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LinkedIn cofounder reportedly funded Russian-style influence campaign in Alabama race
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Billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman put $100,000 into an experiment that adopted Russia-inspired political disinformation tactics on Facebook during last year’s special Senate race in Alabama, The New York Times reports.
Hoffman did not immediately comment on the report. One of his partners told the Times that Hoffman does not “micromanage” the political projects he funds, and may not have been aware of the project’s tactics.
During the 2017 special Senate race in Alabama, the project’s organizers created a fake Facebook page designed to attract conservative Republican voters. Once they had built an audience, the page criticized Republican candidate Roy Moore and urged its followers to vote for a write-in candidate, according to an internal report on the campaign obtained by 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 report said.
One of the project’s participants, New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan, called it a “small experiment” that wasn’t intended to affect the outcome of the election. Democratic candidate Doug Jones beat out Moore by fewer than 22,000 votes, in a race where campaigns spent $51 million and garnered 1.3 million votes.
“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” Morgan told the Times. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”
Hoffman emerged as a sharp critic of President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election, and pledged to spend millions of dollars to help Democratic candidates improve their digital tactics in future elections.
Last summer, Hoffman teamed up with billionaire Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus to launch Win the Future, with the goal of steering the Democratic Party toward policies that are “pro-social, pro-planet and pro-business.”