Margot Cleveland: The State Department Funded a Private Group to Draw Up Lists of Conservative Outlets Who Should Be Censored, Then Used This List to Pressure Advertisers Not to Do Business With Them

by Ace

Here’s some background. Do you remember this story? In 2018, a leftwing group was faking “Russian bot” support of the Republican candidate Roy Moore. They then took the fake Russian bot story, that they had created out of whole cloth, to the media, to help the Democrat win the election.

It was all fake. The only “Russians” in the story were the ones created by this leftwing group.

Here’s the New York Times, spinning insanely for their Democrat “disinformation” buddies.

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…

Sure. We know for sure that $150,000 in Russian ad buys on FaceBook to support both Trump and Hillary Clinton definitely swung that election to Trump, but no one can say if this Democrat op had any “significant” effect on a statewide race, during a period of Peak Russiagate Paranoia in the media.

… in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore.

Oh he edged him out? Definitely, there’s no way this op could have contributed to that edging.

But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.

Of “both parties”! It was the Democrats that did this, but don’t you worry — this is about both parties!

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.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.”

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.
Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.

…Despite its small size, 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.

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.

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.

Oh I see — we know that scheme swung an election.

But not this one!

Now, note the name Renée DiResta:

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.“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.”

But she said Mr. Morgan simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worth testing. “My understanding was that they were going to investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news,” she said.

Mr. Morgan confirmed that the project created a generic page to draw conservative Alabamians — he said he couldn’t remember its name — and that Mac Watson, one of multiple write-in candidates, contacted the page. “But we didn’t do anything on his behalf,” he said.

Oh she just was a Helpy Helperton in all this. She was Advancing Science.

So who is Renée DiResta?

Well, she’s a former CIA employee — she claims she was just an “intern,” um, whatever, she’s not exactly a reliable witness — who just so happens to have lead the “Global Engagement Center” and then the “Stanford Internet Observatory,” two government-funded groups that carry out “disinformation” operations against the right.

In other words, she’s the government’s Queen of Disinformation — and labeling Republicans as almost exclusively guilty of spreading it.

And yet the Queen of Disinformation-Labeling was guilty of having helped a Democrat group create a Fake Russian Conspiracy in order to swing an election.

The woman who claims to be an expert in disinformation was a critical part of spreading actual disinformation (involving Russia) in a closely-fought election in which the Democrat “edged out” the Republican.

So obviously — Let’s promote her to running the government’s biggest anti-disinformation cut-out groups!

She claims that she thought she was just participating in “an experiment” — an experiment to see if disinformation could successfully get a Democrat to edge out a Republican in a real live election. She claims — and those behind this disinformation scheme claim — they were just running an “experiment” during a real election using real ads intended to manipulate real voters, but they “designed the experiment” to be so “limited” as that it could not have any significant impact on the race.

This is their cover story.

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