Trump team drunk alone Kool-Aid uses 2016 strategy on social media
08 September, 2020
A note saying you “won’t be safe” in Joe Biden’s America. The former vice president displayed “sleeping” during a television interview. Biden “hiding”-alone-in his basement.
All three videos featured in social media of President Donald Trump and his team as recently as days gone by week as he sought to close the gap on his Democratic rival. And each was labelled as false or manipulated content by social media giants and fact checkers.
While negative campaigning has long been a fixture of American politics, the open use of digitally-altered images by Trump and other candidates in 2020 has tech giants worried.
Twitter has cracked down by removing or labelling several of the president’s tweets. Facebook, citing the risk of civil unrest, announced Thursday that it could not allow new political ads on its platform within the last week of the November 3 race.
There remain questions whether such messages-almost impossible to avoid after they become viral-are focusing on voters but a line was already crossed.
“There’s an extended tradition in politics of competing politicians presenting their opponents’ words or beliefs in edited ways, right? That’s part of politics,” Ethan Porter, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told AFP.
“Alternatively, the Trump campaign is in part running a campaign completely detached from reality, with techniques that have little to no precedent in American political history.”
Biden’s campaign has yet to receive the same sort of censure as Trump’s. But can a willingness to manipulate highly visible political advertisings and videos produce results?
THE TRUE Clear Politics poll average barely changed after the Republican Convention, where Trump ramped up his attacks on Biden who's seven points ahead nationally. But swing states remain a toss-up.
‘One-sided’
“Manipulated media for the most part has been utilized by the Trump campaign to have significantly more, let’s say, ‘tactile-looking’ evidence, for the claims that they’re making. Because there’s not actual evidence,” said Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of NEW YORK, Chapel Hill.
It’s like the approach found in 2016, but technology has made manipulations easier and more sophisticated.
The Trump campaign accused tech companies of double standards over the Biden videos.
“Big tech is in Joe Biden’s pocket however the liberal coastal elites in Silicon Valley are blatantly one-sided when it comes to how they define manipulated media,” Samantha Zager, deputy national press secretary, told AFP.
However, McGregor, who studies the role of social media in political processes, said that instead of looking to attract different constituencies, “the rhetoric is really polarising and it’s type of digging into Trump’s base of supporters and trying to activate them to vote.”
An example came within an August 30 Facebook post by Donald Trump Jr, after the shooting death of Aaron Danielson, 39, in Portland.
“WARNING, HORROR: Antifa Targets And Executes Trump Supporter,” the president’s eldest son said in his post, including video that was viewed a lot more than 780,000 times, and liked almost 50,000 times.
A suspect reported to be a supporter of the Antifa anti-fascist movement was shot and killed on Thursday night as police tried to arrest him.
‘Drinking their Kool-Aid’
The violence in Portland came just before Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg announced the restrictions on political ads, saying misinformation about mail-in voting, and concerns about delayed counting of ballots, meant the 2020 election is not business as usual.
Porter said the Trump team is convinced its approach is a winner.
“In some ways they seem to have drunk their own Kool-Aid. They think that their social media use and strategy in 2016 won them the election,” he said.
“It’s not saying he won’t win. It’s just to say that if he does win I can’t suppose will be among the top or probably causes,” Porter added, maintaining that fact-checking of false information works.
Cyrus Krohn, who managed digital campaigning for the Republican National Committee ahead of the 2008 election, says this year’s race “does seem to be tightening” and “you can attribute that to worries factor that the web is creating.”
Which means, he said, that manipulated media are working for the Trump team. Although the Biden campaign is not “as overt,” Krohn said, “there are factions on the left who want to see the (former) vice president elected that are deploying the same tactics as the state Trump campaign.”
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