Homegrown misinformation
Democrats felt after losing the White House and Congress in 2016 — with the assistance, many were convinced, of online disinformation peddled by Russians and U.S. conservatives on social media, who pushed damaging but false information about Democrat Hillary Clinton’s health, honesty and suitability for office.
One person who expressed a desire to fight back was Dickerson, according to social media researcher Renee DiResta, who met him in January 2017 at a conference in Chicago. . Dickerson told her at the time about his desire to create a start-up to battle political disinformation, she said.
“There was a feeling after the Trump election that Democrats hadn’t prioritized tech, that Republicans had built this amazing juggernaut machine,” said DiResta. “The right wing was running a meme war, and there were these crazy dirty tricks. People wanted to build countermeasures.”
DiResta briefly advised AET, offering technical guidance and helping them meet potential supporters in the months before Hoffman agreed to fund the company.
DiResta, who also accepted a single share in AET and a seat on its board, said she became concerned with the opaqueness of the project and severed ties with the company a few months after joining.
She became research director at New Knowledge in January 2018 but said that, while she had heard of an experiment in Alabama, she did not know about the tactics.
As debate continues over who did what in Project Birmingham, The Post was able to find evidence for several claims in the explanatory document.
The document, for example, says it “planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. We then tied that botnet to the Moore campaign digital director, making it appear as if he had purchased the accounts.” Morgan denied any knowledge of the incident involving Russian bots.
During the campaign, journalists wrote about Twitter accounts that appeared to be Russian followers of Moore.
Those accounts were later suspended by Twitter. The Post found an archived version of a misleading tweet and also several news reports and tweets by journalists during the election describing evidence that Russian bots were supporting Moore.