JAKE HOFFMAN IS GOING TO PROVIDE US WITH ENDLESS COPY

Presumptive LD12 Representative Jake Hoffman’s marketing company, Rally Forge, propped up an independent CD5 candidate named Randall Sand, who faces a significant hurdle in the upcoming election: he doesn’t exist. Rather, he is or was an invention of Rally Forge, just one of the firm’s fabrications in its efforts to promote clients and their conservative messages online that a group of researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory highlighted in their recent report into Rally Forge (LINK). Sand’s profile was one of the many pages that Facebook and Twitter removed as part of their probe into Rally Forge. Those efforts, as the Washington Post has since revealed, included paying teenagers to spam pro-Trump, COVID-skeptic messages online across multiple accounts, mimicking the behavior of bots (YS. 9/16). Sand’s page shared doctored images of news headlines purporting to be from local press featuring Sand, the Stanford researchers noted. Exactly how Sand who Rally Forge portrayed using doctored images of a film director named Derrick Acosta fits into this project, we may never know. However, the mysterious case of Sand shows a sophisticated online operation full of fascinating details. According to the report, which examined hundreds of accounts that Facebook and Twitter identified as linked to the effort, Rally Forge has for several election cycles operated “accounts engaged in astroturfing operations on multiple platforms.” Mostly, these accounts, groups and pages were quite small and with limited reach a mix of fake, sometimes AI-generated accounts and real accounts belonging to Arizona students contracted as part of Rally Forge’s work with Turning Point. Some had serious reach: a Facebook page called I Love My Country had more than 120,000 followers at the time of its removal due to its affiliation with Rally Forge.

CREDIT: hank stephenson