Offline with Jon Favreau - How the Right Won the Internet and How the Left is Fighting Back

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Why are Republicans apologists for misinformation? How should campaigns respond to online trolls? Are Democrats still using an Obama-era digital strategy? Journalist Sasha Issenberg joins Offline to talk about his new book, The Lie Detectives, and to break down how to defeat conservatives in a truth-agnostic world. He and Jon discuss how today’s political class is adapting to a tumultuous and Trumpy social media landscape, and why controlling today’s narrative is more elusive than ever before. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

The MAGA world has much stronger ties among its supporters, and I think it's because it really does empower them. What Trump did, I think, was he helped cultivate a community where he sent a signal by his own behavior, because at 3 a.m. he was tweeting about whatever crazy shit came to mind or whatever he saw that he thought was cool or funny, and he sent a signal to his supporters that it's good. It is useful to my campaign for you to just post whatever you want about me.

Hey, everyone. You just heard from today's guest, journalist and author Sasha Eisenberg. So way back in 2012, when I was working on my last campaign, Sasha wrote a book called The Victory Lab about how the Obama reelect and other Democratic campaigns had used what was then revolutionary technology to reach voters and increase turnout. It was an optimistic take on the role of tech in politics based on the idea that voter targeting and digital fundraising could lower the barriers to political participation and organizing. Then the 2016 election gave us Trump, fake news, alternative facts, and a mess of bad actors who exploited technology and online platforms to spread disinformation and propaganda that made voters more confused and more radicalized than ever. It came from the Russian government, but also from the Trump campaign, right-wing media,

and countless anonymous trolls and kooks who remain difficult to track. All of this led Sasha to go back and re-evaluate the lessons he wrote about in the Victory Lab. What he came up with is a new book called The Lie Detectives, where he dives into all the things we missed about politics and technology way back when, and talks to the strategists and researchers who are figuring out the most effective ways to fight back against the disinformation that still threatens democracies everywhere. I sat down with Sasha to talk about why the left and right view disinformation so differently, how the Biden campaign used new strategies to deal with it in their successful 2020 campaign, and what we can all

do to help neutralize the threat ahead of 2024. Sasha and I, a couple of political and internet nerds, ran long this week, so we're going to skip the A block. With that, here's Sasha Eisenberg. Sasha Eisenberg, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me, John. I can't believe this is your first time on this show or any of the shows I host, since your books cover all my nerdiest passions. Politics, the internet, public opinion, campaigns, including all the ones that I've been on. I noticed my book about dental tourism in Hungary didn't make the cut. Yeah, that one I missed.

So your first book on campaigns, The Victory Lab, focused on how voter targeting technology transformed political campaigns like Obama's. Your new book, The Lie Detectives, is in some ways a corrective to the techno-optimism of The Victory Lab. Why do you think technology and the internet went from being a mostly positive force in politics to a mostly harmful one? I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with the willingness of people in politics to use tools for ill. These are fundamentally stories about people and institutions, not stories about technology. And so, you know, some of it is there's a structural story, which is that that first book, The Victory Lab, was largely about these innovations in targeting that were the result of campaigns getting all sorts of new data about voters.

It was mostly offline. Like, that was a very analog book. I hardly mentioned the internet in it. And that's because all these innovations were tethered to people's real identities at their home address and campaigns getting better at door knocking and direct mail, boring stuff. And their use of experiments to figure out what worked. And the fact is a lot of that was being done in this country by people who their funding structure and their ambitions were tied to getting people more involved in the process. So they were, these innovations were used for campaigns to get more efficient at registering voters, at turning them out. You know, these micro-targeting, it's not to say that every statistical model was used to give

people good information, but it was used to give people more precisely targeted information, which is generally in the service of informing voters and educating them. And I think what we've seen is that we have all sorts of people in politics now who are willing to do things in the context of a campaign that were outside of what political consultants sort of thought was fair game before. And so what we see is that a lot of the technical innovations can be turned on their head and used for ill. So what made you want to write this latest book? So, you know, I've been having a conversation with the book editor. That book came out in the

fall of 2012, right before the reelection. And a book editor had been coming to me for years saying, I'd love to do a follow-up to the Victory Lab. And all the stuff in that area seemed very incremental to me. And a few years ago, it really struck me that the most interesting sort of frontier of innovation and campaigns was thinking about this new asymmetry that had been created. We're now in an environment where legitimate political actors, talking about candidates, party committees, super PACs, labor unions, people who have to report to the FEC or the IRS and be regulated and held publicly accountable are now dealing with a situation where their opposition isn't their opponent. It's not another candidate. It's not another party committee.

It's not somebody who's playing by the same rules, might not even be in the same country as we are. And the whole structure of all the logic of political communication, the playbook that people like you and your co-hosts here grew up with, was, I think, tethered to a bunch of 20th century institutions and assumptions about communication. And what we sort of call disinformation, which I think is a sort of useful catch-all term for a lot of crazy stuff that happens online now, I think has challenged, has made clear that all of those assumptions are basically outdated. And this question of how and when you respond to an attack, the old playbook just doesn't make sense anymore online. And so this was, a few years ago, really struck me that coming to discover what the smartest people in this area of politics were thinking about how you make those determinations

and navigate the online landscape was really interesting to me. I want to get into sort of how the playbook has changed and how political actors are sort of using technology, not just for good, but for ill now. It also seems to me like some of this change happened because the internet itself changed and technology changed. Obama talked about this last time we interviewed him on Pod Save America. And he said that the key difference was that our campaign saw the internet and social media as a tool to organize people offline and in-person meetups. He was talking about that, which also allows for like more nuanced, thoughtful conversations between supporters of a potential candidate who may not agree on everything. And now so much of political

organizing and campaign work itself happens only online. And obviously, the internet and social media, especially not places where you can have thoughtful, nuanced conversations. Yeah, and mediated by a campaign institution that is moving towards a goal, right? So, you know, the Obama campaign in 2008 was not using the Internet for the goal of creating an online community of its supporters for its own sake. Right. It realized that there were tools that would make certain types of political activity easier and more efficient, that more people would do them if they could do them from home, if they didn't have to go to a field office to print out a walk sheet. What we see now is that communities are being built online with purposes other than winning elections. And so, you know, I think that a lot of the communities that have emerged around the sort of big conspiracy theories that are shaping our

politics today are not actually being – I think that there are political candidates who benefit from them situationally. But they're not being created and cultivated with the goal of getting to 50 plus 1 votes. They are actually fairly organic communities. And so what that means is that they sort of take a life of their own. And there are a lot of people whose motives – I mean, this is the sort of asymmetry I was talking about. It's not just about who's doing the communicating online, but what their goal is. Like you guys knew in 2008 that, you know, if you saw an attack from Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or John McCain

come or an outside group affiliate of them, you could infer the logic behind what they were trying to accomplish. And you could determine a tactical response based on intuiting the strategy of theirs. And sometimes you might have been right. Sometimes you might have been wrong. You might have come up with the right or wrong response, but you knew what they were doing. Now, often, if you're working for Joe Biden's campaign, something, a storyline starts moving. You don't know if the person who created it is doing it just to create chaos, to cultivate a media business because they're working for a foreign government, because they just make money off of clicks online and want to, you know, create a stir because that's what drives eyeballs. And that makes all the calculations that you would

have within a campaign about, do we respond to this? Do we push back? Do we hold the speaker accountable? Do we appeal to mainstream media to debunk this? None of that makes sense if the person behind it is just, you know, doing it for shits and giggles as opposed to electoral votes. And it almost doesn't matter at this point what the source is, right? There's a lot of focus. I mean, it matters if it is your opponent, right? Because then you can still do the same thing that you would have done before this. But there's so much focus, there's been so much focus on the left, especially about on foreign governments and Russian interference. And like, we can debate, you know, how useful that is. But even if there were no foreign interference, there would still be tons of damaging shit on the internet because they are flooding the zone with shit. And some of that's directed and some of it, like you said, is just organic, right?

Yeah, and I think that this has been one of the, you know, the sort of story I follow in this book is basically post-2016, it becomes a job in American politics to advise campaigns on counter-disinformation tactics. And there are a number of things which are very difficult for the people who do this to convince political communicators, especially politicians of. And one of those things is, yeah, it doesn't really matter if this is Russia, if we're trying to think about what we respond to and why. And I think this is an area where, you know, there are the geopolitical considerations, national security considerations weigh heavily, especially on, you know, people in Congress who are thinking about how to run campaigns in this environment. But also the

peculiar nature of the response is sort of two-headed. One is there's this, you know, basic sort of political comms 101 thing. Do we respond? How do we respond to it? Do we acknowledge the thing? You know, all of this, you know, things people have been talking about rapid response for decades. The other part of it is this sort of litigating with the platforms part. And at times, it does matter who's behind it. If this is a bot network that violates one of the platform's policies on illegitimate, inauthentic coordinated activity, or whatever they call it, then it does matter who's behind it. And if it is a misrepresentation, then you can make an honest

appeal to get it taken down. And I think people are starting to get the hang of this. But I think for a while, it was difficult that it's a little like a political campaign if you have to, you know, or political cause that on one hand is litigating in court, and at the same time is talking to voters. And it's like the arguments you make to the judge should not be the arguments you make to voters. Right. But I think way too often activists get that backwards and I think we, you know, in both directions we see now. And so anyway, I think that that's part of what draws the confusion is that, yeah, if you want to get Facebook to take something down saying this isn't really Jill from Michigan, this is really, you know, Igor in St. Petersburg is enough to get it taken down if you can demonstrate that. But deciding whether to push back on what the Post claims is irrelevant, whether it's Jill or Igor. Yeah, and it's not going to stop a real Jill from Michigan from posting the same kind of thing or being persuaded.

You talked about asymmetry. Can you talk about the difference between how the right views disinformation and how the left and center view it? You know, you note early on in the book that this is a project, sort of the interest in disinformation and fighting disinformation is a project undertaken almost entirely by people on the left

and the center of the ideological spectrum. Yeah, and this is true in the US and I have a chapter set in Brazil and basically the same dynamics apply there. You know, I ended up finding myself talking almost entirely to people on the left and center and I kept on wanting to make sure

that I wasn't missing anything analogous on the right. And so I kept on talking to, you know, going to the sort of smartest plugged in people about modern campaigns on the right and saying, you know, is there anybody I should be talking to? And what you recognize is that you cannot find people in the Republican Party, in this Bridges, the sort of MAGA world, and the establishment professional world, who will even accept the premise of that, quote-unquote, disinformation is like a meaningful category of speech.

And, you know, basically, I think the consensus view, and this has now become a core precept of the Republican Party now is that disinformation is a concept that academic researchers conjured so that they could work with federal agencies to exert pressure on social media platforms to censor conservative speech in the service of Democratic candidates and campaigns. And that's what it is. And that is a very hard conspiracy theory to break. And now we actually see what that looks like when it's turned into action, which is the Jim Jordan Weaponization Committee in the House, Republican Attorneys General, who have been suing platforms about this. But it's really notable. Donald Trump announces he's running for president again in 2024. Literally the first policy pronouncement he makes, he puts out a video. It's not about trade. It's not about immigration. It's not about any of the things that we think Donald Trump cares most about.

It is saying, I will get rid of the people at FBI who are doing counter disinformation work, and my government will not work with social media platforms. This is the first pledge that a candidate for president makes. And I think it's because it is a sort of central organizing principle of the Republican Party now. Do you have a theory on why there is that difference in how each side views disinformation. Like, and is that, is it based in ideological differences? Is it political? Is it situational? And that I think Republicans have sort of historically,

especially in the Trump era, sort of been on the offense in trying to spread or use some of these tactics to either suppress voter turnout or confuse people and stuff like that. And maybe Democrats have not done as much of that. Yeah. So I think that there's a bit to all of this. I think it's situational to some extent. I think that, you know, in the sort of thrashing about for explanations for why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, disinformation in some form or another popped up a lot. And so I think that there's a sincere view among non-crazy Republicans that this has become

a crutch that Democrats use to sort of evade responsibility for elections that they lost. It's sort of the new favorite like deus ex machina for Democrats who just want to sort of, you know, don't want to contend with the fact that either their policies aren't appealing or their candidates suck or whatever it is. So I think there's something to that sort of turn on Silicon Valley from the right that has sort of become this supposed free speech campaign is pushing back against the fact that content moderation, the political side of content moderation policies seem to do more damage to conservative communication online than in the US, than liberal progressive communication online. We should know, like,

most content moderation stuff that they're doing is about, like, child porn and people selling drugs and, like like all sorts of stuff that does not have a conventional sort of partisan attachment to it. But the fact is that, you know, the right, the online right figured out how to use social media more effectively for certain types of communication than the left did. And, you know, there were all of those, you know, when Kevin Roos from the New York Times started publishing the top 10 most trafficked things on Facebook every day from crowd to angle, you know, it was always Ben Shapiro. And it was like seven or eight of the 10 were like overtly conservative day after day, right? And when people started mapping how information moved online, there was an asymmetry

to it, which is that these right-leaning sites, many but not all of whom trafficked in stuff that was, you know, inaccurate or disreputable, had a much stronger hold and sort of network analysis on traffic than the, you know, mostly mainstreaming news organizations that were providing stuff to folks on the left. And so, I think that folks on the rights basically think that all of this is a correction to weaken the hold on a sphere of American life that they had sort of figured out how to master. And now I think the idea is that the American left is sort of not playing fairly and trying to weaken their hold or silence them. post 2016 i remember sitting in a focus group for this other podcast i do the wilderness and um i was asking people why this was like third party voters um people who decided not to vote for trump or clinton and i said why didn't you vote for Hillary? And they said, oh, she's just awful. And I was like, what

was it? And I'm thinking about all the different, was it the email? Was it this? They're like, oh, well, she killed all those people. I was like, I'm sorry, what? So it's like, now here is someone who clearly has bought into a piece of disinformation, right? But absent that disinformation, is that the kind of person who probably would not have voted for Hillary Clinton anyway? And that, I think, is what's hard to tell. I also think the real, the challenge for the left is, and this may be a bit of a straw man, but I have noticed over the last several years, particularly after 2016, some on

the left seeming to believe that we can like fact check our way out of disinformation. And I wonder what your reporting and research says about that. Yeah, so I think there are a lot of reasons to think that kind of a conventional way of pushing back on stuff just is ill-suited for this, right? So a few reasons. One, there is the, what people call the Streisand effect, right? So you take something that's maybe not circling at a high level or reaching a lot of people and you come out in the Biden campaign. We can talk a little bit about the Obama experience because you guys had a very different posture towards this in 2008. But the idea that you'd come out and say like, or if you're Hillary's campaign and you would say, she has not killed anybody, might send people looking for it.

Wait, what? Two, like there's actually a lot of cognitive science that suggests if you go out and say, I did not kill anybody and you don't really frame it the right way, you actually reinforce a suspicion among people who might have thought possibly you killed somebody that there's something there. The whole structure of the internet, of the algorithmic internet, social media in particular, is that in trying to fact check or dunk on or like, you know, sass somebody who posts something wrong, you can end up by engaging with it, sending more traffic

to it. So it is directly counterproductive. And then I think the bigger thing is a general sort of communications playbook thing, which is if you spend all day just answering what other people say about you, you have only a limited capacity to communicate on the things you care about. To your, you know, to persuadable voters, to your donors, to your supporters, to the media. And if you spend all day responding to crazy things that people say about you online, you will run out of the ability to talk about the things you want to talk about and you'll be. And so, and then, you know, I think there's the basic thing, just common sense, which is part of the reason we're in this situation is that people are fundamentally non-trusting of a large significant portion of the electorate is not trusting of traditional news sources or other academic institutions, the people who produce fact checks. And so I think it, and that those organizations have trouble getting in front of the who who are in, you know, information silos or filters or whatever, whatever metaphor we use.

And so the idea that if only they saw this thing from PolitiFact or the AP, it would change their mind. No, the reason that they are open to that is related to the fact that they are fundamentally distrustful of the Associated Press. And so, like, we're just not, we're not addressing the issue. This, to me, is the sort of fundamental asymmetry between left and right in trying to fight disinformation is because the right, especially in the Trump era now, is a coalition of low trust voters. And that's okay because their project under Donald Trump is to continue to erode faith in institutions, to in some cases tear down institutions. And so that works for them if

people are pissed at institutions. Even if their people are running the institutions, it doesn't matter. They're just trying to confuse people. The left is now been put in the position of, especially Joe Biden, being the defender of institutions, the liberal democratic order. But of course, all the other institutions that come along with that. And so try they are. We are trying to like it's an uphill battle trying to both fight disinformation and trying to defend a set of institutions that people have lost faith in. Yes. And it's not the job of any political campaign to protect institutions or educate voters for its own sake. Right. And so I think that there is this the sense that the folks I write on this book are pushing back on, which is, you know, we need to, and so much of the disinformation, the Hillary killed people woman, you know, that question,

which is, is this somebody who theoretically was persuadable, got this bit of information, and it pushed them away from Hillary Clinton? Plausible. Is this somebody who was not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, was receptive to this ridiculous claim, and then used it to justify what she had already decided to do, or wore it as a kind of like token of identity? I mean, so much of, on any given day of, if you're on the Biden campaign, so much of the stuff you would see on the internet attacking Joe Biden is being created by Trump supporters to amuse and impress other Trump supporters. It's like an Etsy DIY marketplace, but with just memes and gifs. And what Trump has done that's sort of remarkable, I think, is that he, by retweeting and sharing, endorsing, whatever, stuff that people create, has helped to turn this cargo cult into really formalize it.

So now you're not just creating lies and conspiracy theories and stuff to impress your friends and build the community, But like, if the leader takes it and holds it up for everybody, you've succeeded. And so the difficulty for the Biden campaign, I write a lot of how they sort of navigated this in 2020, and it's similar to what they're thinking about today, is how do we measure, and this is just, you know, how do we figure out the small share? If spend all day if you're a public figure or institution people are gonna be lying about you and the stuff you care about issues you care about every day online probably for the reasons we just talked about 99 of it you should ignore it would be counterproductive to engage with the one percent could be a real problem. And so figuring out what is the 99% that is not actually an electoral problem, it's not getting in front of the small share of voters

who are persuadable on topics that they care enough about to change their vote choice, or affect their likelihood of turning out, other voters' likelihood of turning out. That's the challenge, is isolating, getting data to make an intelligent determination about when is this going to make the jump from the sort of insular community of people who use disinformation not to persuade other people, but I think to just sort of affirm their community and get in front of a share of people who, by definition, are lower information, later to tune in. And how do you respond to it then without reinforcing it or appealing to forms of authority that those voters are not likely to respect in the first place. So talk a little bit about how the Biden campaign did this in 2020, because, you know, Rob Flaherty is one of the big characters in your book. He was just on offline a couple weeks ago.

He's now the Biden's deputy campaign manager, but he was the digital director on the 2020 campaign. And they sort of had a new strategy around how to deal with how to both track and then fight disinformation. Yeah. So Flaherty and the Biden digital operation were in the summer of 2020 blessed with these two things you don't get a lot. They had a fair bit of time by campaign standards and more money than they actually knew how to spend. And so Flaherty had been thinking a lot. He'd worked on Clinton's campaign in 2016 and so had sort of been there at the origins of like the panic around disinformation and had sort of regretted that they did not take it seriously early enough to do anything about it. And so he'd always wanted to do something. And so they end up in the summer

of the campaign and there's this money and time that comes their way. And he decides that they really want to dig into identifying what he calls distinguishing this market moving information. He says, you know, we have one goal, it's to get to 50 plus one. We do not care about anything that's online unless it's helping us get there. We need to be really ruthless about not getting distracted by disinformation that isn't actually an electoral problem for us. And we need to, as a result, focus just on that, which is going to get in front of those persuadable voters in the, you know, whatever it was, seven or eight states that they care about on the issues that will affect their vote. And what they did was they worked with this firm called Bully Pulpit Interactive, which was one of the big democratic digital firms. They tested a number of basically viral narratives that were circulating about Biden online. They called them

all disinformation. It's not a great term for this because some of them are based in a fair bit of truth and some of them are not. And they polled a universe of persuadable voters. And they basically asked two things. One, are you familiar with this message? Would it affect your, with the storyline rather, and would it affect your vote choice between Trump and Biden? And they mapped this on an axis. So one axis was the reach, how many people were familiar with the storyline, and the other axis was the impact. Would it affect their vote? And so they found, for example, and the idea was only stuff in the upper right-hand quadrant where it had both reach and impact was worrisome. And anything in the bottom, let's keep an eye on it. Maybe it can make a jump. Maybe voters' opinions

can change, but we don't need to do anything on it. What they found, for example, was that the Hunter Biden storyline had a lot of reach. People were very familiar with it. Trump had already been impeached over this. But they had a lot of reach, even though it was apparently cens a lot of impact. Voters said it wouldn't affect their choice and they did focus groups and it revealed that in this case, voters did not see – this fairly small share of persuadable voters did not see Biden as fundamentally motivated by personal gain. So even though they were familiar with all the Hunter Biden stuff, they did not actually change their impression of Biden on something that mattered. The age stuff, what they called the Sleepy Joe storyline, had both reach. People obviously knew that he was old. And it had impact. Voters said it could affect their choice. And the focus groups revealed it wasn't actually because they saw him as, that they were worried about his physical fitness. And the thinking in the campaign and the sort of traditional communications team for a while had been, okay, we need to deal with this. We're going to have photo ops of him on a bicycle. We're going to have him jog up the steps of the plane. And the focus groups revealed that these voters were not,

they weren't worried that like he wouldn't get his steps in in the White House, right? They saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think a lot of this has to do with being defined as vice president. He got through that big primary field and was like never the main character. And voters didn't really know what he cared about and what he would do. And so they maybe had suspicions that he wouldn't be calling the shots or that he would be following somebody else's agenda. And that manifests itself in a receptivity to claims that he was frail and old, but this research revealed that wasn't the underlying issue. And so I quote Danny Franklin, who's a pollster, didn't work for the campaign, and he says, you know, fundamentally, they weren't worried about his fit. They were worried that he was not going to be the author of his presidency, is the line. And so the way that they pushed back against that was not to do things that look like they were responding to age. But, you know, if you found yourself Googling, you know, Biden and senile, for example, in the fall of 2000, you might get

a cookie dropped in your browser so that when you go to YouTube the next time, the pre-roll video you see was like 15 seconds of Biden speaking to camera about how growing up in Scranton gave him this view of economic policy. And this was the stuff that tested best because the voters who were receptive to this weakness were reassured by saying, oh, this guy can actually articulate what he cares about and why. And so, how Flaherty defined this shift in thinking was to go from having what he called a supply-side approach to disinformation, which I think is generally the way that the media, a lot of academic researchers, certainly the default assumption of people in politics has been, which is, okay, where's this coming from? What platform is it on? Did people use AI to make it? How's it spreading? Are they making money off of it? And instead, what he called a

demand side approach, which is, what are the underlying anxieties or concerns of the voters who might be open to a given storyline? And how can we address those without playing whack-a-mole with whatever the new trending thing is today? And it is, you know, I think both a real tactical shift in thinking about how you do this, but it also is a sort of conceptual shift that I think many of us who are worried about this as a problem should think about. I think way too many of our conversations

and news coverage are sort of about what, you know. Who's doing it. Who's doing it, how it's moving, what tools they're using, and not enough about like the fundamental question, which is basically why such a significant portion of our country right now, gullible, so gullible and susceptible to certain storylines over others, right?

There are tons of conspiracy theories that are going to travel today that are not going to catch on, right? That somebody is going to create on a 4chan board and it's going to go nowhere. QAnon started on a 4chan board and seven years later is driving aspects of our politics and trying to think about and research why some of the, you know, why is vaccine skepticism around around COVID so persistent? But, you know, people stopped worrying about fluoride in their water. Right. Why? And and if you care about pushing back on them to figure out what the underlying issue is there instead of just, you know, chasing whatever

today's meme or gif is. I will say from a, from my experience as a campaign hack, it feels very intuitive, this whole, and because if you're looking at it from a campaign perspective, you of course want to focus on the demand side and not the supply side. And even hearing like the, how the Biden age concern is really a concern about weakness. That is also something that candidates have always had to deal with. Like we had to deal with that. Obama wasn't old. It was actually the opposite problem. Obama was too young. So he was going to be weak. Obama was too inexperienced. So he was going to be weak and not the author of his own story. Then once he was the president, then it was, he's too aloof, he's too nice, he's too professorial. But the underlying challenge was that people were worried he was not

going to be as in control of events. And, you know, we did the same thing in 08. We tested some of the scariest attacks that we thought would be most damaging to Obama. We tested, like, I think, at some point, I think Axelrod and company, like, created fake ads to test with focus groups, right? Of, like, how was the Bill Ayers thing gonna play? How was Reverend Wright gonna play?

And I think the challenge now is, all right, so you identify the most damaging narratives based on the information environment in which you're operating, conspiracies, QAnon, whatever it may be. Then the question is, how do you determine the best way to counter those narratives? And then how do you disseminate that message to the right people? Yeah. And I should say, like, I think a lot of this shift, a lot of this does seem intuitive to people who were thinking about message strategy informed by opinion research. But a lot of the decisions about responding to this were being done by digital operatives who, and I think this is-

That's interesting. There's a big, there has been in democratic politics for a while, a big disconnect between those two groups of people. Yes. And so I think some of it's a mindset and tools issue, which is, if you are a digital operative, and there's a sort of fusing of people like Rob Flaherty, who are, and we're just starting to see, I think, a generation of people who came up through digital communications sort of move into the normal hierarchy of a campaign instead of staying there. But often they were looking at the social listening data that was content-driven. It was what are the posts that are moving? What accounts are they going through?

They were not focused on – polling is fundamentally focused on voter opinions. This was focused mostly on what content is moving. A digital communications apparatus that had an ability to track and measure data and come up with some of the targeting tactics so that you were putting these responses in front of the people who are most likely to be susceptible to them. But fusing it with opinion research, polling focus groups that was focused on the voter side of it. I think that there's this ongoing debate in progressive politics right now about what do you do with the conservative media ecosystem? You have groups like Sleeping Giants, which have been very effective, I think, at driving boycotts and are scaring advertisers away from sites like Breitbart because of their content. The Biden campaign made a different decision. We are going to try to buy ads on Fox News and Breitbart because their research suggested that at least some portion

of the people who would be exposed to this, who were persuadable, that's where they were getting information and that they wanted to be adjacent to it. And so I think that this is going to be an ongoing problem, especially as the sort of the view of social media sites themselves are becoming, you know, it was not morally controversial 12 years ago for the Obama campaign to decide we're going to put money on Facebook. People might have questioned the efficiency of it or tactile. It wasn't like we're going to give money to ExxonMobil or Hallib chemical companies or whatever. And so I think that there's going to be, probably it's going to break out more into the open going forward as to like, to what extent do you spend money in the places where, well, we saw this about like,

should Democrats give interviews to Fox News? I was just going to say, I've always been on the side of like, the moral argument is almost beside the point. My view is a campaign operative or former campaign operative, right? Which is like, is it right or wrong to go on Fox News? Are you helping fuel their ratings? way, you know, if you're like debating Sean Hannity in a three minute interview, perhaps it's a fucking waste of time because you're not getting your message out at all. But are there people, even if it's a tiny slice of people, are there people who are getting their information from that news source that are, like you said, that are potentially persuadable? And if so, how are you going to persuade them? right? Like, how are you going to reach those people? In what ways are you going to reach those people? And if they're only getting their information, if they're getting their information from a whole bunch of places, that's one thing. But if they're only getting their information from Fox, and they're still not decided that they're going to

vote for a Republican, then yeah, maybe Democrats should play in that information space. Yeah, no, I think that this is, you know, there are, it's gotten harder to target political advertising. I mean, it's one of these areas where the sort of innovation narrative turned on its head. I think, you know, Apple killed the cookie business.

So there were a lot of things that might have been available at campaigns 10 years ago to try to target individual voters online. That's interesting. That's changed. It has gotten more difficult now. And so I think increasingly it has become important

to get into the networks where the people you want to reach are as opposed to using the sort of infrastructure of ad targeting to get to them as they move around the web. I was talking to a senior Biden person last week, and they were saying that the biggest challenge, the entire campaign comes down to, you know, there was this chart of like Biden's, you know, winning by 50 points with people who get their news from newspapers and network news also, you know, and the places where Biden's losing the most and is behind Trump by the most are people who either get most of their news from social media or people who don't tune into the news at all, don't tune into the news at all, don't follow the news closely at all. And that Biden person was saying like their big challenge

is trying to figure out how to reach those people. How would you assess how the Biden campaign is doing that in 2024 and how they're handling disinformation and the information environment in 2024, particularly compared to what you wrote about in 2020? So I think that there's far more focus on recruiting influencers, not just the people who do makeup routines, but people who are not necessarily political communicators foremost but have circles of readers, followers who rely on them for information. control mentality of the modern political campaign and the fact that the internet does not lend itself to top-down right communication and you know you go back to 08 the things that the obama campaign chose to do the use the internet to do very effectively um what were you know get contact

information for people so that you could ask them for money in new ways and ask them to volunteer in new ways and cut down the friction of having to go into a field office and allow them to make phone calls from their dining table. But in every instance, you are either asking them to do something very specific and targeted. And if they were going to talk to other voters, usually it was offline. And it was with messaging and training provided by the campaign. And this is why when people come into a field office, campaigns don't tell them, hey, run over to whoever you love to talk about politics with and argue with them for our candidate. It's here's a list of people that we have identified, and here's the messaging that we think will work with them, and don't go

beyond the bounds of what we tell you to do. And what Trump did, I think, you know, more a function of his instinct than any great strategy, was he helped cultivate a community where he sent a signal by his own behavior, because at 3 a.m., he was tweeting about whatever crazy shit came to mind or whatever he saw that he thought was cool or funny. And he sent a signal to his supporters that it's good. It is useful to my campaign for you to just post whatever you want about me. That was never a signal that traditional campaigns, not just Democratic campaigns, John McCain was not sending a signal to people, hey, you know, say whatever you want about me or my opponent. But I think that, you know, what we have seen is that Democratic campaigns, I would argue that the Obama campaign, which we certainly until 2016 said was the most successful digital campaign in American history, created, you know, and Obama, I think still probably has the largest email list and contact list in American politics, created a lot of, a large number of weak ties among its supporters. And the Trump, the MAGA world has much stronger ties among its supporters. And I think it's because it really does empower them. I think there's a lot of talk about empowering volunteers

in a sort of offline organizing model, but that never migrated online. Yeah, we were, I think we weren't trying to create communities online and strong ties online, partly because at that time, there weren't really strong online communities. The idea was, of course, to like organize, using technology to organize people offline. And I think the offline communities had strong ties, but like no campaign has their supporters offline

with like forever having strong ties, right? Yeah, yeah. So part of this was just, I think, the way this has changed. But I do, I think even now, you don't see a lot of Democratic campaigns sort of trusting their supporters with all of the information that they have about what's working, what the research you described in 2020.

Like, I think it would be very useful for everyone who is a supporter of the Biden campaign and who's active online to know like, hey, here are the most damaging narratives. Here are the here's the best way to press to push back on those narratives. And we're not going to give you like a detailed script about it. But like, this is the most damaging narratives. Here's the best way to push back on those narratives. And we're not going to give you a detailed script about it, but this is the general idea, and now you be creative in figuring out how you push back on that and just here are some general guidelines.

So I think that they've gone farther this year in recalibrating the risk analysis of... The worst thing that could happen is that some supporter who has a a quasi official mandate from your campaign says something that's problematic. Right. You know, I remember being in a Clinton field office in Iowa writing about her voter contact operation. And, you know, the field organizer I was talking to was telling me about the rules that they weren't even allowed to post about the campaign on their personal Facebook accounts. The idea that a

field organizer, a paid employee might say something that's slightly deviated from the chosen message in Brooklyn was problematic enough that this person who was your connection to the local community in Urbandale didn't communicate in the place where like a significant part of their life took place. It's just ridiculous. And so I think the Biden campaign has come around to sort of accepting that we need to relinquish some control to people we want to communicate for us. But still that idea of a sort of open source research, go wild and, you know, mix it up in the comments for us. We're going to give you the tools. It's so antithetical to the way that the people who make decisions and campaigns think. There's some small examples.

The Fetterman campaign in 22, right? So they created a Slack channel where I think at some point there were like 8,000 volunteers who were active. And it was basically for volunteers to coordinate messaging on, you know, to come up with good memes. And, you know, it was like a writer's room, I guess, for like volunteers and with the campaigns, you know, approval and encouragement. But, you know, that was already a campaign that thought that it was doing things differently. And I think that campaigns, the generational shift is not just do you like use email anymore. It is fundamentally do you still come from a world where you think that a campaign can control the information flow that most voters are getting most days? Or do you accept a world where that has sort of blown up and we are in a decentralized communications environment where, yes, you care about trying to influence what the newspapers and TV networks are saying and your paid advertising is still a thing, but you need to play in a world where word of mouth and

rumor and person-to-person communication and homemade messaging are going to be a way of reaching people. And I don't see that the Biden campaign has gone quite that far yet. No, and it's funny because it's different parts of the campaign. It's sort of like your background, right? Like you said, there's the difference between the digital organizers and the message polling people, also the comms people, right? Like they're still, the generation of communications people today are still trained by like our generation of communications people, which is like, here's the main message for today and here's the talking points, but it's all feels like it's very stilted. Like if it leaked, we would all be okay kind of thing. And that's the other part of it is I think a lot of those people were shaped by the Swift boat experience in 2004, which was this, you know, like traumatic event for democratic communicators. And the lesson from it that you guys internalized in 08, um, was don't let anything that anybody bad says about you go unanswered because it could start as this little thing in a small media market in Pennsylvania,

and if you let it move, it's going to get everywhere. And that's terrible advice now. But I do think that— I see so many examples of fucking swinging at every pitch. Yeah, yeah. And I don't—it's hard. I get it because, I mean, part of this is the challenge again about a challenge of running against Donald Trump.

And Trump gives you so many targets. And he says so many crazy, it is, he floods the zone with shit, whether intentionally or not. And so you feel like you have to swing at every pitch. And there's a ton of attacks on you. So you have to defend each one. But even the ones that you know are damaging, right? Like just today, right? We're talking on Wednesday. And Wall Street Journal had some story where they talked to a bunch of Republicans, basically, who said that Biden is slipping, right?

And they don't have any Democrats on the record. They only have like Kevin McCarthy on the record, which is, it's like ridiculous, you know? And I only noticed the story because I went on Twitter and like all like Biden supporters are sharing the story to dunk on it. Yeah. And I'm like, I don't know that this would have been a big deal.

Right, right. Otherwise, and I realized that the age thing is that damaging narrative. I'm sure it's even more so now than in 2020 for a host of reasons. Right, right. the attack itself. Yeah, and I think in this case, you know, I think that they're sort of torn between a very old-fashioned idea of trying to send a signal to other reporters about what, you know, about the quality of reporting.

I think that there's a... But the fact is that, yeah, so the people in the White House around the campaign who are pushing back are probably trying to communicate with basically nine reporters at the Washington Post and Bloomberg who might do their own version of this story. And try to shame the Wall Street Journal, which there is value in doing. Absolutely. But the fact is that then you have a whole community of, you know, lefty online personalities who have their own audiences who take a signal from, oh, well, you know, Andrew Bates at the White House is shaming the Wall Street Journal. That's what we should be doing today. And then it becomes

the dominant thing that the pro-Biden internet is on today is shaming a reporter at the Wall Street Journal about a story that probably very few voters would ever have seen to begin with. Or if they did, it would be like, oh, yeah, do think joe biden's old i've had that for a while yeah yeah right but it's funny because like i i tweeted you know a story where the only thing i did is i did not respond to it i tweeted a story where there's like seven republican senators who were like yeah i've talked to joe biden and he's great from like a couple years ago and then like kevin mccarthy the story where he was like yeah i'm private i've talked to him he's really sharp and then like said nothing else and then went on to start tweeting about, you know, the story about how like Trump and Bannon are like ready to throw Democrats in prison and Laura Loomer's calling for

their execution. I'm like, like, let's focus on that stuff. But it is it's the decentralization, I think, is such a challenge. And campaigns are by by their design, trying to control the information environment. They cannot do that. Basically, all campaigns can control now is their candidate's message, their paid advertising. And like you said, Trump sometimes does. They can send a signal, I think, to their supporters about what matters, what the best, what the most effective negative messages at the comparative message against their opponent, and also the most positive, the best, most effective positive message for the candidate. I think they can do that. And I don't know, I feel like that, that the sending the signal stuff is probably something that our side could work on a bit more.

Yeah. And we should say like, you know, that was not a bad logic for political communicators 30 years ago. You know, if you mentioned city newspaper is, there are local TV, three TV networks, and two news weeklies, and whatever TV ads we can put into their living room on one of three networks. And at some point, what we can put in their mailbox, and that's going to be... That's it. That's it. And maybe they hear something at the park or at the bar, but it's not deciding it's going to get scale or reach a large number of people. If you're a David Axelrod or a Karl Rove or somebody of that era, that logic, okay, that is something you can shape. It's obviously not the case anymore. And so I think that people have sort of adjusted by degrees, but have not had a wholesale rethinking of everything we thought about how to communicate

was tethered to this environment. And those 12 news organizations, we should note, like, you know, we're at a moment where American media aspire to a certain type of neutrality that is close to unique in the world. And we just have this peculiar confluence of factors in the late 20th century that's the creative communications playbook that is no longer applicable. And it's going to take, you know, a significant shift in, I think, the minds of people who are making decisions inside campaigns to fully break away from it.

Yeah. And again, it's like, you know, mission accomplished with trying to shape the traditional media in a way that's going to be beneficial to Joe Biden and not to Donald Trump. Right. Because again, all the people who are reading the New York Times, all the people who are watching CNN, they're voting for Joe Biden. Yes. Or at least Joe Biden's winning them by a huge amount, way more than he'll ever win the presidency by. But then I think of all the platforms now, especially in 2024, like TikTok, one of the reasons it is so scary to, I think, a lot of Democrats right now and problematic is because you can't even track the misinformation, the disinformation on TikTok or the propaganda or whatever you may want to call it. And that I

don't know how you solve for because you can, you know, like the Biden campaign is on TikTok. Great. And they're talking to some influencers. But then like beyond that, how do you even know what's on there that's damaging? Yeah, no, I think that's that. You're absolutely right. I mean, so, you know, a TikTok content doesn't have a link that exists in the world. Right.

So just as a simple fact, you can't send somebody in a conventional way the way you'd send them a tweet or a Facebook post. And that makes it for researchers impossible to see how something moves. In addition to the fact that the algorithm is particularly opaque and you're getting stuff from people that not only do you not follow, but it's hard to tell how and why you're getting it. And so it is a, I think rightfully people are sort of vexed by it. One of the main characters in the book, this woman Jory Craig, the first thing that she does when she goes to work for a campaign – she was basically the first counter disinformation operative in American politics. And the first thing she does when she goes to work for a campaign or a party is what she calls a landscape analysis. And it's basically, let's map the communications landscape in the area we care about. It could be an issue area like abortion. It could be a geographic area like Arizona. And let's see, what are the crucial nodes for

information to move? How are things networked? And what is like a baseline level of communication on a given topic or theme every day? So I think one of the things that people who are not looking at this in a sort of ongoing holistic way do is something's trending today.

Okay, you know, Sleepy Joe is trending today. Well, do you know if it's trending any more than it trended yesterday? Do you know if it's trending when the same people with whom it trended yesterday? And so some of it is just to create that baseline map so that when you get into the ebb and flow of a campaign and stuff is moving, you have some sense of context or proportion. And it has been over the years, gotten easier and more difficult on some of the platforms to have the data to intelligently assess that. But TikTok is orders of magnitude more difficult to make sense of than Facebook

or Twitter or Instagram or any of the places. Yeah. Last question. I'll let you go. Larger than this, any individual political campaign is, I think, the concern that this is just incredibly destabilizing to democracies, not just here in the United States, but all over the world. Have you seen any examples or signs of hope that people are developing tools and strategies to actually push this in a better direction so that we can sort of get a handle on this? Or is this just still sort of the Wild West and people are just trying to, you know, just do what they can in individual campaigns? I think it's closer to the Wild West. And, you know, the thing we haven't talked much about is the role of the platforms themselves

and their policies in this. I think if you want to find causes to be optimistic, it would be to hope that the sort of posture of the platforms is cyclical here. You know, we have been since 2017, roughly, you know, which I think if you had to pinpoint the moment where the techno-optimism we started with turned to whatever bleak reality

we're in now, it's Cambridge Analytica story broke in 2017, and I think that was the moment that probably the consensus view of people was like, Facebook's probably a net neutral or good force in American life to a net bad force in American life turned. What has, the platforms have gone through, I think we're on like their third sort of cycle

of just their posture towards content moderation on politics. There was a big show in 2018 and into 2019 of saying we take seriously basically policing content around elections in particular on our platform, not just in the U.S., but Facebook created this global election war room where they hired a lot of people and they went to the media and said, hey, like, we have our hands around this and we are committed to making sure that people don't get bad information on our platform. We're putting resources behind it.

That was the generally I think that attitude was shared by the major online platforms through the 2020 election. Obviously, right after January 6th, basically every platform took down, and their biggest show of commitment to this principle took down Trump's accounts. And then a few things happened afterwards. One, the Republican Party organized itself against content moderation as a policy position. Two, Twitter, which had been, I think, generally putting upward pressure on other platforms by taking this relatively seriously after the Musk acquisition obviously, you know, created a floor whereby there was very little motivation for other platforms to have basically concluded there's more to lose by antagonizing the right than there is to gain either in civic terms or in sort of PR terms by placating a broad center and left that want to see a more active sort of content moderation. Now, that changed quickly and it could change again. And I think it is worth, if you go back to the utopian times, some of that was that, you know, people like us looked at campaigns and thought, hey, generally this is getting people more involved and that seems good.

But part of it was that companies like Facebook wanted to be associated with politicians like Barack Obama. Like that was a very successful PR effort. You know, Google and Twitter loved being associated with the, I mean, Google, with the Arab Spring. I mean, that, and to you, I could imagine, you know, there was, there were just the valence of this is, social movements are being created on our platforms. We are bringing people into a community. They worked very hard to be associated with politics during that period. They also, it's a big advertising, you know, $16 billion or something is going to be sent on the election. That's a significant share of potential advertising revenue.

I could imagine it would not take a whole lot over the next two years or four years for some of these tech platforms to think, okay, there's a, you know, these platforms have all sent some signal like we're not really a place for political communication anymore to start saying, hey, we want some of that advertising business back. And part of that is we need to send a signal to political communicators that, you know, in the same way that Fortune 500 companies don't put ads in porn magazines, that we are like a place that there is serious fear of regulation as there was in the 2018 period that makes the companies say we're going to try to stave off the regulation by doing more ourselves. I think that is a conceivable shift. And I think we have seen that they can turn the switch on both specific policies and putting the resources behind them pretty quickly and could do it again. Yeah, I think that's all right. And I think to your point about the potential charismatic candidate, I just think whether it's a single candidate or a movement, I do think that the pro-democracy forces do need to find a way to develop these same strong communities online that are bound by sort of joy in what they're doing. I think that there is this sense of belonging you get from whether it's QAnon or being at a Trump rally on the right. And I think we need to figure out on our side

how to create that, or at least how to encourage that, even if we can't necessarily control it. Sasha Eisenberg, thank you so much. The book is The Lie Detectives. It's a great book. Everyone should read it. It's a quick read, but just fascinating stuff if you're a campaign nerd and an internet nerd like me. So, thanks for sitting down with me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, John. Before we go, some quick housekeeping. If today's conversation with Sasha about people in politics

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