Democrat activists, funded by LinkedIn co-founder and left-wing financier Reid Hoffman, imitated “Russian tactics” to push the 2017 Alabama Senate election in favor of the Democratic Party, including the creation of fake conservative Facebook pages to divide Republicans, according to the New York Times.

The Times reported this week that, “As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race.”

The “secret project” was reportedly “carried out on Facebook and Twitter,” and was “designed to help” Democrat candidate Doug Jones beat Republican candidate Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama Senate election — an election which Jones won.

“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,” the Times explained. “It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.”

An “internal report” on the project, which was obtained by the Times, reportedly boasted, “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 New York Times also reported that the project was backed by “prominent names in the world of political technology,” and received funding from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

“We did have suspicions that something odd was going on,” declared Roy Moore’s campaign manager Rich Hobson. “Any and all of these things could make a difference… It’s definitely frustrating, and we still kick ourselves that Judge Moore didn’t win.”

This month, it was reported that Hoffman is working with “a group of Obama administration officials to launch an initiative aimed at storing ‘all of the progressive community’s voter data.'”

Hoffman has spent a considerable amount of money funding projects opposed to President Trump and in favor of the Democratic Party and left-wing causes.

As reported by Breitbart News’ AWR Hawkins in October, “Hoffman donates less money than the other billionaires–giving millions instead of hundreds of millions–but he gets the most out of every dollar by using his donations in very specific ways. Those ways include purchasing unorthodox political ads to appeal to millennials and non-traditional voters.”