Online disinformation: Not just Russia anymore

Americans were appalled when it was revealed that Russian “troll farms” had launched a disinformation campaign on social media designed to influence the 2016 election. But online deception about elections is detestable even when it originates inside this country, as it apparently did in a 2017 special election for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama.

The New York Times reported last week that progressive Democrats opposed to Roy Moore, the odious Republican candidate in that race, created a Facebook page and Twitter feed purporting to represent Moore supporters opposed to the sale of alcoholic beverages. The convoluted strategy behind the “Dry Alabama” campaign was to associate Moore with calls for a statewide ban on the sale of liquor in order to alienate moderate, pro-business Republicans and help Democratic candidate Doug Jones. (Jones, who says he had no idea that the deception was underway on his behalf, was narrowly elected.)

“Dry Alabama” was actually the second case of Russian-style disinformation in the Alabama campaign uncovered by the New York Times. In December it reported on an “experiment” in which a phony Facebook page was created to try to drain support for Moore from conservatives and a “false flag” operation was created to suggest that the Republican candidate was being followed on Twitter by Russian bots.

The architects of “Dry Alabama” made no apology for trying to influence the election. Matt Osborne, a progressive activist who worked on the project, told the New York Times that while he hoped that deceptive tactics would someday be banned from American politics, in the meantime Democrats “cannot unilaterally give it up.”

That’s ludicrous. Misleading voters is not just another campaign tactic. It’s a corruption of democracy.

This sort of deception is entirely unacceptable, whether practiced by Republicans, Democrats or Russians.