For the past couple of years, there has been Democratic outrage about alleged Russian interference in U.S. elections and claims that the deceptive and subversive tactics allegedly used to influence voters in 2016 was entirely anti-American, undemocratic and must be wholly opposed.
It has been revealed that a Democrat-aligned group funded by a left-leaning Silicon Valley billionaire adopted and used those very same tactics in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, which resulted in Democratic candidate Doug Jones barely squeaking out a win over Republican candidate Roy Moore.
The New York Times dropped a bombshell report on Dec. 19 that exposed the “secret experiment” in Alabama by a Democrat-aligned group in 2017. This experiment used deceptive and fake Facebook accounts and pages, hired Russian “bots” and purposeful leaks to the media to foment division among Republicans and bolster support for the Democrat.
The Times obtained an internal report from the group, which explicitly noted that participants in the project “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
“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 bragged.
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The scheme involved the creation of a fake Facebook page targeted toward unsuspecting Alabama conservatives, which sought to drive a wedge in the support for Moore by boosting a potential Republican write-in candidate — a businessman named Mac Watson — for the hotly contested election while at the same time highlighting the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore.
It also purposefully leaked stories to the media that linked Moore to a sudden swarm of alleged Russian bots that began to follow Moore on Twitter, implying that the embattled Republican candidate was supported by the evil Russians in order to demoralize Republican voters while energizing Democrats to turn out on Election Day.
Of course, participants in the project are now attempting to downplay the significance of what they did by suggesting the project was too small to have a measurable impact on the election, and was merely an experiment to see how the online tactics would work in practice, not to actually sway any voters.
The Times reported that, according to Federal Election Commission filings, the project had a budget of $100,000, which came from left-leaning tech billionaire Reid Hoffman — a co-founder of LinkedIn and member of the Microsoft Board — and was funneled through a group known as American Engagement Technologies, which was operated by former Obama administration members.
Should this tech billionaire face repercussions for his deceptive actions?
Newsbusters reported that Microsoft declined to respond when pressed for comment on the subversive actions of a board member, with a spokesman stating merely that the company had “nothing to share at this time.”
However, the corporation may soon be compelled to say or do something in response to the revelations as the involvement of Hoffman in the Alabama race may very well be in violation of Microsoft’s own “Standards of Business Conduct,” which explicitly instructs board members and employees to “Communicate Accurately to the Public” and insists that all public statements be “honest and not misleading.”
For its part in the deceptive scheme, which became known as “Project Birmingham,” Facebook proceeded to suspend five users linked to the project on Dec. 24 and released a statement which said, “We take a strong stand against people or organizations that create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.”
Even the liberals at The Washington Post — which played an integral role in promoting the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore — called the deceptive operation “highly disturbing” and quoted Hoffman apologizing for what had occurred, which he claimed to have no advanced knowledge of or participation in, aside from providing funding.
In a prepared statement, Hoffman said, “I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing. For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET — the organization I did support — more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject.
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“I want to be unequivocal: there is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political advantage.”
He also readily admitted to providing funding and support for numerous Democratic Party candidates and “dozens of organizations,” virtually all of which are left-leaning and advocate for the progressive agenda.
Whether Hoffman was fully involved in the Project Birmingham scheme or just an unwitting financier is beside the point, as the real scandal here is the proof that Silicon Valley and the left are more than willing to use the latest technology to deceive and manipulate voters ahead of an election … the exact same thing they so vociferously decried just a year prior.
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NewsBusters Analyst 
