Alabama Senator Doug Jones called on federal authorities Thursday to “take a close look” to see if crimes were committed by a group of Democratic tech experts whose social media experiment was aimed at helping him win last year’s special Senate campaign.

Jones said he’s as “outraged as anyone else” over a report in The New York Times that detailed a secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, to support his candidacy and hurt Republican Roy Moore. Jones won the December 12, 2017, special U.S. Senate election by less than 22,000 votes.

He called on the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice to look into the issues raised in a New York Times story, and determine if a crime was committed.

“We need to nip this in the bud and we should not encourage any groups, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, to do these things that illegally interfere in the election process,” Jones said during his final media call ahead of the Christmas holiday.

“I’ve railed against Russian interference ever since I started campaigning and during my first year in the Senate,” Jones added, referring to an ongoing federal investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. “We’ve all focused too much on the Russians and not picked up on that there are some nefarious groups, whether right or left, that would interfere in elections.

Moore reacts

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks after narrowly losing the election to Democrat Doug Jones during an election night watch party Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2017, in Montgomery, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.­com)

The interference came from a group that called itself the “Alabama project,” and involved the creation of a misleading Facebook page meant to divide Republicans and draw votes away from Moore, the Times cited based on an internal report it received about the effort.

The Times reported that the Democratic tech experts established a fake conservative Facebook page and encouraged visitors to support a write-in candidate and not Moore.

The project also involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts which followed him on Twitter, according to the Times.

Jones denied connection to the social media efforts, which the Times reported was funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and orchestrated by several individuals including Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of the cyber security firm New Knowledge.

“We had some pretty sophisticated software to monitor these things, and we didn’t see anything like (what the Times reported),” Jones said. He said his own campaign accounts were also attacked by social media bots.

Robert Matney, with New Knowledge, said that Morgan was working as an independent researcher, and that the issues reported by the Times was not directly related to his firm.

Morgan described the project to the Times as a “small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked.

“My involvement with the project described in the New York Times was as a cyber-security researcher and expert with the intention to better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation," said Morgan, in a statement. "I did not participate in any campaign to influence the public and any characterization to the contrary misrepresents the research goals, methods and outcome of the project, and I never attended a presentation about the results as described in the article.”

The Moore campaign, in October 2017, released a public statement addressing the influx of over 1,000 Russian bots following his Twitter account. The campaign filed a report with Twitter, requesting the firm take a closer look at the activity.

Moore, at the time, accused Jones and Democratic operatives of “pulling a political stunt on Twitter.”

On Thursday, he linked it to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House.

“Recent reports of a ‘secret experiment’ in the Alabama Senate race of 2017 demonstrate something we’ve always known: A lot of people and a lot of money went into a gigantic effort to allow a radical liberal Democrat to steal Alabama’s Senate seat,” Moore said through a spokeswoman in an emailed statement to AL.com. “The immorality of our society has seeped into our political system to corrupt our election process, threaten democracy, and destroy our country. Only an appeal to God and our Constitution can preserve our Republic.”

Moore cited an October 8 segment by Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, in which the TV host linked comments Pelosi made in June 2017 to a political strategy to “merchandise” false stories through social media. At the time, the Pelosi comments were linked to the Democratic efforts of undermining Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Now, we learn that they were using Russian tactics,” Moore said.

The website, FactCheck.org, in an October 12 analysis, said that Pelosi’s statements had been taken out-of-context. The site concluded that Pelosi’s full statement was about tactics she felt Republicans, not Democrats, used against their opponents.

Election influence

The Alabama project cost around $100,000 to pull off, and the Times reported that the expense likely didn’t alter the election’s outcome.

Jones agreed. “I don’t think it had any effect,” he said.

Dean Young, who served as a spokesman and strategist for Moore last year, said he believes the effort suppressed voters.

“It turned them away from voting for Judge Moore and it had a tremendous effect on the state of Alabama no matter what these people who broke the law may say,” said Young. “It was $100,000, but we’ll never know how much money they spent to destroy Judge Moore’s candidacy.”

The $100,000, which was downplayed in the Times report, drew immediate rebuke from Jones and a representative from Moore’s campaign.

“The mere fact that money was put into that, it really makes me mad,” said Jones. “Something needs to be done about it and the authorities need to use this example right now to start setting the course for the future to let people know this is not acceptable in the United States of America.”

Said Young, “They were doing everything they absolutely could to mislead the people of Alabama. It worked and they got away with it.”

He added, “Let’s all sit back and watch and see if these people are criminally charged.”

‘Troubling’

Young called the activity a “wake up call for Alabama” to “really verify their sources” of information circulating on social media.

Jess Brown, a retired political science professor at Athens State University, said the case underscores a problem for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and should serve as a warning for voters.

“It’s irresponsible, as a citizen in the United States right now, to rely upon Facebook and Twitter,” said Brown. “There is no accountability on the spending of the money or the accuracy of the source of the information. It’s just a day dream for political consultants who have no moral compass and it’s an absolute nightmare for people who are interested in an electoral process that works.”

He added, “In order for the electoral process to work, you cannot have citizens bombarded and manipulated by this kind of information.”

Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, said the lack of regulations and oversight of social media platforms to prevent future occurrences from happening.

Political campaigns, he said, had long relied upon disinformation to influence election outcomes, and that past efforts have taken form through pamphlets, robo calls and email blasts.

“But what is so troubling now, I think, is that social media can reach so many people and the sophistication of microtargeting technologies that rely on these platforms has been advancing at a rapid pace,” said Fording.

Fording said it is “difficult to determine” how much of an influence the social media activity had on the election’s outcome.

“But I think what happened in Alabama suggests this is something that goes far beyond ‘Russian meddling,’” Fording said. “This is the modern version of political disinformation campaigns and I think we are likely to see many more examples of these tactics being used by domestic campaign operatives unless Congress decides to do something about it.”

This story was updated at 3:31 p.m. to correct the name of the federal agency Senator Doug Jones is asking to investigate the issues surrounding social media activity during last year’s Senate race. Jones is asking the Federal Elections Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice to look into the matter.

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