takes credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” and points to stories on the phenomenon in the mainstream media.

“Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers,” reported The New York Post.

Inside the Moore campaign, officials began to worry about online interference.

“We did have suspicions that something odd was going on,” said Rich Hobson, Mr. Moore’s campaign manager.

Mr. Hobson said that although he did not recall any hard evidence of interference, the campaign complained to Facebook about potential chicanery.

“Any and all of these things could make a difference,” Mr. Hobson said. “It’s definitely frustrating...”