Alabama’s attorney general is looking at whether Democratic efforts to spread disinformation about Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore on social media cost him last year’s special election, according to a report.
“The information is concerning,” GOP state Attorney General Steve Marshall told the Washington Post Thursday. “The impact it had on the election is something that’s significant for us to explore, and we’ll go from there.”
Marshall, however, declined to announce a formal investigation into whether the tactics tilted the contest to fill then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old seat in now-Democratic Sen. Doug Jones’ favor.
The New York Times last week reported on an internal study conducted into a Democratic-linked digital experiment during the heated Alabama race. For example, tech experts created a Facebook page and posed as Republican voters encouraging others to cast ballots for a write-in candidate instead of Moore. They also pushed accusations that Moore’s campaign was being “amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the review stated. But the Times reported that the $100,000 operation likely did not have a significant impact on the $51 million election.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Wednesday apologized for funding some of the project through a $750,000 donation he made to American Engagement Technologies. AET, in turn, paid research firm New Knowledge to conduct a small-scale experiment online. New Knowledge’s CEO Jonathon Morgan said it was for research purposes only, but he and several others were suspended from Facebook last weekend for encouraging “coordinated inauthentic” behavior on the platform.
“I can’t object strongly enough to the characterization that we were trying to influence an election in any way,” Morgan told the Post.
Marshall’s comments follow Jones and Hoffman calling for a federal investigation into the matter.
