super pac – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Anti-Trump Ad Demonstrates Both The Streisand Effect & Masnick's Impossibility Theorem

from the a-case-study dept

Well, this one hits the sweet spot of topics I keep trying to demonstrate: both a Streisand Effect and Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem. As you may have heard, a group of Republican political consultants and strategists, who very much dislike Donald Trump, put together an effort called The Lincoln Project, which is a PAC to campaign against Trump and Trumpian politics. They recently released an anti-Trump campaign ad about his terrible handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, called Mourning in America, which is a reference to Ronald Reagan’s famous Morning in America campaign ad for the 1984 Presidential election. The new ad is, well, pretty powerful:

And while it’s unlikely to convince Trump fans deep into their delusions, it certainly got under the President’s skin. He went on one of his famous late night Twitter temper tantrums about the ad, and later lashed out at the Lincoln Project when talking to reporters. He was super, super mad.

And what did that do? Well, first it got the ad a ton of views. Earlier this week, one of the Lincoln Project’s founders, Rick Wilson, noted that the ad had already received 15 million views across various platforms in the day or so since the ad had been released. Also, it resulted in the Lincoln Project getting a giant boost in funding:

The Lincoln Project, which is run by Republican operatives who oppose President Donald Trump, raised $1 million after the president ripped the group on Twitter this week ? marking it the super PAC?s biggest day of fundraising yet.

Reed Galen, a member of the Lincoln Project?s advisory committee, told CNBC that the total came after the president?s Tuesday morning Twitter tirade in reaction to an ad titled ?Mourning in America,? which unloads on Trump?s response to the coronavirus pandemic. It recently aired on Fox News, which Trump often watches and praises. Galen said it was the Lincoln Project?s best single-day fundraising haul

Not only that, but it has opened up more opportunity for the Lincoln Project team to get their word out. With so much interest in the ad, it opened up opportunities for the project members to get their message in various mainstream media sources. Reed Galen wrote a piece for NBC:

What we accomplished this week was not something to be celebrated. No commercial should have the power to derail the leader of the free world.

And another Lincoln Project founder, George Conway (who, of course, is the husband of Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway), wrote something similar for the Washington Post:

It may strike you as deranged that a sitting president facing a pandemic has busied himself attacking journalists, political opponents, television news hosts and late-night comedians ? even deriding a former president who merely boasted that ?the ?Ratings? of my News Conferences etc.? were driving ?the Lamestream Media . . . CRAZY,? and floated bogus miracle cures, including suggesting that scientists consider injecting humans with household disinfectants such as Clorox.

If so, you?re not alone. Tens of thousands of mental-health professionals, testing the bounds of professional ethics, have warned for years about Trump?s unfitness for office.

Some people listened; many, including myself, did not, until it was too late.

That’s the kind of media exposure you can’t buy, but which you get when you have a President who appears wholly unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect.

And that then takes us to the Impossibility Theorem, regarding the impossibility of doing content moderation at scale well. After Trump’s ongoing tirade, Facebook slapped a “Partly False” warning label on the video when posted on Facebook. While the whole situation is ridiculous, it’s at least mildly amusing, considering how frequently clueless Trumpkins insist that Facebook censors “conservative” (by which they mean Trumpian) viewpoints. Also, somewhat ironic in all of this: the only reason that Facebook now places such fact check labels on things is because anti-Trump people yelled at how Facebook needed to do more fact checking of political content on its site. So, now you get this.

Part of the issue is that Politifact judged one line in the ad as “false.” That line was that Trump “bailed out Wall St. but not Main St.” Politifact says that since the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program has given potentially forgivable loans to some small businesses, and because the bill was done by Congress, not the President, that line is “false.” And yet, because angry (usually anti-Trump) people demanded that Facebook do more useless fact checking, the end result is that the video now gets a “false” label.

Of course, this shows both the impossibility of doing content moderation well and the silliness of betting big on fact checking with a full “true or false” claim. One could argue that that line has misleading elements, but is true in most cases. Tons of small businesses are shuttering. Many businesses have been unable to get PPP loans, and under the current terms of the loans, they’re useless for many (especially if they have no work for people to do, since the loans have to be mostly used on payroll over the next couple months). But does that make the entire ad “false”? Of course not.

And Rick Wilson is super mad about this. He’s right to be mad about Politifact’s designation, though it’s really a condemnation of the religious focus on “true or false” in fact checking, rather than in focusing on what is misleading or not:

But the ad doesn?t actually claim that small businesses received zero help. Rather, it makes the point that Main Street America is still seriously struggling as the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic continues.

But Wilson is also mad at Facebook:

Speaking exclusively to Mediaite, Wilson called the decision ?the typical fuckery we?ve come to expect from both the Trump camp and their tame Facebook allies.?

?Facebook is perfectly content to allow content from QAnon lunatics, anti-vaxxers, alt-righters, and every form of Trump/Russian ? but I repeat myself ? disinformation,? he pointed out. ?This is a sign of just how powerfully ?Mourning In America? shook Donald Trump and his allies. Their attempt to censor our ad isn?t a setback for us; it?s a declaration of an information war we will win.?

Separately, the Lincoln Project also sent out an email to supporters, again blaming Facebook:

… it’s no secret that Facebook has stood by and done little to nothing as lie after lie ? from the Liar-In-Chief himself ? runs wild on their platform.

(Oh, and let’s also not forget the conspiracy theories, foreign disinformation campaigns and negligence that got Mark Zuckerberg questioned by the United States Congress.)

But, this? This is an entirely different and dangerous kind of collusion.

And what is Facebook’s excuse for playing favorites with its recently-transferred former employees in the Trump campaign?

They say a “fact-checker” labeled our claim that “Donald Trump helped bailout Wall Street, not Main Street” was untrue.

….Really?

The email goes on to justify the “main street” line with a bunch of links, and then again argues that Facebook is “censoring the truth” to help Trump:

Is that “Partly False?” Of course not.

We told the truth about Donald Trump…

He lost his damn mind over it on Twitter…

Attacked us in front of Air Force One…

Then sent his spin machine to discredit us…

And now his allies at Facebook are doing his damage control by censoring the truth he doesn’t like.

I get the frustration — and I find it at least a bit ironic that the whole “fact checking” system was a response to anti-Trump folks mad at Facebook for allowing pro-Trump nonsense to spread — but this is just another example of the Impossibility Theorem. There is no “good” solution here. We live in a time where everyone’s trying to discredit everyone they disagree with, and many of these things depend on your perspective or your interpretation of a broad statement, like whether or not Trump is helping “main street.”

We can agree that it’s silly that Facebook has put this label on the video, but also recognize that it’s not “Trump’s allies at Facebook” working to “censor the truth he doesn’t like.” That’s just absurd (especially given the reason the fact checking set up was put together in the first place).

But, hey, outrage and claims of censorship feed into the narrative (and feed into the Streisand Effect), so perhaps it all is just designed to work together.

Filed Under: donald trump, fact checking, fundraising, george conway, impossibility theorem, masnick's impossibility theorem, political ads, reed galen, rick wilson, streisand effect, super pac, temper tantrum
Companies: facebook, lincoln project, politifact

New Strategy For Pro-Clinton SuperPAC: Argue With Everyone On Social Media

from the xkcd-becomes-real-life dept

We’ve seen a lot of silliness this political season, most of which I happily lay the blame for at the feet of what has to be the lamest group of candidates for President this esteemed country has ever seen. What these good-for-nothings have bred is a deeper level of hateful rhetoric and toxic partisanship than what was present already, which I didn’t even think was possible. Yet they achieved it anyway, meaning that my social media feeds are overflowing with the kind of know-nothing memes and claims about all of the candidates that have me thinking about downing a bottle of rat poison just to make my brain stop hurting. Add to all of it the involvement of SuperPACs for all of these candidates, with their un-subtle messages and self-serving advertising, and it’s enough to wonder if we should scrap this whole America thing and try to start something new from scratch.

Well, those two worlds are apparently colliding as we speak, with information about the new strategy being taken by one pro-Clinton SuperPAC coming to light.

Citing “lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’” a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to “push back against” users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram. Correct the Record’s “Barrier Breakers” project boasts in a press release that it has already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” The PAC released this on Thursday.

I’ll get the obligatory XKCD out of the way, because there was simply no way not to include this comic in this post.

So, yeah, this Hillary PAC is spending a million dollars to apparently argue with people on social media, which is the kind of thing some of us do for free every day, because we’re obsessive jack-wagons unable to let anyone anywhere say something stupid and think they got away with it. But I know that I’m almost certainly wasting my time, whereas this superPAC is boasting about all of this.

But why is it a time-waster? Well, because the kind of people saying the kinds of messages about Hillary Clinton that this campaign is likely to try to rebut aren’t going to be swayed by paid web-trollers and their arguments, factual or otherwise.

“This explains why my inbox turned to cancer on Tuesday,” wrote user OKarizee. “Been a member of reddit for almost 4 years and never experienced anything like it. In fact, in all my years on the internet I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

So the targeted rebuttal is deemed to be “cancer.” Victory?

More interesting is that the PAC in question, Correct the Record, claims it is coordinating directly with the Clinton campaign in doing all of this. And it claims that this is all perfectly legal, despite the infamous Citizens United ruling resting on the claim that PACs are private interests and do not coordinate with the campaigns of politicians. What logic is Correct the Record relying on in claiming that its coordinating is legal? Well, these rebuttals aren’t paid spots, so campaign finance rules don’t apply.

Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs.

“SuperPACs aren’t supposed to coordinate with candidates. The whole reasoning behind (Supreme Court decision) Citizens United rests on (PACs) being independent, but Correct the Record claims it can coordinate,” Watson told The Daily Beast. “It’s not totally clear what their reasoning is, but it seems to be that material posted on the Internet for free—like, blogs—doesn’t count as an ‘independent expenditure.’ Usually places like MMFA and CTR are defending her against the media and established figures. This seems to be going after essentially random individuals online,” she said. “I don’t know that they’ve done anything like this before.”

It’s an interesting argument by the PAC, but one that reportedly is raising eyebrows among lawyers involved in campaign finance law. Some are claiming that this tactic is a cynical undermining of the spirit of campaign finance laws, using a loophole to get around the laws’ original purpose. There are also claims floating around that the Federal Election Commission should do something about this, but isn’t over a lack of understanding of whether any of this is legal.

Which ultimately may not matter all that much because, as I noted above, I just can’t see how this is a productive use of this PACs time and resources. I argue with people online all the time, because I’m an idiot, and rarely do those arguments end with minds changed. And those arguments are often on topics far less divisive than American politics. Why should this PAC think any of this will turn out any better for them?

Filed Under: correct the record, elections, hillary clinton, social media, super pac, trolling