Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. But the source of the texts was never discovered. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. vote republican. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. Reserved. The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. “There is no such thing anymore. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person. CheckPoint ID to the rescue! They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel. Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier. demands MSNBC. ), When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”, Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. ET on February 10, 2020. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.). “My story is my story.”. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result. 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As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100. some assembly required. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”. Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. Watch the latest breaking news video from the Atlantic provinces. Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton. The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. 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There is one other case study to consider. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic. McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads? The local press covered the smear campaign. The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”. “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. In-depth reporting, live breaking news, and daily top stories and updated news headlines. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. Official site provides news, recipes, catering details, information on cookbooks, and links to the fine dining restaurants sponsored by Wolfgang Puck. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. tree. The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. Scottish perspective on news, sport, business, lifestyle, food and drink and more, from Scotland's national newspaper, The Scotsman. Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it. We've developed a suite of premium Outlook features for people with advanced email and calendar needs. Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news. The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. But they do have their uses. But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. Read: What Facebook did to American democracy, Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. “They can stick to things that are true.”. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers. Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. There will be no bar too low for him.”. All Rights “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign. 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