Russian trolls are back in the news. Not because of any new election meddling, but because of a new Senate report based on a research team led by the New Knowledge cybersecurity firm.

The founder and CEO of New Knowledge is Jonathon Morgan. That information is important because Morgan (I kid you not) just got busted for election meddling while posing as a Russian troll.



Facebook has suspended five accounts for spreading misleading information during the special election in Alabama in 2017, including that of Jonathon Morgan, CEO of social media research firm New Knowledge. "We've recently removed five accounts run by multiple individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook around the Alabama special election, and our investigation is ongoing," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider...

Morgan previously told The Washington Post that he created a misleading Facebook page for conservatives and bought Twitter retweets "to measure the potential 'lift' of political messages" as part of an experiment with misleading online tactics during the election, which involved Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones.

You literally could not create a more ironic situation.

How does this not cast that Senate report in a dubious light?

And yet Morgan's official defense is probably the most important item.



The campaign was clearly meant to remain classified – the Times' attempts to interview participants were as often as not met with claims of "I don't remember" or pleading the Fifth. Others downplay the effect of their actions, or claim they were just meddling in the name of research. But, as much as they claim their actions had no consequences, they succeeded in electing the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate for over 25 years. In order to paint Roy Moore as the Kremlin candidate, the manipulators linked his campaign to thousands of Russian Twitter accounts that all started following him at once – drawing the attention and suspicion of the media, which obediently published rumors that his support numbers were artificially bolstered by Russian bots. Morgan claims the botnet "false flag" – a term that actually appears in the report – "does not ring a bell," dismissing the project as "a small experiment" in tactics that were not meant to sway the election.

If intentionally acting exactly like Russian bots isn't expected to sway an election, then why should anything different happen from actual Russian bots?

Remember that New Knowledge spent an identical amount of money on their project to create a Russian bot “false flag” campaign that Russia spent on the 2016 presidential election.

So either Russia election meddling is a nothingburger, or New Knowledge threw the Alabama Senate election to the Dems, and is thus illegitimate.

It's one or the other. You can't have both.

Of course you could do simple math and use common sense to decide.

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018

Morgan was one of the developers of the "Hamilton68" dashboard, beloved by Russiagate pushers for linking virtually everything to "Russian bots."