[The Intercept] NBC News published a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that "experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard."But the whole story was a sham: The only "expert" cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm New Knowledge, which just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.
Phew - that was a looooong sentence
To justify its claim that Gabbard is the Kremlin's candidate, NBC stated, "analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they've spotted ‘chatter' related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns."
What NBC ‐ amazingly ‐ concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: That same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: "We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag' operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'"
That fraud was overseen by New Knowledge's CEO, Jonathon Morgan. At the same time Morgan was fabricating Russian troll accounts and using them to create a fraudulent appearance that Putin was trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate, he was exploiting his social media "expertise" to claim that Russians were interfering in the Alabama Senate election. In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled.
Even worse, Morgan's firm is behind one of the recent Senate reports on Russian social media election interference, as well as the creation of "Hamilton 68," the pseudo-data-driven dashboard constantly used by U.S. media outlets to claim that its enemies are supported by the Kremlin. (That tool has so been abused that even some of its designers urged the media to stop exaggerating its meaning.) During the Alabama race, Morgan ‐ in a tweet he deleted once his fraud was exposed ‐ cited the #Hamilton68 data that he himself manipulated with his fake Russian accounts to claim that Russia was interfering in the Alabama Senate race