Democrats Created Fake "Russian Bots" to Help Doug Jones Win the Alabama Special Election Against Roy Moore

False flag. For real.

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.

Note they immediately claim it was too small to impact the race -- and yet they've been claiming for two years that a hundred thousand or so dollars spent on FaceBook ads in the five billion dollar plus 2016 Presidential race was nigh decisive and an assault on our very democracy.

But this $100,000? Pish-posh. 'Tis nothing.

...

An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that [the "cyber security firm" here] "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.

They're now claiming that this was purely a scientific experiment and that they did not intend to hurt Roy Moore's campaign or depress Republican turnout or excite Democrat turnout.

I guess that's just a bonus coincidence that it worked out so nicely for them.

Let's check in at how the New York Times reported this expenditure of $100,000 in confessed false flag operation in a race costing $51 million, versus how it reported about the same amount being spent to influence a five billion dollar plus presidential election:

It's almost as if it's not an attack on our very democracy if it's intended to help Democrats -- which I guess is why the Democrats never fussed themselves much about seventy years of Soviet agitation on behalf of the American left and Democrat Party.

posted by Ace of Spades at 07:47 PM

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