Acronym group that sabotaged Iowa caucus birthed by billionaire who funded Alabama disinformation campaign

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.

by Max Blumenthal

Part 4 - Aiming to ‘mirror’ the tactics of Russia’s Internet Research Agency

Following the 2018 midterm congressional election, Reid Hoffman and his henchman Dmitri Mehlhorn faced further scrutiny in national media, this time for operating a fake news-style organization called News for Democracy.

This shady outfit managed an array of community Facebook pages initially focusing on sports, Christianity, patriotism, and other topics that were likely to generate interest from right-wing voters in swing states.

Yet the seemingly locally-branded cultural pages took a decisively political turn as election night approached. After racking up millions of likes, News for Democracy slipped in ads for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on a Facebook page targeting evangelical Christians, and attacked a Republican candidate, Senator Marsha Blackburn, on a page focused on local Tennessee sports.

While Hoffman’s right-hand man, Mehlhorn, claimed to reject the spread of misinformation, he told the Washington Post that through projects like News for Democracy, he aimed to “mirror” the tactics of the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.

Facebook eventually launched an investigation into the insidious manipulation ploys of Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s News for Democracy.

The very tactics that landed the two in hot water are remarkably similar to those that Tara McGowan, the Acronym founder who disrupted the Iowa caucuses, has put on display.

McGowan recently founded Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take on a more overtly partisan role with time. Like News for Democracy, Courier Newsroom has opened local news pages on Facebook with unassuming names like “The Virginia Dogwood” or “Arizona’s Copper Courier.” After seeding the pages with folksy local stories, Courier Newsroom bombards users with pro-Democrat political messaging.

As Bloomberg reported, McGowan used “her sizable war chest and digital advertising savvy to pay to have her articles placed into the Facebook feeds of swing-state users.” McGowan then used “that feedback to find more people like them.”

One of McGowan’s dubious news pages, the Virginia Dogwood, spent a whopping $275,000 on Facebook ads during the 2018 midterm elections.

“We’ll try it, see if we can make it work, and hopefully become a permanent piece of the new infrastructure,” McGowan told Bloomberg.

Tara McGowan’s shenanigans in Iowa could be seen in the light of a wider string of manipulations by the Silicon Valley-backed neoliberal network behind her. While Democratic Party elites blame incompetence for the fiasco in Iowa, the history of Acronym and its billionaire backers casts a disturbing shadow over the whole episode.

***

Source, links:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/06/acronym-iowa-caucus-billionaire-alabama-disinformation/

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