1. Thread on the NYT "Russian tactics in Alabama" story - nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/…. Short version - if there isn't serious countervailing evidence that has not yet been made public, this is toxic.
2. What the NYT story says is that a group of actors - including Jonathan Morgan, the CEO of New Knowledge - engaged in a secret small scale experiment in the Jones v. Moore race in Alabama. In the words of an internal report that the NYT somehow obtained:
3. "We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” This week, New Knowledge presented a widely publicized report on Russian social media ops to the Senate Intelligence Committee
4. claiming that Russian operations had large scale damaging effects for American democracy. The report's main author was not employed by New Knowledge at the time of the Alabama experiment, but according to the NYT, Morgan "reached out at the time" to her.
5. So, put more succinctly, the NYT is reporting that New Knowledge (a) put out a report saying that Russian information operations were damaging US democracy through divisive fake news, (b) was in some way involved in an effort to emulate these info-ops to benefit Democrats, and
6. (c) that the Alabama info-ops pushed the story about how many Russian bots were following Moore. So, we had an effort that in the internal report's own words: "experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections,"
7. and did so in part by hyping up claims about those tactics. In other words, the experiment involved information operations that sought not only to emulate Russian tactics, but to do so by leveraging fears about these tactics.
8. Now, there may be less of a story here than meets the eye. It is not at all clear from the NYT piece that all the actors who were involved in this effort had full knowledge of it. New Knowledge may not be directly to blame for the sleazier aspects of the operation.
9. But entirely apart from the question of who was specifically at fault, the whole operation seems worrying and toxic. It also touches on a big disagreement among scholars and think tank people who study information operations.
10. Roughly speaking, political scientists like @BrendanNyhan and @johnmsides (also @YBenkler et al) are skeptical that Russian information operations changed 2016 election. Some other scholars & think tankers (notably Kathleen Hall Jamieson) think they may have been decisive.
11. New Knowledge seems to tend towards latter interpretation. Unless substantial exculpatory evidence emerges (as it might), the query New Knowledge has to answer is why it was apparently involved in an effort to deploy just the kinds of tactics that it says are hurting America?
12. It could be, of course, that the experiment was too small scale to have had significant consequences - but why conduct it in the first place? Also, some people who talk about Russian influence ops have made sweeping claims about how small amounts of money/interventions have
13. had vast consequences. Of course, if these kinds of tactics are ineffective as the Russian influence skeptics argue, then perhaps no harm, no foul. But there may be other second order effects. As I argued back in January of this year foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/17/ame… 
14. I suggested that exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of Russian influence operations might actually be more harmful than the influence operations themselves. If that is right, then the second order consequences of info-ops aimed at spreading fear about info-ops
15. may possibly be more pernicious still. If I'm wrong, the people who believe that Russian influence ops are devastating have still damaged their own cause by associating themselves with an experiment deploying just the kinds of techniques they deplore. Finis
