An election hacked — by Democrats

It seems like a blatant case of election trolling: a deceptive stealth campaign using social media and bots to discredit one candidate and even siphon votes from him to a randomly chosen third-party hopeful.

Only this wasn’t Russian hackers trying to influence the outcome of the 2016 Trump-Clinton presidential contest.

As The New York Times reports, it was a secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, by Democratic tech experts, with one purpose: to weaken the Republican candidate in the 2017 Alabama special election for a US Senate seat.

In fact, an internal report boasts that “we created an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea” that GOP candidate Roy Moore’s campaign “was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

It also created a social-media boost for obscure independent candidate Mac Watson, in hopes of drawing votes from Moore. And it worked, getting Watson an interview with The Washington Post.

More