New Knowledge, owned and run by Ryan Fox and Jonathan Morgan, was recently caught hiring an "army of fake Russian bots" to spread misinformation online – even after the company had repeatedly been warning about "Russian efforts" to meddle in American elections.
"This week ... we learned that New Knowledge was running its own disinformation campaign (or 'propaganda war against Americans,' you could say), complete with fake Russian bots designed to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore as a Russia-preferred candidate when he was running for the U.S. senate in Alabama in 2017," writes Danielle Ryan for ZeroHedge.com.
New Knowledge caught using "fake Russian bots" to smear Republican candidate Roy Moore
Interestingly enough, this scheme was exposed by none other than The New York Times, which about a month earlier published an op-ed penned by Fox and Morgan that warned about the very thing that the two would end up doing themselves – the epitome of hypocrisy and shameless virtue-signaling.
In their op-ed, Fox and Morgan fear-mongered about "the Russians," which they claim are actively trying to thwart American "democracy" with the spread of misinformation. Their evidence? A higher-than-normal number of articles from RT (Russia Today) being shared on Facebook.
It's a hilariously conspiratorial pile of rubbish that makes it seem as though New Knowledge is out there fighting some kind of Russian propaganda war, when in fact it's New Knowledge that's now been caught spreading Russian propaganda.
New Knowledge conspired with the Russians to launch fake attack on Roy Moore, claiming he was conspiring with the Russians
As revealed by Ryan, New Knowledge created a "mini-army of fake Russian bots and fake Facebook groups," many of which had Russian names, that were tasked with following and taking down then-candidate Moore.
An internal company memo from New Knowledge that has since come to light shows that the company had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
In the end, these nefarious efforts by New Knowledge to destroy Roy Moore were a success, as he reportedly lost by a slim 1.5 percent margin.
New Knowledge says it conspired with the Russians to "imitate Russian tactics"
When confronted about its involvement in conspiring with the Russians to take down a Republican candidate for political office, New Knowledge tried to further blame the Russians that it conspired with, claiming that it merely "imitated Russian tactics" to somehow counter the Russian tactics of Roy Moore's campaign – which, it's important to note, were never proven.
New Knowledge even had a name for its little scheme, "Project Birmingham," which it claimed had absolutely no effect on Roy Moore's political loss.
Meanwhile, the money to fund Project Birmingham came from none other than Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of free speech-hating tech giant LinkedIn. Hoffman reportedly contributed a cool $750,000 to a company known as American Engagement Technologies (AET), which then gave $100,000 to New Knowledge to hire Russian bots to interfere with a U.S. election.
After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman offered up a public apology claiming that he had no idea how the $750,000 he contributed was going to be used. He used the words "highly disturbing" to describe the revelation.
"You would think that a newspaper like the New York Times would have cottoned on to the fact that guys like Fox and Morgan, with their histories in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, have clear agendas and are not exactly squeaky clean or the most credible sources of information when it comes to anything to do with Russia," Ryan writes.
"But that kind of insight or circumspection might be too much to ask for in the age of Russiagate."
For more news about manipulated information, be sure to check out Corruption.news.
Sources for this article include:
Please contact us for more information.
