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When Russia's online voting mechanisms were revealed last year, a group of Democratic technology experts decided to try an equally deceptive tactic in the race to compete. in the Senate of Alabama, according to people close to the effort and a report on its results. 19659002] The secret project, conducted on Facebook and Twitter, was probably too small to have a significant impact on the race. The Democratic candidate he was destined to help, Doug Jones, was ahead of Republican Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that US political leaders of both parties paid particular attention to Russian methods, some of which fear to distort elections in the United States.
One of the participants in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the main person in charge. executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of social media operations in Russia in the 2016 elections and released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
An Internal Report on the Effort of Alabama, Obtained by The New York Times explicitly states that he "has experimented with numerous tactics purporting to have influenced the 2016 elections".
Project operators created a Facebook page on which they portrayed themselves as conservative Alabamians, trying to divide Republicans and Republicans. even to approve a registered candidate to draw the votes of Mr. Moore. It was a ploy to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that had suddenly begun to follow the Republican candidate on Twitter, an event that caught the attention of national media.
"We orchestrated an elaborate" false flag "operation that sown the idea that the Moore campaign was magnified on social networks by a network of Russian robots," the report said.
In an interview, Morgan said the Russian cunning of zombie networks "does not ring like a bell," adding that other people had been working on this effort and had written the report. He said that he viewed the project as "a little experiment" aimed at analyzing how certain online tactics work and not affecting the elections.
Morgan said that he could not explain the claims in the report that the project was aimed at "enraging and energizing the Democrats" and at "reducing the turnout" among Republicans, partly in pointing out the accusations that Mr. Moore had sued teenage girls while he was a prosecutor in his country. 30.
"The purpose of the research project was to help us understand how these types of campaigns work," Morgan said. "We thought that it was useful to work in the context of a real election, but that the project had virtually no impact."
The project had only one of them. a budget of $ 100,000, in a run costing about $ 51 million, including the primaries, according to the records of the Federal Election Commission.
But, no matter how modest, the effort of influence in Alabama could be a sign of the future. The veterans of the campaign in both parties fear that the Russian example will trigger a race to the bottom, in which candidates choose to manipulate social media because they fear that their opponents will do so.
Republican consultant based in Kentucky. "You have Russia, which has shown people how to do it, you have consultants willing to adopt this type of behavior and political leaders who seemingly needless to stop it."
There are has no evidence that Mr. Jones sanctioned or was even aware of the social media project. Joe Trippi, a seasoned Democratic agent who was the main advisor to Jones' campaign, said he noticed that the swarm of Russian robots was suddenly following Mr. Moore on Twitter. But he said that it was impossible for a $ 100,000 operation to have an impact on the race.
Trippi stated that he was nevertheless disturbed by the infiltration operation. "I think the big danger is that someone in this cycle is using the black art of robots and social networks and that it works," he said. "So we are in trouble."
Despite its small size, the Alabama project brought together personalities from the world of political technology. The funding comes from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Billionaire, who sought to help Democrats catch up with Republicans in the use of online technology.
The money went to American Engagement Technologies, headed by Mikey Dickerson, founder director of the United States Digital Service, created under the Obama administration to improve the use of technology by the federal government. Sara K. Hudson, a former Department of Justice Fellow at Investing in Us, a technology finance company partially funded by Hoffman, worked on the project with Morgan.
A close associate of Mr. Hoffman, Dmitri. Mehlhorn, founder of Investing in Us, said in a statement that "our goal of investing in politics and civic engagement is to strengthen American democracy" and that, even if they do not " Microgenerate "not the projects they finance, they are not aware of funded projects that have used deception. Mr. Dickerson declined to comment and Ms. Hudson did not answer the questions.
The Alabama project was launched as Democrats began seizing social media arsenal by the Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and promote Donald J Trump [19659002] million. Morgan then contacted Renee DiResta, who would later join New Knowledge and was the lead author of the report on Russian social media operations released this week.
"I know that some thought that Democrats had to fight fire with fire," Ms. DiResta said, adding that she was not in agreement. "It was absolutely talkative during the party."
But she said that Mr. Morgan had simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worthy of being tested. "After what I understood, they were going to study how much they could increase the audience of Facebook pages using sensational information," she said.
Morgan confirmed that the project had created a generic page to draw conservative Alabamians – he said that he could not remember his name – and that Mac Watson, one of the multiple candidates written , had contacted the page. "But we did not do anything on his behalf," he said.
The report states, however, that the Facebook page had agreed to "energize" Watson's campaign and remained in regular contact with him. an advisor and the privileged media interlocutor for the candidate who responded to the call. "The report states that the page was interviewed by The Montgomery Advertiser and The Washington Post.
Mr. Watson, who runs a patio supply business in Auburn, Alabama, has confirmed that he is the only one in the world. he had received the help of a Facebook page whose operators seemed determined to stay in the shadows.
On dozens of conservative, Facebook-centered, Alabama-oriented pages he had written to, only one replied. "You are in a particularly interesting position and according to what we have read of your policy, we would be inclined to approve you," wrote the anonymous operator of After Mr. Watson answered a single question about the right to abortion as a kind of test, the page offered an endorsement, but no money.
"They n & # 39; Have never spent a red cent as far as I know about anything that says to their s 400 supporters: "Hey, vote for this guy," Watson said.
Watson never spoke on the phone with the author of the page or with the authors and they refused a meeting request. But he noticed something unusual: his subscribers on Twitter went from 100 to around 10,000. The operators of the Facebook page asked Mr. Watson if he trusted everyone to set up a super PAC that could receive funds and offered him advice on how to strengthen his appeal to voters disillusioned Republicans.
Shortly before the election, the page sent him a message. , wishing him good luck.
The report does not say whether the project bought Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly started following Mr. Moore. But that deserves the credit of "radicalizing the Democrats with a bot-Russian scandal" and tells stories about the phenomenon in the mainstream media. "Roy Moore has been inundated with fake Russian Twitter subscribers," the New York Post reported .
As part of the Moore campaign, officials began to worry about online interference.
"We had reason to think that something was going on strange," said Rich Hobson, Mr. Moore's campaign director. he does not remember any tangible evidence of interference, the campaign is Facebook's complaint of a potential quibble.
"All of these things could make a difference" said Mr. Hobson, "It's really frustrating and we continue to complain that Judge Moore did not win."
On Election Day, Mr. Jones became the first Democrat in Alabama to be elected to the Senate in a quarter of a century, beating Mr. Moore by 21,924 votes in a race that garnered more than 22,800 votes cast.More than 1.3 million votes were cast.
Many votes were awarded to Jeff Sessions, Attorney General of the time, Condoleezza Rice, Alabama national and former secret state stand, to popular football coaches and to Jesus Christ. Mr. Watson received only a few hundred votes
. Watson noticed another curiosity. The day after the vote, the Facebook page that interested him so much was gone.
"It's a group that, honestly, went missing the next day," said Watson.
"It was weird," he says. "Everything was strange."
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