Talk:Project Birmingham (disinformation campaign)

Disputed content in lead sentence

SPECIFICO stop adding unsourced content to the article. The sources are overwhelmingly clear the campaign aimed to influence the election. One of the tactics was using misleading social media posts. You are falsely claiming the campaign was to influence social media posts.

Please quote a source here that supports what you are changing the article to, or stop changing it. Mr Ernie (talk) 19:15, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Your comments here should address content and sourcing, not any contributor. The principals of this "project" deny the intent to influence the election and describe it as an experiment in manipulating social media postings. As such we cannot state in Wikivoice that the project was an effort at election interference. Because you wrote the intial article text, it seemed unnecessary to quote back at you the principals' sourced denials in the article text you wrote. You can check the statements and sourcing there. Note, I attributed the "experiment" bit to the operator who said it. There is no conclusion as to the truthfulness of his denial. The Republican state official who could have investigated and demonstrated misconduct made a weasel-worded statement, followed by no further action, investigation, or conclusion of impropriety. Perhaps BLPN may be the best venue if you wish to pursue your claims further, as I doubt any eyes are on this page. SPECIFICO talk 19:58, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

I can’t find your text in any source. Please quote it here and link to the source. I’ll give you a chance to do that before I restore the sourced lead (direct quotes from 3 sources are in this edit summary. You certainly know what the WP:V policy says, so please follow that and quote a source. Mr Ernie (talk) 20:09, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

I've changed the header to a neutral wording, per WP:TPG. Use Dispute Resolution if you feel strongly about this. The leader of the effort describes it as an "experiment" as does your own article text. Read the cited sources, please. SPECIFICO talk 20:12, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Why will you not quote the source of the text you inserted? I’ll give you a couple examples of how to do it:

From WaPo A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. And the tactics described in the Project Birmingham document have come under intense scrutiny. Those included a “false flag” effort that generated phony evidence that automated Russian accounts called bots had supported Moore on Twitter and the creation of a misleading Facebook page, aimed at Alabama conservatives, that sought to undermine Moore by encouraging them to vote for a rival Republican through a write-in campaign.

From NYT An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention. “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 report says.

Please explain what source supports the text you are inserting - Project Birmingham was an online disinformation effort that its leader said was an experiment to influence social media postings in the 2017 United States Senate special election… This is probably a BLP violation against the leader. Mr Ernie (talk) 20:30, 27 April 2023 (UTC)