Liberal Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman issued an apology on Wednesday for funding a group that falsely tried to give an impression the Russian government was supporting Alabama Republican Roy Moore in last year’s Senate election against now-Sen. Doug Jones.
Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, is one of Silicon Valley’s top donors to the Democratic campaigns and PACs. In the last election cycle he donated $7 million to Democratic groups, though his money also pours into non-traditional groups that aren’t mandated to report their funding and often operate in the shadows.
One such groups is American Engagement Technologies (AET), a firm run by former Obama appointee Mikey Dickerson, which received $750,000 from Hoffman and was part of the effort to falsely portray the Republican’s senate bid as being supported by the Kremlin.
“I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing. For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET – the organization I did support – more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject,” he said in a statement provided to the Washington Post.
“I want to be unequivocal: there is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political advantage,” he added.
Democratic operatives created thousands of fake Russian accounts on Twitter and began following Moore, prompting attention from local and national media that falsely suggested Russia is backing Moore’s candidacy.
The disinformation campaign was first revealed by the New York Times that obtained an internal report detailing the efforts.
“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 internal report said.
It also took credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” after experimenting “with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, is one of Silicon Valley’s top donors to the Democratic campaigns and PACs. In the last election cycle he donated $7 million to Democratic groups, though his money also pours into non-traditional groups that aren’t mandated to report their funding and often operate in the shadows.
One such groups is American Engagement Technologies (AET), a firm run by former Obama appointee Mikey Dickerson, which received $750,000 from Hoffman and was part of the effort to falsely portray the Republican’s senate bid as being supported by the Kremlin.
“I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing. For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET – the organization I did support – more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject,” he said in a statement provided to the Washington Post.
“I want to be unequivocal: there is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political advantage,” he added.
Democratic operatives created thousands of fake Russian accounts on Twitter and began following Moore, prompting attention from local and national media that falsely suggested Russia is backing Moore’s candidacy.
The disinformation campaign was first revealed by the New York Times that obtained an internal report detailing the efforts.
“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 internal report said.
It also took credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” after experimenting “with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
