Democrats Ran Russian Bot ‘False Flag’ Operation In Alabama — And Media Fell For It

Democratic operatives created thousands of Twitter accounts posing as Russian bots in order to boost Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in the October 2017 special election by linking his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, to Russian influence campaigns.

The operatives, who were funded by liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman independently of Jones’s campaign, created more than a thousand Russian-language accounts that followed Moore’s Twitter account overnight, The New York Times reported Wednesday evening.

Hoffman gave the operatives $100,000 for their project, which included creating fake conservative Facebook accounts to dissuade voters from supporting Moore, according to the Times.

“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 operatives recounted in an internal report obtained by the Times.

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