How one of America’s premier data monarchs is funding a global information war and shaping the media landscape
Through
his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to
American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the
national security state, and a media empire that shields him from
critical scrutiny, Pierre Omidyar has become one of the world’s
most politically sophisticated data monarchs.
by
Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal
Part
4 - Backing a disinformation warrior
This
January, a Democratic Party-tied cybersecurity firm called New
Knowledge was exposed for its plot to swing Alabama’s 2017
Senate race in favor of the Democrat, Doug Jones, by falsely painting
his opponent, Roy Moore, as a useful idiot of the Kremlin.
The firm
was co-directed by Jonathon Morgan, a former Obama special advisor
who helped create the Omidyar-backed Hamilton 68 Russian bot tracker.
His partner in the initiative was Ryan Fox, a veteran of the NSA.
Their firm’s non-profit arm, Data for Democracy, received
$411,300 from the Omidyar Network in 2018 for an initiative to create
a code of ethics for data scientists. The Omidyar Group has
not responded to MintPress News’ request for comment on this
matter.
The
story of how this duo orchestrated a black ops project to swing the
Alabama special Senate election in 2017 first appeared in the New
York Times. It described a “false flag” disinformation
campaign that featured the mass purchase of Cyrillic-speaking bots to
follow Moore’s Twitter account, then a tidal wave of stories
planted in media from MSNBC to Mother Jones alleging that the
Kremlin was throwing its full weight behind Moore’s candidacy.
There is
no evidence Omidyar had any personal knowledge of the operation.
This
February, The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald published a
blistering attack on New Knowledge after the group was cited
as an expert voice in a defamatory NBC News article suggesting that
the Kremlin was backing Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). Greenwald may have
had no idea about the relationship between Omidyar and the New
Knowledge team. But the article’s publication in an
Omidyar-funded outlet highlighted the tangled web of the
billionaire’s political empire.
Omidyar’s
interest in the weaponization of news and data extends to a murky
international initiative operating on the frontiers of a rapidly
escalating information war.
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