Senate report on Russian interference was written by disinformation warriors behind Alabama ‘false flag operation’
On
December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference
operations commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were
made public. They generated a week’s worth of headlines and sent
members of Congress and cable news pundits into a Cold War frenzy.
According to the report, everything from the Green Party’s Jill
Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population
had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a
private Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.
Nevermind
that 56% of the troll farm’s pages appeared after the election,
that 25% of them were seen by no one, or that their miniscule online
presence paled in comparison to the millions of dollars spent on
social media by the two major presidential campaigns and their
supporters to sway voters. This was an act of war that demanded
immediate government action.
According
to Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the reports were “a wake up call” and a
“bombshell” that was certain to bring “long-overdue
guardrails when it comes to social media”. His Republican
counterpart on the committee, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr,
hailed the research papers as “proof positive that one of the
most important things we can do is increase information sharing
between the social media companies who can identify disinformation
campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyze them.”
But the
authors of one of the reports soon suffered a major blow to their
credibility when it was revealed that they had engaged in what they
called a “Russian style” online disinformation operation aimed to
swing a hotly contested special senate election. The embarrassing
revelation has already resulted in one of the authors having his
Facebook page suspended.
The
well-funded deception was carried out by New Knowledge, a
private cyber intelligence firm founded by two self-styled
disinformation experts who are veterans of the Obama administration:
Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.
[...]
According
to an internal New Knowledge report first seen by the New
York Times, the firm carried out a multi-faceted influence
operation designed to undermine a 2017 bid by right-wing Republican
former state supreme court judge Roy Moore for an open Alabama senate
seat. By its own admission, New Knowledge’s campaign
capitalized on the sexual assault allegations against Moore to
“enrage and energize Democrats” and “depress turnout”
among Republicans.
To
accomplish this, the New Knowledge team created a Facebook
page aimed at appealing to conservative Alabamians by encouraging
them to endorse an obscure patio supply salesman-turned-write-in
candidate named Mac Watson. They hoped the subterfuge would peel
votes away from Moore. It was precisely the kind of tactic that New
Knowledge claims Russian troll farms carry out to sow divisions among
the American electorate.
Morgan
told the New York Times the effort stopped there. But the New
Knowledge report says the Facebook page “boosted” Watson’s
campaign and even arranged interviews for him with The Montgomery
Advertiser and the Washington Post. At the same time,
Watson’s Twitter following mysteriously jumped from 100 to about
10,000.
Of the
dozens of conservative Alabamian Facebook pages the Watson campaign
messaged, the New Knowledge-run page was the only one that
responded to it. “You are in a particularly interesting position
and from what we have read of your politics, we would be inclined to
endorse you”, they wrote. New Knowledge then “asked
Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super PAC that could
receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his appeal to
disenchanted Republican voters.”
While
Watson communicated with the deceptive Facebook page, the New
Knowledge operators never revealed their identity, and the page
disappeared the day after the vote. “It was weird,” Watson
commented to the New York Times. “The whole thing was
weird.”
New
Knowledge then sought to manufacture a link between Roy Moore’s
campaign and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of his Twitter
followers were Russian bots. Mainstream media outlets credulously ran
with the narrative, insinuating that the Christian theocrat Moore was
secretly backed by Russia.
[...]
As the
Russian bot narrative peaked, Moore blamed the Jones campaign for
manufacturing the scare. “It’s not surprising that they’d
choose the favorite topic of MSNBC and the Fake News outlets — the
Russia conspiracy. Democrats can’t win this election on the issues
and their desperation is on full display.”
Moore’s
opponent, Jones, said he had no knowledge of the operation.
Moore
was roundly mocked in liberal circles as a conspiratorial crank, but
New Knowledge’s internal report contained a stunning
admission: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’
operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified
on social media by a Russian botnet,” its authors revealed.
Full
report:
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