Facebook suspended on Saturday five accounts run by multiple people who used the platform to weaponize disinformation in the 2017 Alabama special election for US Senate.
One of the accounts was confirmed by the Washington Post to be that of Jonathon Morgan, former special adviser to the State Department and CEO of New Knowledge, the cybersecurity firm that last week delivered a report on alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to the Senate.
A cursory look through the resumes of key people at the cybersecurity firm reveals a revolving door between it and the apparatus of the US security state, which is not uncommon for pro-Washington cybersecurity firms.
In the article, published many months prior to the revelation about New Knowledge’s false flag operation in Alabama, BuzzFeed reporters presciently and critically explained that Russian bots had been blamed by the media “for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama’s special election.”
“Nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard,” BuzzFeed reported.
In yet another example of a key participant in a project rejecting its own stated aims, Watts told BuzzFeed that the bots tracked by the dashboard, which Hamilton 68 claims are linked to Kremlin influence operations, are not even believed to be “commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”
To identify which bots they wanted to track, the Alliance for Securing Democracy “employed social network analytical techniques largely developed by J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan,” the think tank states in a page on its methodology.