Communications about Collusion exchanged between Democrat Senator Mark Warner and operative for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Mr. Waldman

Not only was Senator Mark Warner allegedly arranging back-channels to the Russian state via Russian oligarch and billionaire "fixer" Oleg Deripaska, but Warner and his apparent co-collusionists set out to test run their newfound Russian social media influence techniques in the 2017 Alabama Special Senate Election between Judge Roy Moore (R) and Democrat Doug Jones on December 12, 2017.

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This 'dry run' of social media 'influencing' turned out to be a great success with Democrat Doug Jones overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to win the Alabama Senate seat in a huge upset.

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The victory for Doug Jones was the first for a Democrat in Deep Red Alabama for more than 25 years since Democrat Richard Shelby won the 1992 Alabama Senate Election. Shelby soon recognized the shifting sands in Alabama and became a Republican two years later in 1994.

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The Russian modeled disinformation campaign in Alabama was run by Jonathan Morgan and covered in extensive and detailed stories in the Washington Post & New York Times in December 2018.

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From the Washington Post (December 18, 2018)

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A leading social media researcher whose firm wrote a major report on Russian disinformation for the Senate acknowledged Tuesday night that he engaged in misleading online tactics of his own during Alabama’s hotly contested special election last year.

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Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of the research firm New Knowledge, said he created a Facebook page under false pretenses to test his ability to appeal to conservative voters and bought a small amount of retweets — spending less than $10 — to measure the potential “lift” he could achieve in social media messaging.

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Of his actions, Morgan said, “This was like an, ‘Is it possible,’ small-scale, almost like a thought experiment.” Having long studied Russian disinformation, he said he wondered, “Is it as easy as it might seem?”

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Source & Full Article: Washington Post

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From the New York Times (December 19, 2018)

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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“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.

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But however modest, the influence effort in Alabama may be a sign of things to come. Campaign veterans in both parties fear the Russian example may set off a race to the bottom, in which candidates choose social media manipulation because they fear their opponents will.

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“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.”

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Mr. Joe Trippi, a seasoned Democrat operative who served as a top adviser to the Jones campaign, said he was nonetheless disturbed by the stealth operation. “I think the big danger is somebody in this cycle uses the dark arts of bots and social networks and it works,” he said. “Then we’re in real trouble.”

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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.

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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.

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The Alabama project got started as Democrats were coming to grips with the Russians’ weaponizing of social media to undermine the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and promote Donald J. Trump.

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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.

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“I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” Ms. DiResta said, adding that she disagreed. “It was absolutely chatter going around the party.”

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Shortly before the election, the page sent him a message, wishing him luck.

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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.

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Source & Full Article: New York Times