dark post

this started as social media ads targeted then disappear? now refers to micro-target msgs in gen'l

this includesonline ads (see Gr Hack docu)

see also negative attack ADS

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cool tool:

https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/?age_bucket=30&location_bucket=North+Dakota&politics_bucket=conservative&gender=female

TOOL:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3, 2020 — With the digital-dominated 2020 election shifting into high gear, OpenSecrets is releasing a new searchable, sortable online ads database that provides comprehensive details about political ad spending on Google and Facebook. 

OpenSecrets is tracking over 80,000 online political advertisers, more than four times the number of committees registered with the Federal Election Commission. Each advertiser has its own profile, which includes:

• Its total spending on both Facebook and Google ads over time
• Information about and links to each of the Facebook and Google pages where it runs ads
• Its total Facebook ad spending in each state

Online ads are at the center of strategies to misinform and deceive voters ahead of Election Day. This section will help users identify the online forces behind political messages and better understand their affiliations with political groups. Mysterious “dark money” organizations, industry groups and fake news websites are among the advertisers pouring millions into ads to influence voters. 

OpenSecrets used machine learning to group numerous Facebook and Google pages into one distinct profile, allowing users to see the full extent of each advertiser’s political spending. Our partners at the Wesleyan Media Project and the NYU Online Political Ads Transparency Project contributed substantially to the data collection for this project, which was made possible by support from Democracy Fund and Media Democracy Fund.

Visit the new Online Ads section here

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an 10 24

alternet-no lnx

Revealed: Deceptive political ads thrived on Facebook in run-up to 2024 election

Craig Silverman, Propublica, And Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center For Digital Journalism October 31, 2024

Reporting Highlights

Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.

Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.

Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

Meta’s Rules

Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

Patriot Democracy

The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

Taking on a Network

Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

Still Locked Out

After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

Methodology

...

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"dark posts"? disinfo?

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/experts-warned-facebooks-ad-bans-wouldnt-stop-election-misinformation-they-were-right

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-testified-facebook-performed-well-during-2020-election-media-matters-has

1120

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mma 920

to be fair, some assembly req?

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mma 24/5/20

:{facebook is letting the Trump campaign publish at least 529 ads with false claims of voter fraud:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

05/19/

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https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/facebook-ads-library/

now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s all part of Facebook’s newAd Library launching today that makes good on its promise to increase transparency after the social network’s ads were used to try to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Facebook’s Ads Archive that launched in May 2018 previously only included ads related to politics or policy issues, but now shows all active ads about anything, as well as inactive political and issue ads. It displays Page creation dates, mergers with other Pages, Page name changes and where a Page is managed from, and the option to report an ad for policy violations — all of which will be visible on a new Page Transparency tab on all Pages. Users can search political and issue ads by keyword or other ads by Page name, and Facebook will lend a hand with auto-fill suggestions and previous searches. The Library also displays Pages’ total political ads in the past week or since May 2018. And in mid-May, Facebook will move to offering daily downloadable Ad Library reports as well as monthly and quarterly ones instead of just weekly ones as it currently does.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-facebook-misunderstands-free-speech/

no lnx

How Facebook misunderstands free speech

Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon January 11, 2020

Only three months ago, social media megalith Facebook made the universally-reviled announcement that they would not be fact-checking, censoring, or otherwise banning political ads that deceive or mislead. “We don’t believe [that] it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” a Facebook spokesperson said at the time. The controversy over the announcement was so heated that the hashtag #DeleteFacebook began to trend, while presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren mocked the policy (and the company’s CEO) in her own promoted Facebook post.

Now, the biggest social media platform on Earth has doubled down on its tone-deaf policy. In an official announcement posted to Facebook’s newsroom, the company’s director of product management tries to spin a separate policy of increased transparency as some kind of net plus for freedom of speech, while defending the ad policy that gave carte blanche to politicians and PACs to prevaricate.

...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go

...Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.

Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.

Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line(using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.

Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”

Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward.These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/on-tv-political-ads-are-regulated-but-online-anything-goes/

no lnx many

On TV, political ads are regulated – but online, anything goes

Written by The Conversation November 23, 2019

With the 2020 election just a year away, Facebook is under fire from presidential candidates, lawmakers, civil rights groups and even its own employees to provide more transparency on political ads and potentially stop running them altogether.

Meanwhile, Twitter has announced that it will not allow any political ads on its platform.

Modern-day online ads use sophisticated tools to promote political agendas with a high degree of specificity.

I have closely studied how information propagates through social channels and its impact on political messaging and advertising.

Looking back at the history of mass media and political ads in the national narrative, I think it’s important to focus on how TV advertising, which is monitored by the FCC, differs fundamentally with the world of social media.

The birth of political ads

Eisenhower was one of the first politicians to use TV as a medium to spread his message to the American public.

In 1952, Eisenhower met with Rosser Reeves, an American ad executive, to discuss how to use this relatively new medium. They created 20- to 30-second slots to run during prime-time, called “Eisenhower Answers America.”

These ads helped usher in how political campaigns would use new broadcast media to campaign.

An ‘Eisenhower Answers America’ ad.

TV ads were also used in the campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in the 1960s to shock viewers into going to the polls by catering to their fears of a world that might exist should their opponent win.

Over time, TV ads became more negative and critical of opponents’ ideology and positions. For example, in the late 1980s, George H.W. Bush attacked Michael Dukakis on his prison furlough program giving weekend passes to convicted criminals. They used convicted felon Willie Horton to provide added emphasis and provoke fear-mongering.

The Willie Horton ad.

From TV to Twitter

To understand how effective their ads have been, TV advertisers use measures of reach and frequency of views. These measures are based on a general understanding of the type of viewers that might be watching a given channel, show and time slot.

However, it’s hard to understand a given ad’s effectiveness in driving voters, especially as modern TV audiences migrate to video on demand and other streaming platforms.

In other words, TV political advertising today might provide highly skewed results based on demographics. That’s because the people who still watch live broadcast TV tend to be older than the average American.

With the advent of the web, political messaging went online. First, there were websites focusing on the campaign; then, videos on platforms like YouTube to show support for candidates; and now, political ads use social networks to campaign, create community and raise money.

Unlike TV, social networks offer the ability to hyper-target individuals by characteristics like geography, age and interests. They provide real-time measurable outcomes while rapidly disseminating political messages.

There is also the issue of cost. For example, a 30-second advertisement during the popular TV show “This is Us” cost about US$434,000 last year. Facebook political ads can run for a fraction of that cost and be much more effective at reaching specific audiences, due to targeting.

With a plethora of data on what drives people to click, share or pledge money, modern-day political strategists can now understand what messages help reinforce their base and slowly percolate them into the consciousness of those who might be swayed.

Hyper-targeting and tailoring messaging for individual users can reinforce a person’s deeply held beliefs. It also contributes to the spread of disinformation. This is a more fundamental issue than simply focusing on whether an ad is truthful or not.

The regulation gap

One of the other big differences between social network political ads and TV ads is the impact of regulation.

TV is regulated by the FCC, while social networks are self-regulated.

The FCC was established by Franklin Roosevelt with the assumption that the airwaves belonged to the people. With the growing popularity of TV in the 1950s, the FCC regulated obscene and indecent material. It also set out to ensure there would be balance and truth associated with political messaging.

FCC regulations stipulate that broadcasters must allow any qualified candidates for political office the opportunity to purchase an equal amount of advertising time at the lowest unit charge.

In addition, regulations required transparency from political groups running the ads, which includes mentioning in the ad the name of the group purchasing the commercial time, and whether the advertisement is part of the candidate’s campaign efforts, or if another political action group paid for the spot.

In contrast, without regulation, political ads on social networks can hide behind a cloak of secrecy. The Federal Elections Commission does provide guidance on advertising and disclaimers on any public communication made by a political committee – requiring, for example, statements such as “My name is [Candidate Name]. I am running for [office sought], and I approved this message.”

However, Katherine Haenschen, an assistant professor of communication at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, found that Google and Facebook often requested and received exemptions from requiring advertisers to include standard disclaimers.

Facebook recently decided on its own to require disclosures from advertisers when they purchased political ads, including the organization’s government-issued identification number.

However, social networks like Facebook will have a difficult time providing complete transparency on why members might be seeing a particular political ad. Financially, it is not in their best interest to do so. This is reflected in the company’s recent stance toward several petitions against posting false political ads on the network.

What the future holds

I think the future of political ads on social networks involves greater levels of checks and balances.

In my view, the networks’ efforts on self-regulation and transparency are steps in the right direction.

Senators Amy Klobuchar, Lindsey Graham and Mark Warner have proposed the Honest Ads Act, which would force online political advertising to adhere to the same stipulations as political ads on TV.

Independent media outlets, like ProPublica, are also taking steps to inform the public about the power of targeted political messaging.

However, the size and scope of the problem of political disinformation and hyper-targeting in social networks still needs to be addressed. This is simply too powerful for political campaigns and political operatives not to exploit. I fear that it will invariably lead to greater manipulation of public opinion in the runup to the 2020 campaign.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter. ]The Conversation

Ari Lightman, Professor of Digital Media and Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/why-is-the-media-cheering-trump-for-his-campaign-of-lies/

no lnx

Why is the media cheering Trump for his campaign of lies?

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos November 4, 2019

It’s gone from bad to worse: After spending years refusing to call Donald Trump a liar, the press is now toasting his reelection campaign, which is built on lies.

“That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message,” The New York Times recently reported in a major story on Trump’s reelection run. “While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media.” The message the Times presented was unmistakable: Trump’s reelection campaign is trouncing Democrats online. (Trump had gotten “the message.”) Separately, the Times in another piece announced, “The technical superiority and sophistication of the president’s digital campaign is a hidden advantage of incumbency.”

What did the Times almost completely ignore in its flattering reports about Trump’s “web operation”? His reelection campaign is built around spreading lies online. Somehow, that unprecedented presidential campaign strategy wasn’t considered to be the newsworthy one.

“His 2020 campaign, flush with cash, is poised to dominate online again, according to experts on both ends of the political spectrum, independent researchers and tech executives,” the newspaper reported. That was the key angle. Also, Trump isn’t necessarily pushing lies online. Instead, he’s creating “emotionally charged content” and “provocative ads” featuring “divisive themes” and touting an “angry partisan approach,” the paper reported.

If a Democratic candidate such as Joe Biden unleashed a torrent of fabricated and outlandish claims via Facebook campaign ads, it’s highly doubtful that the Times would marvel at how savvy Biden was being and how he was outsmarting Republicans with a digital strategy that relied on constant bouts of purposeful misinformation. Instead, Biden’s constant lies would be the Times’ obvious area of focus. And the brazen untruths wouldn’t be gently referred to as “provocative content.”

Yet with the Trump coverage, the fact that his campaign is wallowing in aggressive misinformation isn’t presented as the most newsworthy element. Instead, Trump’s lies are depicted as being part of a formidable, winning online formula that has desperate, overwhelmed Democrats trying to catch up.

“The campaign under Mr. [Brad] Parscale is focused on pushing its product—Mr. Trump—by churning out targeted ads, aggressively testing the content and collecting data to further refine its messages,” the Times marveled.

At least a recent Washington Post report gently noted so many of Trump’s online ads aren’t true:“Some of the ads accused the freshman [Democratic] lawmakers of making “pro-terrorist remarks,” which they have not done.” But that salient fact garnered just a passing mention.

When the press touts his online reelection campaign as a masterful stroke of marketing and largely ignores the fact that it’s built on a mountain of falsehoods, this all amounts to another way that Trump’s signature lies get normalized. Has the press become so numb to Trump’s torrent of untruths that news outlets are prepared to shrug their collective shoulders when blatant lies emerge as the driving force of a U.S. presidential campaign? That’s stunning, considering that just a few years ago the same news outlets manned fact-checking teams to put campaign ads under a microscope in search of misleading information.

It’s the same type of normalizing Facebook now does when it throws up its hands and says politicians in the Trump era are allowed to lie in their ads, knowing full well there’s only one party that traffics in lies incessantly: the Republican Party.

One Trump ad clearly has been labeled false by the press, in part because it became the centerpiece of a campaign battle over Facebook’s porous policy retarding the truth. The clip from the Trump campaign erroneously claimed that Joe Biden offered the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid if it stopped an investigation into a company tied to his son.The preposterous claims had already been debunked, and CNN refused to play the ad. But Facebook rejected the Biden campaign’s demand the ad be taken down. The lie-riddled Trump video has been viewed well over 5 million times.

Meanwhile, also being quietly set aside by the press in its mostly positive reporting on Trump’s online reelection machinery is the fact there’s no proof yet that any of it is working. For instance, the Times noted that in an attempt to change the narrative, the GOP campaign quickly spent more than $10 million in the wake of Democrats launching the impeachment inquiry one month ago.“The biggest political crisis of Trump’s presidency is translated into an “impeachment defense task force” to fire up supporters and tap their wallets,” the paper reported, clearly impressed. (Trump’s impeachment-related ads have been viewed tens of millions of times on Facebook.) Because spending more money automatically means success, apparently.

Yet since that time, the percentage of Americans in favor of impeachment and of removing Trump from office has only increased. Overall, there’s been no improvement in Trump’s reelection chances since his campaign started spending tens of millions of dollars on Facebook ads. Doesn’t that suggest Trump’s team is flushing away a lot of money online? Doesn’t that suggest the Trump campaign might not be so savvy and that Democrats might not actually be in disarray?

Recently, Axios touted the fact that online, “Trump attracted three times the attention of all the Democratic candidates combined, underscoring how he consumes the social media conversation.” But again, there’s no evidence that people talking online about Trump more often than they’re talking about Democratic candidates means good news for him, since it’s obvious that lots of people online hate Trump and that’s why they talk about him.

Trump’s online reelection campaign is unlike any in American history, simply because it’s willfully detached from facts and the truth. It’s stunning that the Beltway press looks at something that reckless and labels it super savvy.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

FEC rejects proposal to consider new rules on foreign spending in US elections

May 25, 2018 | The FEC has considered similar proposals before, but none have passed. Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub, who proposed the motion, expressed concern about the possibility of foreign groups using dark money to influence the 2018 midterms.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Thursday rejected a rulemaking to address foreign influence in United States election spending, the third time the commission has shot down similar proposals since reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election began emerging about two years ago.

The motion, which was proposed by Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub, would have begun the process of potentially implementing new FEC rules intended to discourage foreign spending in U.S. elections. Among those possible new rules was a requirement that super PACs and other groups state they did not use money from foreign sources in U.S. elections.

The FEC’s two Republican commissioners voted against the proposal, citing a reluctance to move forward with the motion until more information about foreign election interference is released.

Foreign spending in elections is illegal, but Weintraub expressed concern about the possibility of foreign groups using dark money to tip the scales in the 2018 midterms. She urged the commission to vote for the rulemaking before the November elections.

“We are receiving information from a variety of public and private sources that indicate that we should be seriously concerned about people trying to influence the elections in 2018, and spending serious money to do it,” Weintraub said.

Thursday’s FEC vote came about a week after leaders of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is investigating international meddling in the 2016 elections, released a statement acknowledging Russian efforts to help then-candidate Donald Trump. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who chairs the committee, said he had “no doubt” Russia tried to influence the 2016 races.

Weintraub said she wanted to propose the rulemaking again because of the Senate committee’s bipartisan agreement that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

Commissioners deadlocked on the proposal across party lines. Weintraub and Commissioner Steven Walther, both Democrats, voted in favor of the rulemaking, while FEC Chair Caroline Hunter and Commissioner Matthew Petersen, the two Republicans, voted against the motion.

Hunter and Petersen both said they wanted to wait until additional information about foreign election influence is revealed before voting on the proposal. Petersen said he could support the rulemaking in the future, but he would not vote for the proposal before the intelligence committee and other groups finish their investigations.

“There are going to be findings that are going to be issued by the (intelligence committee), and I think that I look forward to seeing what those findings are to see to what extent the efforts to interfere involve matters within our jurisdiction,” Petersen said.

The FEC has already taken some bipartisan steps to curb foreign influence in U.S. elections, Petersen said. He cited a plan passed by the FEC in March to implement stricter disclosure requirements for political ads on internet platforms like Facebook.

The federal government has also indicted foreign individuals and companies alleged to have violated laws prohibiting foreign interference in elections, he added.

After the commission rejected Weintraub’s initial rulemaking, she proposed a narrower motion which was also voted down.

In a statement Thursday afternoon, Weintraub chided the Republican commissioners who rejected the motions, saying the “time for excuses and delays is over.”  

“The Director of National Intelligence (Dan Coats) is satisfied that the Russians are targeting the 2018 midterm elections, but my colleagues on the Commission are not? At this point, I frankly don’t think they would be satisfied by anything short of an FEC expenditure report personally signed by Vladimir Putin,” Weintraub said in the statement.  

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implemented?

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/03/new-fec-new-rules-for-digital-ads/

Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted on Wednesday to move forward with new:{rules:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: that would bump up disclosure requirements for certain political ads on platforms like Facebook and Google.

The move comes as spending on the 2018 midterms is ramping up and as both lawmakers and digital platforms look to prevent continued foreign influence in American elections.

Any rule change may not be in place for the bulk of this election year as well, and last week FEC Republican Chairwoman Caroline Hunter expressed apprehension about “changing the rules of the game” midway through an election cycle.

At the meeting, commissioners presented two proposals that would require new disclaimers on “express advocacy” ads on digital platforms. “Express advocacy” ads advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate and makeup just a small percentage of online ads.

The commission voted 4-0 to open 60 days for public comments and have scheduled a June 27 public hearing on the matter.

The two proposals vary in their requirements for the size and content of disclaimers, among other differences. One proposal would also define the term “internet communication.” The measures would also only cover a small portion of political advertising on digital platforms and likely not affect the types of ads that allowed for the harnessing of Facebook and other digital platforms by Russian actors in 2016.

However, Democrat Ellen Weintraub, the FEC’s vice chairwoman, called the commission’s vote a “step in the right direction” for transparency of digital advertising, a medium that is expected to be increasingly experimented with since the Trump campaign successfully harnessed it in 2016.

Political spending on digital ads is projected to:{grow by 2,539 percent:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: between 2014 and 2018, according to a recent study.

“I think it will be an improvement,” Weintraub said of the FEC’s proposals. “It will bring greater transparency to political ads. It’s not going to solve all the problems that we saw in the last election.”

Despite butting heads in the process of:{drafting the proposed rules:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}:, commissioners noted the urgency to create rules to regulate the growing realm of digital advertising.

“It has taken another event like Watergate to make everyone realize we have to act in a bipartisan [effort] in order to do something,” said Commissioner Steven Walther, an independent.

Republican Commissioner Matthew Petersen said they were “threading the needle,” trying not to overregulate but also working toward greater transparency.

“We have a strong interest in ensuring that we are not impeding the further development of the internet and technology as a means of allowing and facilitating political communication,” Petersen said, “but at the same time ensuring that the disclaimer requirements … are also being met.”

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Politics

After latest shooting, Trump pushes Facebook ads ‘straight from the NRA playbook’

A campaign surrogate also falsely linked Beto O’Rourke to the Saturday shooting.

A sign at a demonstration coinciding with President Trump's visit to El Paso last month after the mass shooting there. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By Isaac Stanley-Becker September 3

From the White House lawn on Sunday, President Trump promised a package of laws to address the scourge of gun violence.

But in advertisements that went up Monday on Facebook, the president delivered a very different message, pointedly warning a select group of voters that Democrats were intent on repealing the Second Amendment and asking them to sign their names to a petition to defend gun rights.

“Democrats have finally admitted what they truly want: a repeal of the Second Amendment,” reads one variation of the ad, which went up two days after a shooting attack Saturday in two Texas towns left seven dead and 22 wounded. “It’s up to the American people to stand strong and defend our freedoms.”

The appeal went out as a Trump surrogate — a member of his 2020 advisory board — promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter falsely tying the Saturday gunman to Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and presidential candidate.

The Facebook blitz, which relies on misleading claims about Democratic objectives, offers a window into Trump’s mixed messaging on guns in the wake of a pair of mass shootings in early August — in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio — that marked the nadir of a bloody month in which more than 50 people were killed in mass gun attacks.

In the days after the El Paso shooting, Trump signaled he was open to proposals for new background checks, saying that “there is a great appetite” for such measures. Soon after, following a phone call with National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre, the president changed his tune, echoing the messaging of the NRA.

Last weekend, Trump again embraced the NRA’s talking points, asserting that background checks would “not have stopped any of it.” Still, he said, “we’re doing a package, and we’ll see how it comes about.” Mum on details, he said, “We’re looking at a lot of different bills, ideas, concepts."

The ads illuminate how targeting techniques offered by Facebook and other platforms allow Trump to sound one note from the White House lawn and a different note to a handpicked group of Internet dwellers. The base gets one message; everyone else gets another.

Some versions include a video with foreboding music and a promise that “Your Second Amendment will NEVER BE REPEALED.” An invitation to sign what the ads bill as the “Official Defend the Second Amendment Petition” flashes in red. Users who comply are asked to enter their names, email addresses and Zip codes, with the option to add a mobile number.

The ads, sponsored by Trump’s official Facebook page, were paid for by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint national fundraising committee run by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

“The messaging [of the ads] is straight from the NRA playbook, painted in as dire and apocalyptic terms as they can muster,” said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Cortland. “To the extent that he’s been oscillating back and forth and making sympathetic noise about a number of different proposals, this abandons all of that.”

The ads were targeted at users across a broad swath of the country but appeared to be concentrated in certain left-leaning states with a sizable population of gun owners, such as Oregon and Washington, as well as a handful of Midwestern states, including Michigan and Ohio.

One version appears only to men between the ages of 45 and 54 in Louisiana, which is exceptionally specific, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering who studies advertising on social media. She speculated that it was an attempt to collect personal identifying information from attendees of a single event, such as a gun show.

Spitzer said the ads amounted to a “rallying cry for the gun base,” delivered two days after a deadly shooting and as prominent Democrats pressed the case for gun control. That environment provides fertile ground for dire warnings about the Second Amendment, he said, because of anxiety that spikes about lawmakers reining in access to firearms.

[On Labor Day, presidential candidates turn the conversation to guns]

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request about the timing of the ads and whether they were specifically tied to fresh calls for gun control after the shooting in West Texas. Also unanswered was a question about the accuracy of saying Democrats want to repeal the Second Amendment, which is not a pathway publicly favored by any Democratic presidential aspirants or member of Congress.

Reexamining the Second Amendment has gained currency among a small group of state lawmakers and candidates for federal office. Hawaii Democrats introduced a measure in March urging Congress “to clarify the constitutional right to bear arms.” And Shannon Liss-Riordan, who is challenging Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts in the Democratic primary, last month said it was “time we take real action and repeal the Second Amendment.”

John Paul Stevens, a Republican who served on the Supreme Court for 35 years, in March made the case for the Second Amendment’s repeal in a New York Times op-ed. (Stevens died in July.)

Facebook did not return a request for comment about whether the characterization of Democratic priorities violates its policy against “deceptive, false, or misleading content.”

The Trump campaign has spent massively on Facebook in recent months, including about $5 million since the start of June, according to data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic communications agency. But it has not been a top Facebook spender on ads related to guns and gun control. Among top-tier Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was alone in putting out new ads about gun control after the weekend violence.

Other groups that have come out with fresh gun-related ads on Facebook after Saturday’s shooting included Washington Gun Law, an advocacy group that promises to “keep you apprised of all relevant legal issues involving firearms and self-defense in Washington state,” and U.S. & Texas LawShield, a legal-defense organization.

Social media was awash in misinformation about guns and gun control after Saturday’s shooting, which unfolded in Odessa and Midland.

Much of the false messaging targeted O’Rourke, who has called for mandatory buybacks of assault weapons, among other measures to curb the violence that has convulsed scores of American cities, including his hometown of El Paso.

Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a member of Trump’s 2020 advisory board, on Monday promoted a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the gunman in West Texas was an O’Rourke supporter, with a sticker on his truck supporting the candidate — claims for which there is no evidence, authorities confirmed.

Shaffer, who has promoted baseless claims about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and clashed with the U.S. military and intelligence communities over his allegations of an intelligence failure before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took to Twitter after the shooting to assail Democrats for calling for new restrictions on firearms. In one post, he said the gunman was a supporter of O’Rourke, tagging the Democrat, and retweeting a post from an account with the handle @suemo54 and the name “Sue Moore.”

The original tweet, posted Sunday, read: “The Odessa Shooter’s name is Seth Ator, a Democrat Socialist who had a Beto sticker on his truck.” It had garnered more than 10,000 retweets by early Tuesday, despite being previously flagged to Twitter.

Oscar Villarreal, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said there was no indication the gunman was linked to O’Rourke in any way. Nir Hauser, a co-founder of a firm called VineSight, which uses artificial intelligence to track misinformation, said the post appears to have been amplified mainly by bot accounts.

Shaffer, in a brief interview Tuesday morning, stood by his tweet, saying “That’s not what I’ve seen from people” when informed that his claim about the gunman had no basis in fact.

He declined to answer questions about his work on Trump’s advisory board, saying only that it was an unpaid role that he has fulfilled “since the time they went into office.” In April, Shaffer was interviewed by Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, on the Donald J. Trump Podcast.

Responding to an inquiry about Shaffer’s role on the advisory board, the Trump campaign said: “The Trump 2020 Advisory Board is a diverse group of key supporters committed to reelecting President Donald Trump. Advisory Board members often serve as surrogates in media appearances or by writing op-eds.”

The account that appears to have hatched the conspiracy theory about O’Rourke, drawing Shaffer’s attention, identifies its owner as a 72-year-old retiree living in Mesa, Ariz. A message left on a linked Facebook page went unanswered Tuesday.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/youre-better-off-lighting-your-money-on-fire-than-giving-it-to-politicians-to-spend-on-tv-ads-heres-why/

no lnx

You’re better off lighting your money on fire than giving it to politicians to spend on TV ads — here’s why

Written by Liberty Vittert, The Conversation September 8, 2019

Liberty Vittert, Washington University in St Louis

Alright, you want to make this country a better place for yourself, your children and the many generations to come. So you make a donation to a political candidate you believe will fight for a better country.

But, in reality, you are wasting your money. Here’s why.

Television has long been the golden goose of political advertising. The conventional wisdom is that the candidate who can spend the most on it will most likely win.

With the exception of Donald Trump, almost every person elected president since 1960 has raised and spent more money than their opponent. That includes Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama – with a significant amount of that money being used to buy expensive television advertisements.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised over US$1.1 billion, as opposed to Trump’s grand total of less than $650 million. She outspent Trump almost three times over on television advertising.

So how is it that a presidential candidate won with less money raised and spent?

Spending where it counts

Some have attributed this to free media Trump received from television networks hungry for ratings. But, in many ways, that argument doesn’t hold water, so consider a different answer: digital advertising.

While he was outspent on TV, Trump spent four times the amount Hillary Clinton did on digital ads, which are any ad on a computer rather than the typical campaign ads on TV, mail or billboards.

Why would this be the answer?

As of 2016, a new era of politics has been established (arguably initiated by Obama in 2008), dominated by digital advertising. And no one has done it better than Donald Trump.

The wasted dollars of TV advertising

A typical House candidate will spend 65% to 70% of their entire political budget on TV and U.S. mail advertising.

When one of them advertises on TV, almost 80% of the money spent on the ads is spent broadcasting those ads to people who don’t vote or live in that candidate’s district. That’s because TV does not allow you to target your audience to the same precise level as digital can. This is true from major metro TV markets to rural states.

So if you give to a political campaign, then over 50% of your money is

being spent on TV ads that do not reach people who can vote for your candidate.

What’s more, if you take into account what is spent on further advertising, it turns out that for every dollar you give, only 10 cents actually goes to engaging voters.

In effect, television advertising is the worst thing you can support in terms of impact for your money. ...

But, if you give to campaigns, both district-level and presidential, that advertise digitally, it is an entirely different story.

Digital advertising targets better

When politicians advertise digitally, their advertising can get smarter and more targeted. That’s because the digital advertising acquires more information on individuals and better learns what policies and causes the donor cares about.

For example, much of Donald Trump’s current Facebook advertising doesn’t even ask for money, it asks for information about you, such as which issues you are interested in and whether you favor building ‘The Wall.’ Here’s a screenshot:

Screenshot from Trump campaign Facebook advertisement.

Facebook

And here are screenshots from a campaign website that the Facebook ad takes you to, which includes an “Official Secure The Border Survey.”

Screenshots, Trump campaign website.

Facebook

Trump’s digital ads not only ask for your opinion on a variety of topics, they also assign you a survey number and ask for all the data necessary (name, email, ZIP code, phone number) to target you individually for future voting and fund raising.

This is even more valuable than the advertisement itself, because individuals can continually be targeted on topics they specifically care about.

Trump spent 44% of his massive 2016 election media budget on digital advertising. Commercial companies spend 54% of their advertising budgets on digital advertising. But U.S. Senate campaigns only spent 4% to 7% on digital advertising in 2016.

Who do you think is spending more money on figuring out how people are responding to different forms of advertisement?

Now that he’s campaigning for re-election, President Trump is currently running thousands of ads per day on Facebook alone. That’s consistently more than the 23 Democratic candidates challenging Trump combined.

If this trend continues into the general election, it is pretty clear to me who most likely will win.

It seems that the winners will be those who use digital wisely – the losers will be the ones who stick with TV.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]The Conversation

Liberty Vittert, Professor of the Practice of Data Science, Washington University in St Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-biggest-facebook-supporter-is-a-chinese-cult-hoping-for-the-apocalypse/

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Trump’s biggest Facebook supporter is a Chinese cult hoping for the apocalypse

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos August 20, 2019

This is not the death cult you expected. While Donald Trump may regularly count on the support of people who believe that supporting Israel means making sure that every Jewish citizen of that state is handy to be either converted or slaughtered in the any-day-now End Times, this is another group of religious fanatics counting on Trump to fulfill their world (and atheist) -destroying dreams. Until recently, the contents of website The Epoch Times have been so out there, so beyond the pizzagate conspiracy theories of Gateway Pundit and the black helicopter lizard men of Infowars, that it’s been regarded as too odd to be considered part of the right-wing “mainstream.” No more. Under Trump, all bets are off. And a group that’s willing to top the online spending of Democratic candidates to express its support for Trump is definitely welcome in the fold … even if they do want him for his finger on the nuclear trigger.

It’s easy to understand why any group looking for an apocalypse might look to Trump as just the man for the job. But not every cult manages to spend more on Facebook than presidential campaigns. The leaders of the group that is counting on Trump to begin the “Last Havoc” have now spent more than $1.5 million to buy 11,000 pro-Trump spots on social media.In April alone, those ads netted 3 billion views, making this foreign-backed group one of the top video creators on the Internet and a major player in American politics.

As NBC News reports, The Epoch Times may look like just another online conspiracy site belonging to another small cult of slavish Trump followers itchin’ for some good old-fashioned smiting from above. But this “small New York-based nonprofit” is actually controlled by Falun Gong, a Chinese religious group aiming to both bring down Beijing and democracy while cheering for the end of all things. If on the surface they look like another fundamentalist site attacking science, reason, and “humanists,” it’s because they are.

Falun Gong members have been subject to some genuinely terrible oppression and abuse by the Chinese government, so it’s easy to understand why members of the group would pull for anything that might bring down Chairman Xi and his totalitarian regime. What’s less understandable is how that translates into support for Trump, considering his refusal to call out the Chinese government on anything related to human rights, and his expressed willingness to allow Xi to have his way with Hong Kong and anyone else that is “his problem.”

The connection seems to be that group members believe Trump is the guy who is ready to hate the people that they hate and maybe push the not-a-Coke button on the Resolute Desk. Their core beliefs include an upcoming judgement day in which all the Chinese officials who directed punishment their way get sent to a very special communist hell. Of course, American unbelievers, liberals, and scientists will go with them.

The level of spending and the number of views generated by The Epoch Times’ ads has turned it into a Trump favorite. They’ve been frequently retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and by Donald Trump’s Facebook page. And “at least half a dozen times this year,” stories have been written for this fringiest of fringe sites by members of the Trump campaign.

That’s not all. The Epoch Times earned an interview with daughter-in-law Lara Trump in Trump Tower. They’ve been rewarded with interviews of Trump cabinet members. They even took the stage at CPAC and interviewed Republican members of Congress including Mark Meadows, along with “conservative stars” like new Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell.

The religious group still runs the occasional ad or YouTube video on religious freedom in China, but by far the majority of its work is dedicated to defending everything Trump. That means freedom-love of this group from China hasn’t stopped them from screaming about the horrors of immigration, or joining in theattacks on the religious beliefs of Reps. Ilhan Omar and  Rashida Tlaib. And it hasn’t kept them from running thousands of ads about “spy gate” and calling for indictments against the usual list of Trump targets.

There’s little doubt about why Falun Gong is hanging tight with the Trump campaign. Beyond cheering for Trump to bring it all down during what’s known as “the final period of the Last Havoc,” their beliefs mingle pseudo-ancient mysticism with “extremely conservative cultural worldviews.” That includes a belief that all atheists are bound for a properly evangelical level of eternal torture, that evolution is “a deadly idea born of the Red Specter,” and that homosexuality is a crime equivalent to international terrorism. In a strong parallel with Trump, the group teaches about “the blind arrogance of the world scientific community” and the “limits of the scientific paradigm” and attacks both archaeology and geology to defend a kind of creationism akin to that expressed by the most fundamentalist churches in the United States. The leadership emphatically does not believe in climate change, and supports climate change deniers. They support racial “purity” including miscegenation laws. Falun Gong also has no fondness for the basic idea of democracy, which is seen as too “individualistic.”

Other highlights include a belief in shape-shifting aliens who once inhabited the Earth and that Falun Gong’s leaders can both levitate and walk through walls. How that fits in with a support for Trump is unclear … but it certainly sounds like a story that would work well on Infowars. And they run a dance troop that sings about the evils of evolution, feminism, and race-mixing. If all this sounds like someone sat down in 1990 to gather up the worst of fundamentalism and Scientology then lightly covered the whole thing with a veneer of “rediscovered” ancient beliefs that never existed … you got it in one.

The persecution that Falun Gong has received in China is more than regrettable, it’s criminal. Tens of thousands of its practitioners were arrested at Tiananmen Square, and the group was deeply involved in efforts to end the rule of the totalitarian Chinese leadership … even if they were less than interested in replacing them with a secular democracy. The abuse of Falun Gong within China represents exactly the kind of human rights abuse that Trump should be fighting.

But actions in the United States show that a group ostensibly founded to defend religious freedom in another country can become a major player in the politics of the United States … so long as it puts aside those original goals and concentrates on hating the right people. And buying enough media.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-and-right-wing-media-are-peddling-an-apocalyptic-ideology-of-a-civilizational-conflict/

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Trump and right-wing media are peddling an apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 6, 2019

It has been seventeen years since John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. One of the central themes of the book was to cite demographic data about the so-called “browning of America” and note that it was the left that was positioned to benefit from the fact that non-Hispanic whites would eventually become a minority in this country.

In the years since the book was published, a lot of liberals (including one of the authors) came to question the premise that “demography is destiny.” While those on the right have publicly panned the book’s analysis, there is a way in which it has become the foundation of what we are witnessing from Donald Trump and his enablers.

Two years ago, I wrote about the connection between the president and white supremacists, including this quote fromRichard Spencer.

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

More than a year before Trump was elected, Spencer—a spokesperson for white supremacists—explained that the “Trump phenomenon” was based on the fear white people have about the changing demographics in this country.

As Courtney Hable explains, the El Paso gunman was inspired by “the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically ‘replaced’ by people of color through mass immigration.” She goes on to document how Fox News has been pushing that narrative relentlessly.

The subtle shift in how this narrative is being presented is that personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have re-framed the demographic changes away from being the inevitable destiny of this country so that they can blame it on immigration. The El Paso gunman caught on and described immigrants as “invaders” flooding into the United States.

Thomas Kaplan documents how that is exactly the language being employed by the Trump campaign on social media.

President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.

Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.

I would not normally read an article titled, “White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Islamic State’s Rise” because it sounds exploitative. But Max Fisher, who has a reputation as a thoughtful and serious journalist—especially on matters related to terrorism and propaganda—is the author. Here is what he wrote.

Many scholars of terrorism see worrying similarities between the rise of the Islamic State and that of white nationalist terrorism, seen most recently in the carnage in El Paso, Tex.

“The parallels are stunning,” said Will McCants, a prominent expert in the field.

And they are growing more notable with each new attack.

Experts say that the similarities are far from a coincidence. White nationalist terrorism is following a progression eerily similar to that of jihadism under the leadership of the Islamic State, in ways that do much to explain why the attacks have suddenly grown so frequent and deadly.

In both, there is the apocalyptic ideology that predicts — and promises to hasten — a civilizational conflict that will consume the world. There is theatrical, indiscriminate violence that will supposedly bring about this final battle, but often does little more than grant the killer a brief flash of empowerment and win attention for the cause.

There are self-starter recruits who, gathering in social media’s dark corners, drive their own radicalization. And for these recruits, the official ideology may serve simply as an outlet for existing tendencies toward hatred and violence…

The feedback loop of radicalization and violence, once triggered, can take on a terrible momentum all its own, with each attack boosting the online radicalization and doomsday ideology that, in turn, drive more attacks.

The apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict is being peddled by the president of the United States and his enablers in right-wing media via the great replacement conspiracy theory. The use of indiscriminate violence as a response travels around the underbelly of social media in places like 8chan.

Americans who don’t pay attention to right-wing media and have no exposure to radicalized social media forums have no idea this kind of thing is happening. They simply wake up one day to see that yet another mass shooting has taken place. When Democrats point the finger of blame at Trump and his enablers, it can appear as if it’s just another example of the politicization of tragedy.

That’s why it is important for people to learn about what’s going on. The use of the word “invasion” over 2,000 times on Facebook by the president’s re-election campaign is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to incite the kind of reaction we just witnessed in El Paso.

As Fisher notes:

It is nearly impossible to eradicate a movement animated by ideas and decentralized social networks. Nor is it easy to prevent attacks when the perpetrators’ ideology makes nearly any target as good as the next, and requires little more training or guidance than opening a web forum.

It will take time and a concerted effort to deal with those decentralized social networks that have developed. But it all begins by exposing the president as the man behind the curtain who is inflaming the situation.

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https://www.axios.com/lawmakers-release-all-of-russian-facebook-election-ads-f0fc9e30-d44a-4da5-8aed-e42a4e47451b.html

Congress releases every Russian Facebook ad that ran during election

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-shadow-digital-campaign-may-prove-decisive-in-2020-and-donald-trump-has-a-clear-advantage/

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A shadow digital campaign may prove decisive in 2020–and Donald Trump has a clear advantage

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

written by Steven Schmidt July 11, 2019

Steven Schmidt was president of interactive digital at Aspen Marketing, now a division of Epsilon/Publicis.]

I think for the first time in history, the data operation ran everything from TV buying to where we were on the ground to all of the different operations. And so, having that data right there, we could start to where the persuadable targets are, [Get out the Vote], everything we needed to know.

Pennsylvania and Michigan… I started to see data and started to track it. We were making thousands of live calls, web tracking… and it was building and it’s building what’s called models and universes. What we can start to see is, ‘we’re in play in Pennsylvania’ and ‘in play in Michigan’. Let’s buy in these areas…. And by the Friday before the election, I had predicted that we were going to win 305 electoral results.”

-Trump Campaign Director Brad Parscale, interviewed on Fox News, November 16, 2016]

Marketing is big business in the U.S. and the Trump campaign is positioned to have the biggest digital marketing operation in history.

Today, with a reported database of 20 million active supporters, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager and digital guru, is confident. Parscale is predicting that the campaign will raise $1 billion, three times as much as they were able to raise in 2016, when Trump claimed to be self-financing his campaign and fundraising only became a coordinated Republican effort late in the game.

As Parscale explained on Fox News shortly after the election, his strategy began and ended “with the data.” The campaign decided to spend its limited resources in swing states late in the race, arguably pushing them over the top. Months later, Trump rewarded Parscale with the top job for 2020. The president, a self-described marketing genius, had found his own marketing genius in Parscale. And Parscale succeeded personally beyond his wildest dream when he took his little marketing company and hitched it to Trump.

Digital marketing has become ubiquitous in Americans’ lives as the age of Madison Avenue relying on TV and print advertising has given way to smarter, more narrowly targeted internet campaigns. Republicans appear to understand this shift well while Democrats have yet to show that they really ‘grock‘ how digital marketing targets and delivers messages to targeted audiences.

Reaching, Acquiring, Engaging and Converting Voters

Hillary Clinton’s team made 66 thousand visual ads. My team made 5.9 million ads. Those are ads targeted directly to people the way they want to consume them. I stopped looking at people as demographics, groups, personas. I said: let’s look at people as individuals, how do they act. Because two people who look the same, might act differently.

– Brad Parscale on ‘Micro-targeting’

As a former president of one of the largest marketing services companies in America, I can tell you that the Democratic party is far behind the curve. While the Democrats continue to rely heavily on old-school techniques of grassroots organizing, union get-out-the-vote drives and appealing to people with ad hoc causes, the Republican playbook has leaped ahead.

Today’s political battles are fought largely through interactive social media. Digital life has become almost indistinguishable from real life, especially for those who grew up with the internet. Every move we make in this world creates valuable data waiting to be harvested. Personal patterns emerge. Political beliefs are packed into your profile. All of this allows marketers like Parscale to finely tune their pitches for specific groups of voters.

When your angry old uncle or MAGA-loving grandpa attends a Trump rally or answers a text message, their contact information is being harvested for Parscale’s sprawling database. When they surf the web, visit popular conservative news sites or click on trending topics about hot button issues for the right, their personal data are, thanks to lax privacy standards across the industry, sifted, sorted and grouped into preferences for targeting.

This is the world of psychographics–a qualitative approach to defining consumers psychological attributes. Psychographic profiles –measures of an individual’s activities, interests and opinions, or AIO variables in industry-speak–were once used to sell sneakers and deodorants but have now become a potent tool for voter outreach and persuasion.

This is marketing 101 and the Democrats are only beginning to get into this high stakes game. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has been given the task, as of early 2019, to launch a new voter database. Dean called it “a big breakthrough” that will aim to compete with what the Republicans have spent years putting in place. “I’d sort of given up that we could get it done,” Dean told the Associated Press.

The Guru

Brad Parscale is a six foot, eight inch balding libertarian out of Topeka, Kansas via San Antonio, Texas. Before becoming Trump’s digital 2016 campaign director, he was a hungry young businessman and digital marketing whiz. When the opportunity of his life sat down next to him on a flight to New York in the person of Eric Trump, Parscale jumped on the opportunity to move up.

In early 2015, Donald Trump asked Parscale if his firm, Giles-Parscale, could build a website for $1500. When Trump launched his campaign in June 2015, he paid Parscale $10,000 to build out of his campaign’s site.

“I just made up a price,” Parscale later told The Washington Post. He promised Eric Trump that the money would be refundable if the work proved unsatisfactory.

Parscale realized that there was some real upside potential here. Trump, a tall man, had to look up to talk to Parscale, which seemed to impress him. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, soon asked him what he could do with Facebook and its marketing platform. Parscale Strategy, a spinoff of Giles-Parscale, kicked into high gear on the Facebook front.

Facebook: A Game-Changer

Earlier this year, during a talk to a Romanian audience titled, “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again,” Parscale hinted at how he plans to leverage his experience from 2016 to run a billion-dollar campaign during the 2020 cycle.

Forbes reported that:

The Trump team gained access to the Republican National Committee’s Data Trust, a collection of more than 200 million voter files gathered through a massive operation begun in the wake of Romney’s 2012 Presidential defeat. It was like a “Christmas present”, Parscale remembers. The team now had a way to “know what Americans think”. But Parscale and his team still needed an efficient way to target them. “And this other Christmas present showed up: these guys from Facebook walked to my office and said: ‘we have a beta … it’s a new onboarding tool … you can onboard audiences straight into Facebook and we will match them to their Facebook accounts’.”

Parscale’s strategy aligned perfectly with Facebook’s algorithms, importing lists of supporters gleaned from Trump rallies and those ubiquitous on-line ads. In his world, data–voters’ contact info–was gold.In 2016, Cambridge Analytica mined millions of users’ Facebook data after acquiring them from a researcher who told the social media giant that he would use it exclusively for academic purposes.

The Associated Press reported last year that Data Propria, “a company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica,” has “quietly been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort.” But Parscale’s operation no longer relies on such vendors. It has become a multi-platform, multi-app shop utilizing direct, one-to-one communications, interactive messaging, mobile content and live events. In 2020, one might call this database-coordinated marketing campaign the ‘Secret Sauce 2.0’.

Some of Parscale’s techniques are proprietary, but others are simply industry best practices. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale told reporters in 2016. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”

While the Republicans romped online, the Democrats stalled out in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s email travails became the ‘whatabout’ attack line of the campaign. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party,Hillary and Bill had an aversion to hiring Obama’s successful digital team and brought in their own consultants–young, inexperienced, and lacking a firm grasp of important security practices. An email server was set up in a closet. It would later be breached. The results were disastrous.

The Coming Onslaught…

What we need to do is create technology, an app on your phone [that] will help execute any type of volunteer programs… once we have data back. The volunteer app would be powered by and fed into the campaign’s data-gathering operation through the use of alarge scale machine learning system. So, when knocking on a door, the team already knows what issues the person cares about, and the takeaways from their discussion will help improve the campaign’s advertising program.

—Parscale on ‘Individual ad targeting’

Opposition research on whomever emerges from the Democratic primary are yet to come, but it is already clear that the party is not prepared to fight back with its own state-of-the-art political marketing apparatus.

Parscale revealed to the Palm Beach Post that in 2016, he created as many as 100,000 ads a day, testing different images, colors and wording to see which were the most effective for particular voters.“We will continue to make content that is tailored for you and the message you need to hear from the president,” he said, promising that during the course of the campaign, millions of personalized messages from the president will be arriving daily on cell phones, in emails, and via news feeds.

This time around, Parscale’s systems are mostly ready to go at this very early date. They’ve been engineered and tested. His team will use various performance metrics to track their successes, optimize their programs as they go, and maximize their spending clout.

They’re running their plan right now.

Via the Palm Beach Post:

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28, Parscale walked onto the stage, raised his cell phone above his head and asked the audience to pull out their phones and text TRUMP to 88022. In a video clip of the rally, Trump supporters behind Parscale can be seen taking their phones out and texting.

“The power of bringing our party together is in that phone,” Parscale told the crowd in Miami. Recently, the campaign has been relentlessly texting supporters, asking them to sign a digital birthday card for the president. However, signing requires turning over your contact information and cell phone number.

“The whole game will be different” in 2020,said Parscale. Back in 2016, “the most people [the Republican National Committee] could contact to show up [to vote] without using television, advertising or some kind of mass media was 2 million people.” By 2020, “we’re gonna have 50-60 million… that’s a gigantic advantage, because the Democrats can’t do that.” Parscale expects to have a least 50 million personalized direct voter contacts in their database (62 million voted for Trump in 2016).“We will have a formidable ground game, one volunteer for every 13 swing voters, and a data operation that cannot be replicated,” Parscale told Face the Nation earlier this year.

According to The New York Times, in the first five months of this year, the Trump campaign had already pumped $4.9 million into Facebook ads, triple the figure of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate who spent the most.

But swing voters aren’t the only ones being targeted by the Trump campaign. The numbers from 2016 tell us those who stayed home in 2016–40 percent of eligible voters–represent a huge untapped source of votes for Parscale and his team to win over.

Those non-voters are being identified and targeted right now by the GOP’s marketing operations. Their data are being mined and put into Parscale’s databases in preparation for the next phase of the campaign. They will be flattered, told of Trump’s many awe-inspiring achievements and repeatedly warned about the horrors that will occur should Democrats get back in power.

It was recently revealed that part of Team Trump’s Facebook strategy to convert users into supporters is a series of targeted ads depicting members of various demographic groups that tend not to be supportive of Trump—among them bearded hipsters, young women and people of color–gushing over how great he is. These testimonials by “real Americans,” it turns out, are not only stock photos but some of them are Turkish stock photos.

Already, those in the database–core Republican voters, persuadables, and non-voters–are getting messages from the campaign. They’re being told to believe in America, keep the economy growing, protect their pocketbook, protect their family and protect the nation.

Brad Parscale is on his way, as he says, to make “political marketing great.” The database politics of the future is here now. Dems need to catch up.

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100K$ ad

This section contains information about this advertiser’s ads of political importance shown to users from May 31st, 2018 onwards. It is updated weekly.

Number of ads purchased through Google Ads Services

1,367

Amount spent across Google Ads Services

$1,057,300

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL SENATORIAL INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE

https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/library/advertiser/AR488306308034854912

TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN COMMITTEE

• FEC ID C00618371

-

ut political advertising, like the ads you probably scroll past in your Facebook feed, has changed drastically over the past couple of decades. Unlike TV ads, which reach voters with undifferentiated mass messages, when it comes to online political ads, campaigns actually know a TON about you. They can target you based on your age, sex, income, where you live — even if you’re a Beyoncé fan. And they can tailor their messaging to how they think you, specifically, will respond.

How do they do that?

Political advertising online is more like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist than a traditional television ad: It uses lots of information about what you’ve done in the past to match you to the ads that you see today. Political campaigns and advocacy groups don’t have this data themselves; they enlist the help of so-called data brokers.

Data brokers gather public information about mortgages, car ownership and marital status, as well as consumer data like your income, education and which magazines you subscribe to. With this information, they make informed guesses about your political beliefs and assign you to a profile, which they sell to political advertisers. Campaigns then show you ads they think will persuade someone like you to vote for their candidate (or against the other one).

These ads appear lots of places online. You see them on search engines like Google, social networks like Twitter and, thanks to the services of online advertising networks that connect advertisers to digital promo opportunities, nearly any website that hosts ad space.

But Facebook (chef kiss) is the crème de la crème of political ad targeting. Everything you do on Facebook is being tracked — by Facebook.

Every time you …

• Like a post
• Tag a photo
• Update your favorite movies
• Post a comment
• Visit a page with a FB share button
• Use Instagram or WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook)

… Facebook uses all this data to guess your political leanings and interests, offering you up to candidates who want to target super specific groups of people.

So, the problem is …

Online ads are are hard to track. They appear on some people’s screens (sometimes for just a few hours), while never being shown to others. There’s also no way to monitor if political campaigns are changing their messaging based on the groups they are targeting — or whether they’re sending out ads that are misleading, contradictory or false.

The Federal Election Commission has strict rules about political ads broadcast on television and radio, but those rules haven’t kept up with the new power of online targeting. They tried recently — and failed.

Basically, in online political advertising, nearly anything goes.

Perhaps you’ll recall:

• During the 2016 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump’s operatives bragged to the press that they tried to dissuade African Americans from voting by targeting them with anti-Clinton Facebook posts.
• Last spring, a year and a half after Trump was elected, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads placed by Russian operatives to influence the 2016 election.

We don’t know the full impact of this, but with no accountability, they open the door for disinformation.

Homework: Find Out How You’re Being Targeted.

To learn more about how candidates target you on Facebook, check out how the site has categorized you. Does Facebook think you’re very liberal, very conservative or somewhere in between?

• Go to https://facebook.com/ads/preferences on your browser. (You may have to log in to Facebook first.)
• That will bring you to a page with your ad preferences. Under the “Your Information” header, click the “Your categories” tab.
• Then look for a box titled “US Politics.” In parentheses, it will show what Facebook says it knows about you (and how it sells you to advertisers), with a description like liberal, moderate or conservative. Does it match up with how you actually identify yourself?
• See what else Facebook thinks you’re interested in on this page under the “Your interests” section at the top (it has a heart icon). Political advertisers sometimes use this information to reach potential voters, too.
• In your newsfeed, click the dots at the top right corner of any Facebook ad and select “Why am I seeing this?” It will give a brief explanation about some of the choices the advertiser made in showing it to you. It may be because of the state you live in, or your age, or because Facebook thinks you’re interested in a specific political party.

Homework: See the Ads You’re NOT Seeing.

Because Facebook thinks they have you all figured out, it’s important to remember there are a lot of ads that they won’t ever show you. To learn more about what other people see, there are a few steps you can take.

1. Visit the Facebook Political Ad Collector, our searchable database designed to create more transparency in targeted online ads. It lets you step into someone else’s shoes and see the Facebook ads that they see.
2. Browse Google’s library of political ads. This summer Google published a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the platform, searchable by candidate or advertiser.

Extra Credit

While ProPublica has collected almost 53,000 political ads from more than 11,000 users for our Facebook Political Ad Collector, we want to monitor more. If you use Chrome or Firefox, you can help by downloading our browser extension, which lets us collect the ads you see.

So far the add-on has found political ads that were actually scams and malware, ads that ignored FEC rules by failing to disclose who paid for and approved them, and Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray’s made-up news pages.

Important privacy note: The extension doesn’t collect any personal information about its users; we just collect the ads you see, automatically. We don’t see any of your or your friends’ posts. Learn more here.

https://www.propublica.org/article/users-guide-to-democracy-political-advertising

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http://time.com/5352516/india-whatsapp-fake-news/

On the evening of June 8, a 29 year-old sound engineer and a 30-year-old business man were on their way to a picnic spot in India’s northeastern Assam state when they stopped at a village to ask for directions. The villagers had been told, in a video circulating on the messaging app WhatsApp, that child kidnappers were roaming the country. Believing these strangers were the ones they’d been warned about, the villagers formed a large mob, and, before the men could convince them otherwise, beat them to death.

The video they had seen was actually an instructional safety video made in Pakistan, but was shared with some text warning about kidnappers in the local area, causing fear and anger among the community. After the killings, police arrested 16 people and demonstrations took place in the victims’ hometown of Guwahati, the largest city in Assam. Similar incidents involving false news stories circulated on WhatsApp have reportedly led to the deaths of two dozen people in India since April. Now, both the app and the government are scrambling to prevent more mob lynchings.

“This is really happening at the frontier of technology,” says Nandagopal Rajan, new media editor at The Indian Express newspaper. “India has had a 4G revolution in the past 18 months and we’ve seen around 200 million new people start using the internet, mostly on phones. That means WhatsApp has suddenly ended up in the hands of a lot of first time internet users.”

India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 200 million users at last count, in February 2017. The number today is likely much higher. While the app was designed as a messaging platform for one-on-one exchanges or small groups, in India it has taken on a life of its own. “Many Indians use Whatsapp not as a messaging platform,” Rajan says, “but as a consumption platform—people join lots of groups so they receive an endless flurry of video messages, memes and random jokes and stories, directly to their inbox.”

When those messages and stories contain false information, WhatsApp’s content-sharing function can have a more sinister effect. End-to-end encryption, which effectively locks messages and gives only senders and receiver the key to open them, makes it impossible for the company to see inside chats and regulate content on their platform in the same way Twitter or Facebook can. Groups are closed and limited to 256 people, making it impossible for journalists or police to get in and track where a rumor originated.

A 2018 reportfrom the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford shows WhatsApp is becoming an increasingly dominant news-sharing platform across Latin America and Asia. That means the problem is only growing.India’s technology ministry said in a statement onJuly 19 that the company would face legal action if it remained a “mute spectator” to the violent consequences of false stories circulating. “When rumors and fake news get propagated,” it said, “the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility.'  Since late June WhatsApp has been responding with a series of unprecedented interventions to curb sharing on the app. It added a setting that would allow only admins to send messages in a group. It reduced the number of people a message can be forwarded to from 100 to 5 in India (and to 20 in the rest of the world) and removed the “quick forward” button that appears next to messages containing photos, video or audio. It also introduced a “suspicious link” label, which will appear alongside links where WhatsApp detects an obvious problem, such as a strange combination of characters. Earlier in July the company took outnewspaper ads in nine states warning people to “question information that upsets you.”

“WhatsApp is making an effort to understand [how people use its platform in India] but we’re in uncharted territory,” Rajan says. “Nobody has ever fathomed what happens when this kind of a platform, which is in encrypted code, starts working at scale—the kind of scale you have in India.”

While the forwarding limit has been reduced, Rajan points out that content can still spread very fast between groups. “Often, all the members of a group are admins, and they’ll all be admins of ten more groups too. All the groups are interconnected, so it’s really easy for content to go viral.” WhatsApp did not respond to TIME’s request for further comment on the situation in India.

“WhatsApp’s new measures are a band-aid, not a solution,” says Bal Krishn Birla, a tech entrepreneur from Bangalore. Two years ago, Birla and software engineer Mohammed Shammas launched volunteer service Check4Spam, in the hopes of curing their country’s burgeoning fake news epidemic. Now with a team of 15 volunteers, the pair painstakingly fact check false stories of all kinds, using lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to balance the task with their day jobs.

They receive between 100 and 250 messages a day from people asking whether or not a story is true. “We can’t respond to all of them, but we try to get most,” Birla says. The team will take a typical news story, such as a report of a young child being kidnapped, research the facts online and use tools like reverse image search to check if photos or videos included in the story come from the region or time that they claim to. “It’s pretty simple,” he says, “We’re not reinventing the wheel.” They then upload the fact-check to their website and encourage the sender to share it too, reversing the flow of fake news.

Check4Spam isn’t the only grassroots organization taking notice of the risks posed by news on WhatsApp. In Mexico, where 35% of people use WhatsApp as a primary news source according to the Reuters Institute, a group of journalists made the app the focus of their fact-checking site,Verificado 2018. In the run up to the country’s largest ever elections in July, they responded to thousands of requests from people wanting to check political stories.

Alongside volunteer groups like these, Birla believes the lasting solution lies in media literacy education, something Check4Spam is keen to get involved in. On May 30, Facebook announced the company would team up with India’s National Commission for Women and the Cyber Peace Foundation, an NGO, to run digital literacy courses at universities in several major Indian cities. They will teach 60,000 women who are new to the internet to recognize false information online, helping to avoid both fake news and scams. But similar programs could take years to roll out across a country of 1.3 billion. “These killings are very likely to continue, unfortunately,” Birla says. “To me it seems like it’s just the beginning.”

Birla questions whether social media companies are truly committed to stopping the spread of fake news. “It amounts to getting people to share less, and that directly conflicts with their business model,” he says. He believes Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, already has the technology to deal with much of the false information circulating on its platforms. “They understand how to flag content that seems inappropriate or like it violates copyright—they just haven’t done it yet for things that may seem suspicious.” While the difference between truth and lie may be more difficult for technology to spot than an unlicensed music clip, tools like reverse image search, which can reveal if an image comes from where it claims to, are currently under-used by social media companies, he says.

“When people start leaving their platform, then I think they’ll figure out the solution,” says Birla, pointing to a trend in young people abandoning Facebookfor Instagram and Snapchat where the lack of sharing function means there’s less undesired spam content. Government pressure can only go so far, Birla says. “The will to fight fake news has to come from consumers. It has to be a people’s movement.”