Billionaire Who Helped Democrats Run Fake 'Russian Bot' Campaign Says 'Sorry'
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman funded fake campaign
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The Billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has apologized for funding an elaborate 'fake Russian bot' campaign against Republican Roy Moore.
Hoffman gave $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET) who then injected $100,000 towards New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm which created thousands of fake Russian bots to follow Moore.
The Democrats ran a crooked Twitter campaign to boost Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in the October 2017 special election.
Operatives from the Democrat party created thousands of fake Twitter accounts acting as Russian bots and connected them to Jones's Republican contender, Roy Moore, to launch the 'Russian interference' narrative.
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The company also created Facebook pages asking Republicans to support a ‘write-in’ candidate rather than supporting Moore, according to the New York Times.
“I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing,” Hoffman told the Washington Post.
“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.”
AET is ran by former Barack Obama administration official, Mikey Dickerson, who previously helped the US government with its adoption of new technology.
Senate Intelligence report authors at @NewKnowledgeAI have devised a curious bot identification method that "sometimes mistakes real people who post anti-imperialist arguments about U.S. foreign policy for Kremlin trolls." https://t.co/atbhDJAW5g
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) December 25, 2018
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Last week, Facebook suspended the account of researcher Jonathon Morgan who was behad the fraudulent Democratic campaign to disinformation campaign against Alabama Republican candidate Sen. Doug Jones in October 2017.
The CEO of New Knowledge, a social media research firm which published a major report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, told The Washington Post his Facebook account had been suspended.
Facebook said in a statement it had removed "five accounts run by multiple individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior" and is investigating them.
"We've removed thousands of Pages, Groups and accounts for this kind of behavior, as well as accounts that were violating our policies on spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior during the Alabama special election last year," Facebook said.
