American deep-state dezinformatsiya
Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that
the 'Russia hacked our election' claim is not only entirely false, but the people who made the claim in the first place - members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) - were and are themselves the creators of the only "Russian troll" social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any 'hacking'.
A December 19th 2018
NY Times article revealed that a group of "Democratic tech experts" decided to use "similarly deceptive tactics" (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the 'Alabama effort', obtained by
The Times, says explicitly that it "experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections." The project's operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?
"
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 says.
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election, and which was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Morgan said that the Russian botnet ruse "does not ring a bell," adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as
"a small experiment" designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election. This appears to be a lie on both counts, given that, as the AL Senate race was in process, Morgan tweeted that the "Russian botnet" that he and others had created was "taking an interest" in the campaign.
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