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Anonymous ID: d8ca37 Jan. 18, 2019, 6:12 p.m. No.4812856   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3241 >>3303 >>3488 >>3508 >>3555

Trying To Make Sense Of The Alabama Controversy Part 1 of 3

 

Here is a very interesting article written by Jonathan Morgan in response to the controversy surrounding the Alabama special Election

In it Jonathan attempts to limit New Knowledge's involvement in the "campaign" and his claims do appear to have validity

and this article provides some interesting lines of inquiry excerpts included below

 

https://medium.com/@jonathonmorgan/social-media-and-the-alabama-special-election-c83350324529

 

"There has since been a document described in the media from AET?the full version of which I have not been allowed to see??

that does not mention me or my firm, but seems to conflate my research project with some broad, grandiose political claims that are unrelated to anything I worked on.

I acknowledge working with AET, but I don’t recognize the claims they’re making now."

 

"We did not write the leaked report and we could not have because it didn’t reflect our research.

The leaked version of the report made a number of claims that did not originate with us."

 

"We do not recognize the mention of an effort to move 50,000 votes by suppressing unpersuadable Republicans.

We didn’t suppress votes?—?we provided links to news stories that might be relevant to voters.

We do not recognize the report’s mention of an effort to “manufacture approximately 45k Twitter followers,

350k Retweets, 370k Tweet Favorites, 6k Facebook Comments, 10k Facebook reactions, 300k Imgur upvotes and 10k Reddit upvotes.”

Any effort to connect us to such activities is a lie.

New Knowledge did not engage in the use of Twitter at all in the Alabama election?—?and we did not “manufacture” followers against Roy Moore."

 

"At no time did New Knowledge get involved in any use of Twitter bots (or bots on any other platform) in the Alabama election.

To this day, we have no knowledge of who did this or why."

 

"Since the story broke, people have come out of the woodwork to tell me about the projects they ran or knew about that also took place during the Alabama special election?—?

including self-described “false flag” operations on Facebook to which neither I nor New Knowledge had any connection."

 

"Other efforts unrelated to New Knowledge included “tests” designed to negatively impact Republican voter turnout.

One outside effort included a case study of “information warfare” in Alabama."

Anonymous ID: d8ca37 Jan. 18, 2019, 6:12 p.m. No.4812859   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3241 >>3303 >>3488 >>3508 >>3555

Trying To Make Sense Of The Alabama Controversy Part 2 of 3

 

Here are the 3 other campaigns out lined by Morgan

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roy-moore-politics-alcohol-alabama-matt-osborne/

"Hoping to deter white male suburban voters from voting for Roy Moore, a campaign targeted Facebook users with ‘false flag’ pages for thirteen days prior to the election.

This limited run was a smashing success that reached 3 million targeted voters, achieving 4.6 million impressions with 97,000 engagements,

posting videos that were watched 430,000 times, and presenting links that received 403,000 clicks.

At least one of the associated memes received unexpected amplification on the Facebook page of a Grammy-winning celebrity.

Debates broke out in the comments, with "piety Republicans" and "economic Republicans" disagreeing over the issue.

By every available metric, the campaign succeeded in spreading the message that a vote for Roy Moore was a vote against service industry jobs, against brewing industry jobs,

and for going backwards to a "Dry Alabama."

 

Given that Doug Jones won by less than 21,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million ballots cast, this campaign

which was inspired by, and modeled on, the Facebook voter suppression efforts that Roy Moore backer Steve Bannon undertook in 2016

appears to have made a real difference at a very small cost compared to TV advertising or other forms of election communications.

 

https://medium.com/@david.goldstein_4168/https-medium-com-tovolabs-proof-of-digital-persuasion-in-alabama-senate-race-85a517481371

Tovo Labs decided to privately finance a digital campaign in the Alabama special Senate election that was scheduled for December 12th,

2017 and pitted Democrat Doug Jones against a controversial Republican opponent, Roy Moore.

In light of the full results we now have in hand, it is clear that we successfully drove up Democratic turnout and drove down Republican turnout in the districts we targeted.

 

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-iv-a375993f3dc0

I approached Alabama as a testing grounds for a fake-news fighting app with some basic assumptions:

· The office of the Presidency was compromised. Ongoing Russian information operations were taking place aimed at disrupting and degrading the American political process,

and America was in significant ongoing danger from the effects of this in a way that our decision-makers were clearly unprepared to appreciate.

· The best path of resistance to disinformation propagated by two different national governments was to build a community.

The mission of that community should be to counteract the divisive effect of disinformation and fake news,

based on experience developing apps for the academic debate community, as well as reading RAND Corp.’s Russian disinformation study,

as well as studying Danish responses to Russian disinformation and accounts of Denmark’s military response using cognitive resilience training.

I knew from previous experience with debate applications that neither interface nor capability, no matter how revolutionary and high-utility and unique,

by themselves were sufficient to develop acceptance and use of an app. I hypothesized that content was the critical factor?—?specifically,

purposeful content which people would want to “self-integrate” or add to their self-presentation on social media.

Once people ran out of the preset content we put there for them, I thought, their interest would disappear.

Anonymous ID: d8ca37 Jan. 18, 2019, 6:13 p.m. No.4812864   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3303 >>3488 >>3555

Trying To Make Sense Of The Alabama Controversy Part 3 of 3

 

Here is an article that I have included for it's overview of media involvement

 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/31/know-d31.html

US intelligence think tank conducted “false flag” operation impersonating Russian election interference

 

A series of articles published in the past week have revealed that the New Knowledge think tank conducted a “false flag” operation to influence the 2017 Alabama state election

and make it appear that Russia was conducting a Twitter campaign to back its preferred candidate.

New Knowledge is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and has been widely cited as an impartial investigator of “Russian meddling” in US politics.

 

The story was first reported by the Washington Post on December 18 and the New York Times on December 19.

Only a day earlier, both newspapers had carried lead front-page articles based largely on a New Knowledge report

that claimed to provide new evidence of Russian social media operations to influence American politics.

 

As is the now well-established procedure, the report by New Knowledge was presented by the Times and Post as “independent” and scientific.

The articles in the Times and Post were then made the basis for countless news articles

and television reports breathtakingly reporting the latest nefarious activities of the Kremlin as established fact.

 

It has since been revealed that the project went beyond the Times’ initial report—and that the Times knew of New Knowledge’s role

long in advance but did not mention it even as it promoted New Knowledge’s own report.

An article by Buzzfeed on December 27 reveals that Scott Shane, the Times national security correspondent who wrote a December 17 article based on New Knowledge’s report

on Russian meddling, was one of a handful of speakers at a September meeting in Washington that discussed “Project Birmingham.”

 

Here is the Buzzfeed article mentioned above

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/alabama-dirty-tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter

"But left unmentioned in the Times story was that one of its authors learned about the Alabama campaign when he spoke at an off-the-record meeting

organized by the same group who ran the operation. A copy of a confidential report about the Alabama effort, obtained by BuzzFeed News,

raises new questions about whether the project was — as the Times said — an “experiment,”

or whether it was a straightforward Democratic attempt to replicate the model of the Russian Internet Research Agency."

 

"Scott Shane, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times national security reporter, was one of a handful of speakers at a meeting held in

Washington in early September by American Engagement Technologies, according to an agenda obtained by BuzzFeed News.

AET is run by Mikey Dickerson, who previously served in the Obama administration.

The organization received $750,000 in funding that originated with Hoffman and spent approximately $100,000 of that on what was dubbed “Project Birmingham.”

 

Shane said he was “shocked” when he watched Dickerson and Hudson detail the operation back in September.

“It was a little breathtaking to hear this was going on in the States, carried out by Americans,” he said.

“I remember I asked a question along the lines of ‘Is there a line that you won’t cross?’ and there was some discussion of that.”

He declined to elaborate, citing his NDA.

 

It appears as the dust settles that "project Birmingham" was run by American Engagement Technologies (AET)

 

'Here is a list of previous diggs on AET

 

>>4393666 The money trickled down through American Engagement Technologies

>>4408713 What is going to happen to Reid Hoffman and Mikey Dickerson?

>>4479543 Billionaire tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman apologized for funding a false flag operation

>>4495582 Call for a Digg on AET & Mikey Dickerson

>>4561023 The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts"

>>4659530 Project Birmingham Appears To Be Politics As Usual

>>4681801 Democratic Operatives Used Misleading Facebook Pages To Suppress GOP Turnout