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That time Democrats secretly used Russian social media tactics
The Democratic Party may be furious about the tactics' possible impact on democracy, but they aren't above using them.
Remember those dubious Twitter and Facebook tactics the Russians reportedly employed to influence the United States’ 2016 election? You know, the ones that Democrats have been railing against for a couple of years. Turns out that the Democratic Party may be furious about their possible impact on American democracy, but isn’t above using them.
According to The New York Times, “a group of Democratic tech experts” mimicked Russia’s social media tactics in the infamous 2017 Alabama senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. Jones ultimately beat accused sex offender Moore by a narrow margin, earning Democrats another seat in the Senate.
Just a year after the Alabama special election, a secret project which, according to one of the participants, aimed at garnering a better understanding of Russian methods, has come to light. As reported by the Times:
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
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. …
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. … Despite its small size, 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 Democrats 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 [Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of the cyber security firm New Knowledge].
Due to the limited scope of the effort, it’s considered highly unlikely it had a significant impact on the 2017 election. However, as the Times’ piece points out, the cause for concern lies in whether future U.S. elections will be determined by questionable tactics such as these. The Alabama incident illustrates that it’s not just foreign entities that are invested in stacking the odds in favor of their interests. As Republican consultant Dan Bayens put it, “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.”
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on Tuesday, political media outlet Axios reported on the latest project of controversial Democratic operative Tara McGowan, best known as head of the ACRONYM network of Democratic-aligned political committees and political investment vehicles including Shadow, which created the phone-voting application that crashed during the Iowa Democratic Party presidential nominating caucuses in 2020. McGowan will head Good Information, a nominally for-profit “public benefit corporation” venture “to fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information” and “to invest in local news companies.” The venture supersedes an earlier reported effort to create a nonprofit along the same lines.
Backers
Axios’s reporting indicates that McGowan’s project will be funded by major Democratic donors including George Soros. That is not surprising, but another name said to be funding this “anti-disinformation” effort should raise eyebrows because he has supported purveyors of disinformation in the past: Reid Hoffman, billionaire founder of LinkedIn.
Since 2016, Hoffman has provided substantial funding to Democratic political causes, among them McGowan’s ACRONYM, through his Investing in US vehicle. But one of those causes should give the lie to Hoffman’s claims of concern about disinformation. Investing in US funded American Emergent Technologies, one of a handful of Democratic groups that allegedly ran a literal fake news campaign modeled on the tactics Russian government cutouts allegedly used to influence the 2016 presidential election in order to defeat a Republican candidate in an Alabama race.
nyt
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An Alabama resident waved to passing cars while holding a Doug Jones sign outside the candidates’ headquarters last year.Credit...Maura Friedman for The New York Times
By Scott Shane and Alan Blinder
Dec. 19, 2018
As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.
The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
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..... end insert
While Hoffman denies having known that American Emergent Technologies was engaging in a disinformation operation, the fact that he funded a group that would consider doing such a thing should be a giant red flag against Good Information’s and McGowan’s claim that they will provide “fact-based information.”
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