Scott Shane, Alan Blinder and Sydney Ember

He was responding to a report in The New York Times on Wednesday about a small group of social media experts who modeled their tactics in part on Russia’s fraudulent misinformation campaign in the 2016 election.

“We have focused so much on Russia that we haven’t focused on the fact that people in this country could take the same playbook and do the same damn thing,” Jones said.

He called on the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to examine whether the episode violated any laws and, if it did, to prosecute those responsible. Officials need “to let people know that this is not acceptable in the United States of America,” he said in a statement.

The Times reported that the secret project used deceptive social media practices in the Alabama Senate election a year ago to boost Jones and damage his Republican opponent, Roy S. Moore. The effort included the creation of a Facebook page designed to look like the work of conservative Alabamians, as well as what an internal report called a false-flag operation to make it appear as if an army of Russian accounts were following Moore on Twitter.

There is no evidence that Jones, his campaign or Democratic Party officials encouraged or even knew about the small-scale effort.

Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a conservative Christian, said the meddling was a sign of moral decline. “The immorality of our society has seeped into our political system to corrupt our election process, threaten democracy and destroy our country,” he said. “Only an appeal to God and our Constitution can preserve our republic.”

A social media expert involved in the project, Jonathon Morgan, said in a statement that it was designed to “better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation,” not to influence the election. But the internal report portrayed it differently — as an aggressive effort to divide conservatives, suppress Republican turnout and drive Democrats to the polls.

The effort, financed by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, is unlikely to have had a significant effect on the outcome, given its modest budget. It cost $100,000, out of $51 million spent on the entire race, including the primaries.

But Moore seized on the disclosure to suggest that perhaps it did have an impact, saying The Times article amounted to proof of “something we’ve always known: a lot of people and a lot of money went into a gigantic effort to allow a radical liberal Democrat to steal Alabama’s Senate seat.”

Some conservatives cited the Alabama episode as evidence of Democrats’ hypocrisy on the issue of social media manipulation. “The left accuses the right of doing what the left has actually done,” Michael Doran, a foreign policy expert who served in the Bush administration, wrote on Twitter.

The revelation that tech-savvy Democrats had used fakery in the race was galling for fellow party members, who have been vocal in denouncing such tactics when they were used by Russia to boost President Donald Trump’s election campaign.

“This is something I’ve been warning of for months,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who as vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee has been critical of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms for failing to guard against misuse.

“The threat these tactics pose to our democracy are not uniquely Russian, which is why it is imperative that the companies get a handle on the problem now and not later,” Warner said.

On Thursday, Alabama’s chief elections regulator said he had warned Facebook and Twitter last year that he believed there was sustained interference under way from boosters of both Jones and Moore, though he thought the candidates were not themselves involved in it.

“We were asking for help,” said Alabama’s secretary of state, John H. Merrill, a Republican. “It was clear to us that this was being done intentionally by certain parties to mislead candidates and mislead candidates’ supporters.”

Merrill said he had become particularly alarmed after a wave of bots followed Twitter accounts connected to Alabama politicians and their campaigns.

Part of the appeal of online machinations is that they cost so little, said Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“I am certainly very worried that the tactics that were used by the Russians are going to be repeated and used by others in 2020 and beyond,” she said. “I think that we’re going to see an escalation.”

Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow in American democracy at Harvard Kennedy School, said he feared that online deception could degrade the political process. To defend against it, he said, greater skepticism will be required.

“Campaigns and voters and citizens now will need to factor in: Where is this information coming from? Who’s generating it? Can I believe it?” Rapoport said.

Attempts to regulate the kind of tactics used in Alabama could run into constitutional barriers, according to Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, who specializes in election law.

“We generally don’t have laws — and the First Amendment prevents us from having laws — that prohibit candidates from lying,” he said.

A requirement for more detailed reporting of what is often vaguely recorded as “online services” might help, at least for activities carried out by an official campaign, he said. But he is not holding out hope for 2020.

“It’s not as though this Congress — and this president — is going to pass any kind of campaign-related regulation that would have teeth in it,” Hasen said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/doug-jones-social-media.html" id="649f672e-9932-3c7a-af9a-4a9644470920">The New York Times</a>.

Doug Jones 'Outraged' by Russian-Style Tactics Used in His Senate Race

Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama said Thursday that he was “outraged” to learn of deceptive online operations used by fellow Democrats to assist his election last year, and called for a federal investigation into the matter.

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Doug Jones 'Outraged' by Russian-Style Tactics Used in His Senate Race