"New Knowledge" tried to rig the election in Alabama by pretending to be Republicans in league with Russians "New Knowledge" tried to rig the election in Alabama by pretending to be Republicans in league with Russians  “New Knowledge” and the same old same old https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/04/new-knowledge-and-the-same-old-same-old/ archive https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/04/new-knowledge-and-the-same-old-same-old/ Some of the text is here  …but what a three they are. Jonathon Morgan, formerly of the State Department and Brookings Institute. Ryan Fox, formerly of military intelligence. Renee DiResta, formerly of Wall Street. The State Department, military intelligence and Wall Street. The unholy trinity. Obviously, some questions present themselves. Primarily, can we really trust all those “formerlies”? How did these three start this project? How do they know each other? Where does their funding come from?  We don’t know. What we do know is that, somehow, these three crazy kids got together and decided to use their money (we don’t know where they got it from) and their army of volunteers (we don’t know who they are) to “combat disinformation”. A noble goal indeed.  Let’s see how they did…  WHY IS NEW KNOWLEDGE IN THE NEWS?  This “think tank” recently made the headlines in the US because they were caught attempting to manipulate the Alabama Senatorial election. This is not a fringe “conspiracy theory” claim – it was in the New York Times, twice. It’s now known that New Knowledge took part in various social media-based attempts to swing the Alabama senate race in favour of Democrat Doug Jones. These efforts were varied and odd. They included creating a fake Facebook page, purporting to be a group of Baptists who supported Republican candidate Roy Moore, because they believed he would help them ban alcohol statewide. They also encouraged (and/or created) independent candidates from the conservative right, in efforts to split the Republican vote. We don’t know what impact it had – but Jones did win a very narrow victory over Moore (fewer than 22,000 votes).  However, this was – by far – the most important facet of this story:  “  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. New Knowledge pretended to be Russians supporting a Republican candidate in order to discredit him by association. They freely admit it:  “  We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” So it seems rather than “combatting disinformation”, New Knowledge actively spreads disinformation to achieve political goals. They are staffed by State Dept. and intelligence agency veterans, and they spread false information to swing elections. That makes them a Psy-Op:  “  Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.  SO WHAT WAS THE REACTION?  Mild. Disappointing. On multiple levels.  Just like the Integrity Initiative coverage in the UK, the wider implications of corruption were completely ignored. The story was always framed in terms of “fighting back against the Kremlin”, or “turning Putin’s methods against him”. The coverage focused on this being a “gift for the Kremlin” because it appeared to undermine the claims of Russiagaters (Note “appears to undermine”, rather than “undermines”). New Knowledge (NK), of course, denied they were attempting to corrupt democracy in Alabama. Morgan called the Alabama operation an “experiment” testing the effectiveness of “Russian methods”. He claimed it was specifically “designed to have as little impact as possible”. (How you can “test the effectiveness” of something designed to have no impact is unclear to me).