The Bulwark Podcast - Sasha Issenberg: Politics, Disinformation, and 2024

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

In 2016, the Trump campaign used microtargeting to suppress the Clinton vote. Since then, digital malfeasance has become the dominant subplot in our politics. How did the Biden team respond to 'Sleepy Joe' and 'Creepy Joe' in 2020, and what's the game plan for viral disinfo in '24? Issenberg joins Tim today. show notes By Sasha: The Lie Detectives The Engagement

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm Tim Miller. Well, we have a rematch. Officially, we've all known this, but President Biden and former President Trump have both officially won enough delegates as of last night to be the presumptive nominees for the party.

Remember, it's Wednesday, so if you want hot political takes on that, head on over to the Next Level feed. I am here today with a very smart political mind himself, old friend, Sasha Eisenberg. He is an author and journalist. His brand new book is The Lie Detectives, In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age. You might remember, Sasha, he wrote The Victory Lab in 2012 about the Obama data nerds. And he also wrote a magnum opus about gay marriage called

The Engagement. We might do some gay stuff at the end. Sasha, thanks for doing this, brother. Thanks for having me, Tim. Great to be with you. Before we get to your book, any big grand thoughts about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Part Deux, and how we got here? I mean, the one thing that just as somebody who's dreading just the kind of soul-crushing nature of this election season we have in front of us that maybe got me excited. Listen to the Bulwark podcast more. That's how you can handle the crushing dread, you know? Was like Trump's comments about entitlement programs on CNBC this week, which just like, it was this glimmer of return to old politics. Like maybe we'll just have, you know, stupid democratic demagoguery on entitlement cuts

like we grew up with instead of some of the other insanity. But it was, it was like a porthole back to like, you know, campaigns in 1996. What might come of that. So moderately optimistic. The other funny thing about that CNBC interview that you're referencing, so Trump was on Squawk Box the other day, which is when he appeared open to entitlement cuts, which is crazy. It's very untrumpy. It's like one of his insightful lizard brain things was that he was the one Republican in 2016 who wasn't supporting entitlement reform. So it was a strange strategic choice for him. But the other interesting thing back to old politics about that interview was like why he was doing it, which is that he needs money. Yeah. Right. You know, and like in the past, Trump has been outspent in every campaign,

but they're in such dire financial straits right now and the RNC had to cut 60 people the money is being repurposed to his various legal entities and so like he's on CNBC because he needs rich guys to give him money and the other you know data point in that this week is that his apparent sort of flip-flop on TikTok was driven by Jeff Yass the Republican mega donor and club for growth guy who had been sort of slow to come into the folds and is now sort of ready to put up money. He also owns 15%, I think, of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and hired Kellyanne Conway. And by all accounts, Trump went from being an anti-TikTok guy to a pro-TikTok guy overnight to placate a large donor, which is another part of the, at least the mythology on this around Trump in 2016

was the, you know, I don't know anybody, anything because I fund my own campaigns, which was not entirely true, but I do think was, you know, part of what seemed to make him a different type of political figure. And now I wonder if we're in a season where he's going to do sort of more conventional rich guy bidding. And we see that on a, you know, not just in terms of where he does his interviews, but on policy changes as well. Yeah, I mean, the swampiness of it is maybe more of a vulnerability for him than the TikTok policy change itself, right? You know, and literally, he's got Kellyanne Conway's being paid. This is

like classic swampy stuff. It's a rare example of a kind of lobbying story that could break through to news just because the TikTok thing is relatable, because the China angle is something that it sort of plays so well into, into Trump's politics, because Kellyanne Conway is a, you know, household name, like all of it is the rare thing where some of these other stories that we've read in in the Times and the Washington Post that some donor once went to mar-a-lago got like a sub agency at a cabinet to do this thing it was always so arcane this is actually kind of graspable i think yeah i agree with that i want to talk more about tiktok in a minute but why don't you just give people uh the elevator pitch on the line detectives um so we can get into you, I think a lot of really sort of important

externalities and an ever-changing thing. I guess it was, were you a little bit concerned to make this a book given how quickly things are changing? Why don't you kind of tell people about that and about the premise of the book? I made it a short, fast book, both in sort of how quickly I turned it around and how quickly it is to read, which I believe my last one gave you a hernia, Tim. It did. I did. Think of this as corrective surgery. Thank God it was during COVID, you know, because I was just like, really, Sasha? 812 pages? I don't know how many pages it actually was. I mean, I like gay marriage as much as the next guy, but that was even, it was a little much for me and my TikTok brain. So this one you can read in an afternoon. We've heard a lot about

disinformation and its place in our politics since 2016. And Somerset has been the sort of like dominant subplot to almost everything that has happened in our politics. Certainly all the stuff around the 2020 election, January 6th, COVID response. And I think we've all heard a lot about what the threat is to democracy, about how it's used as a geopolitical tool. I think we've read a lot about what the platforms, social media companies are or are not doing. The one thing that seemed to be missing was, what does it mean if you are inside of a campaign? And that could be a candidate's campaign or a party committee or a super PAC. And you're in this new environment where your opposition is not your opponent it's

not the other candidate the other party but is somebody who is spreading stuff about you online whose name you probably don't know because they're you know an anonymous meme maker in their basement or they belong to a foreign intelligence service or they're somebody who has figured out how to make a buck selling ad clicks to fake websites. And the whole playbook that folks like you were raised with about how you think about communications, what you say, when you say, where you say it, what you choose to respond to, what you don't respond to. That was all shaped in an era of television, you know, big central newspapers where the candidates were the loudest voice for their campaigns and were no longer in that environment. And so this book was my effort to sort of explore what the smartest people in politics were thinking, are thinking about how you run campaigns in this media environment. All right. So just before we get to 2024, let's go back a little

bit to where this starts. So the book starts after 2016. You'd written, I guess, in October with somebody I talked to a couple months ago, Josh Green, who's also got another really good new book out about the populist left. And you guys wrote about Trump's anti-democratic, the voter suppression tactics, and how they aimed it at three groups that Hillary needed to win, kind of idealistic white liberals. And they thought maybe she was too swampy, younger women and black voters. There was a lot of particular interest in what they did with black voters. And so talk a little bit about that. And this was maybe a proto effort, but, you know, there was a lot of focus on what was happening in the Russian side of things.

But, you know, the Trump campaign was using some pretty interesting, interesting is maybe the nicest way to put it, tactics in 2016 that the other side really wasn't. Yeah. So, you know, my book, The Victory Lab came out in 2012. And it was about all these innovations and campaigns actually involving new data that was available. It allowed campaigns to profile voters and sort of tailor their contact with them. And it was a largely happy story about politics.

It was campaigns were investing in things like training volunteers to knock on doors because they could be more targeted and efficient with it. The communication you were getting from campaigns was more likely to address the issues you cared about because campaigns no longer felt like they had to communicate with 50% of the electorate at one time. They could dig in on small groups of interest. Voter turnout has gone up in the 21st century. And I sort of argued that part of that was because campaigns were focusing on on GOTV in a new way and so this was a happy story I mean it was literally about engaging new people and getting new people involved in the process and like that was the whole premise of what the Obama data

operation was and I've had a lot of reason in the 12 years since to worry that I was naive about about that I into the club yes so. So I wrote very little about the internet, but obviously so much of what we see about new technology and campaigns over the last decade seems like people using it as a force for ill in a way that I did not anticipate. And that really crystallized when Josh Green and I, we spent several days in San Antonio with the Brad Parscale-led Trump digital operation. And there was that moment where we quoted a senior Trump campaign official talking about these voter suppression efforts that they had underway and how they were using Facebook

dark posts to target those sort of specific demographic groups you mentioned. And it was the first time I had personally encountered somebody using the language of sophisticated, modern, data-driven campaigning to drive voters away from the process, actively confuse them. And clearly, what's happened in the seven or eight years since has given me all of the reasons I think that was not an anomaly. That one, social media does lend itself to efforts to confuse or mislead people and that created all these avenues for for bad actors i mean not like gary bucey but like bad actors to to get involved in our our political process and what was interesting to me is like what does that mean when you're on the other side of it right if you're joe biden or you're the dnc or you're

nicky haley or, and you're up against folks who are playing by a new set of rules or no rules at all, what does that mean for you? Biden team did learn a little bit about this in 2020. And like, actually, you know, sort of, they weren't blindsided by it, at least. And so talk about kind of what they learned, and how they decided to deal with the efforts in 2020, which just to be clear, I think it's going to be kind of patty cake compared to what we've got coming over the next eight months. But talk about their 2020 efforts and how they decided to engage or not engage on some of the disinformation side of things. Yeah. So in the summer of 2020, Biden was blessed with a couple of things that most campaigns don't have. A lot of money and a lot of, and relatively speaking, a lot of time.

And so they invested in this sort of massive research project to identify what bits of disinformation were, and this is a quote from Rob Flaherty, who's now the deputy campaign manager, market moving. And their view was, yes, lots of people are going to be online every day making up and spreading lies about Joe Biden. And, you know, maybe not things are outright lies, but things that are misrepresentations or attacks that are going to move virally instead of moving through TV ads. And probably the smart thing to do in like, you know, 97% of the cases is ignore them because they're not reaching a lot of people. They're not reaching a lot of people who might ever vote for Joe Biden. I mean, so much of the sort of trash online is Trump supporters flattering each other by coming up with crazy stuff that they use to gin one another up, but it's not actually sort of a strategic threat. And they wanted to really be focusing on things

that were what Flaherty calls a 50 plus one problem. Is this going to make us harder to win the votes we need to win? And if not, I quote him saying like, okay, this might be a problem for democracy. This might be a problem for our society, but it's not a problem for us as the Biden for president campaign. And this was a really tricky problem for politicians, especially on the left after 2016, because so many of them couldn't really separate their worry about disinformation as a geopolitical social problem from their self-interest, hour-to-hour, day-to-day running for office. And there was this, I think, sort of resistance era instinct among well-meaning people that was like, and this manifests itself in all sorts of anti-Trump politics, like we have

to do something. And the thing about online disinformation is that often doing something is totally the wrong answer, right? So there's a kind of Streisand effect, which is like you draw attention to stuff that maybe is not getting a big audience by paying attention to it. Two, the whole structure of social media is built to reward engagement. So if you are responding to a lie to fact check it or debunk it or sass it or whatever, you are helping to drive eyeballs to it. And then the third part, which is a little more nuanced is, and you know this, Tim, as a campaign professional, like every day you have things that you want to accomplish.

You want to make the news about X. You are using all the tools at your disposal to do that. You have a limited capacity to drive attention towards your priorities. You want to communicate with your supporters. You want to win over persuadable voters. You want to communicate with your donors. And if you spend every day responding to what somebody else is putting in front of you, you're not going to be doing the proactive communications. And so the Biden folks, that was sort of the framework that they brought to this. This is also different. I mean, there's some parallels between calm strategy, right? You'd think about this from a PR side, like, are you going to respond to this attack or not? But in an advertising space, this is really new. I just like to put a finer point on this. Like in 2010, if your opponent was on TV with an ad accusing you of something that's false

or hyperbolic, you know, there wasn't really a should we respond to this or should we not? Right. It was like you kind of had no choice but to because like this is the channel. There's just one big channel and it's TV ads during the six o'clock news or whatever. And so, you know, unless you thought it was a dumb attack, which I guess happened occasionally, but most of this was based in polling and based in research, like you had to respond to it. Right. And you guys had a just sort of, you know, both you could quantify and you had an innate understanding about what volume and reach of the attack meant. Right. So, I mean, you could literally quantify it. Like they would tell you how many points have they bought? How many impressions? So you would know, in a campaign, okay, they put 200 points, and it's on the 6pm news,

that means one thing, they put 1000 points, and it's running on primetime. That gives you a sense of who whom it's reaching. Did this make it on the front page of the Chicago Tribune? Or is it stuck on B 12? in a small story? That'll shape how much of a problem is for you. Is this getting traction on talk radio? You had a mental map of the media environment and just instinctively knew what was breaking through and what wasn't. And some social media platforms are more transparent than others.

But still, the basic question of who is seeing this, whom is this reaching is just like not, doesn't translate well. I mean, so even we see stuff like, oh, 100,000 people view this. Do they live in the state that you're running in? Do they live in the country that you're running in? Are they over 18 years old? Can they vote? Are they a bunch of people who will never support you or will always support you? These are really difficult technical questions to solve, given how opaque the social media platforms choose to be. And so the whole playbook that folks in your generation, not to make you feel old, works

from doesn't translate to digital media this way. And so what the Biden folks wanted to do was, their take was that campaigns, especially post-2016 when there was a focus on this in the US, were thinking about disinformation as a supply side problem. So in their view, we looked at a particular piece of content, and it could be a deepfake video, it could be a Twitter post that had a false claim in it, it could be a conspiracy theory, whatever. And campaigns were inclined to play whack-a-mole with those as they popped up. So they did their best with the data that they had to determine who was this reaching and like,

is it moving, trending quickly or slowly? And then respond to each one as it came along. And maybe that was pushing back in a kind of traditional comms way. Maybe that was going to the platforms to try to get it taken down. But their view was that that was the wrong way to think about this. And it was better to think of this, as they said, as a demand side problem. What does that mean? It means the stuff that is going to cause a problem for Biden, the stuff that's going to stick and change opinions, the stuff that responds to existing doubts, concerns, anxieties that voters have. And let's identify what those are so that we can anticipate which of these viral narratives actually have the power to move people.

And so they did this big research project starting in the summer of 2020. And they used some of the data that was being collected about which viral narratives were moving online. So at the time, this included, you know, and they used Trump shorthand a lot for this because he's good at that. So Sleepy Joe, right, that he's old and mentally diminished creepy joe we hear a lot less about this one these days but the idea that hair sniffing yeah they tried to make a thing out of that handsy with young young women stuff about kamala harris both sort of narratives that she was too far to the left and too far to the right on criminal

justice issues they made up a couple they called them herrings, just to put them in the poll to kind of create a baseline of what people would say that they responded to. One of them was that Joe Biden belongs to an all-white country club, which is in no way true, but they pulled it just to get a sense of what people would say yes to regardless. And then they mapped, they asked two questions. One, are you familiar with this? And two, would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden? And they mapped this on a graph, and they had two axes, one of which showed the reach, how many people had heard this, and the other one showed how potentially damaging it was in terms of people whose opinions would be changed. And what they found was, for example,

the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, a lot of people by getting into the fall of 2020 had heard about this. They were familiar with these claims. I'm sorry, Sasha. I'm sorry. I forgot to interrupt you there. That is not possible because the social media companies stifled the Hunter Biden story and the Hunter Biden laptop. And this was an election interference effort by big tech and the deep state and the Illuminati. You've been told that, yes. I've seen several Republican oversight hearings that were premised on this that note that one of the reasons why Joe Biden won is because this was silenced. So I don't understand. So as it happens, even before the laptop, this was the subject of an impeachment of Donald Trump, stuff had broken through. Got it. Okay. But this was sort of revealed through focus groups.

So a lot of persuadable voters had heard this. They were familiar with it. But it didn't actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden because this focus group showed- It was about Hunter Biden and they're different people. Well, yes. So that's what I was- They would not vote for Hunter Biden.

Yes. They did not see Biden as motivated by personal financial interests. So they'd heard all of it, but it didn't actually change their views of him. But the Sleepy Joe stuff did affect them. Why? Not because they were actually, and this came through in the focus groups, concerned about Biden's physical fitness. They saw Biden as this fundamentally weak political figure. I think probably a lot of this has to do with being defined as vice president, sort of the way he stumbled through a big field in the Democratic primary without ever really being the main character. And the voters' doubts, as I quote one pollster saying, were that Biden would not be the author

of his presidency. They saw weakness. They didn't really know what he stood for. They worried he would be controlled by other people in the White House. And that manifests itself in being more receptive to stuff about his age and mental fitness. And so for the comms department, the folks who schedule what Joe Biden does in front of cameras every day had been pushing stuff like, let's do photo ops of him on a bicycle so people will see that he's fit and energetic. Let's have him run up the stairs to his play.

Those ideas seem to have backfired a little bit. Well, he slipped one or two times, which literally backheel fire. But what this research project showed was they didn't really address what voters were worried about. They weren't worried that he couldn't ride a bike or walk. They had this deeper worry about his political presence. And so the solutions they came up with in some way are sort of banal, but they started buying ads against social media searches. be pushed to an ad, a 15-second ad that showed Biden speaking to camera, seemingly unedited, talking about what he wanted to do on the economy. And that was the stuff that seemed, to the group of voters who were worried about the age issue, that was actually a thing that

was the most persuasive to them. And so they thought of this as avoiding the problem of drawing attention to the actual claim by attacking the underlying anxieties. So now we fast forward to this time and the Sleepy Joe stuff is going to be even more of a concern for people because... He's older. Yeah, he's older. I cover math and politics, Tim. Yeah, every day for people because he's older yeah he's older i cover math and politics tim so every day every day he's one day older this is something we've mentioned quite a few times on the ballpark podcast and so we've got that so now you're kind of combining both right there are some people who still perceive him as a weak political leader to me like that seems easier to combat this time and you sort of see that with their opening ad talking about how he did infrastructure

week, right? And the other guy's also old and talked about how he wanted to do it every week and didn't do it. I do think that unable to get things done week, this time it feels to me like that's the easier problem to solve. And so it's kind of the inverse of 2020, where it's the other problem, the actual, the age, the fitness, the mental acuity. And you're already seeing, I don't have full access to everything that's happening on the internet,

but just casually, like looking through my TikTok, my other social media feeds, like you see these Joe Biden old mashups, Trump put out some meme where he's going to the visiting angels retirement home. So how does that look this time as compared to 2020? It obviously is a more immediate concern now. Biden is more of a focal point of this campaign than he was in 2020 when obviously Trump was in office and for a variety of reasons. COVID. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there's this often folks will look at the campaign, say they're not responding to X or Y that is getting a lot of attention on TikTok, on Facebook. And obviously we do see and then he started, as you suggest, that ad by saying, hey, I'm not did not want to, when the thinking of the communications was,

let's do a lot of things that are under the waterline addressing this, but not help put age in the headlines every day. Now I think that they realize that that is like, you can't be subtle about it. Not an option. But I do think that, you know, we tend to, as outside observers, sort of backseat drive campaigns

by looking at what they say. And I think what I have learned about how they approach this in 2020 is that, particularly when you deal with these sort of viral disinformation problems, that their responses are not always saying the thing that they're responding to, right? And that they will be thinking about ways to address, you know, the age issue specifically among the whatever 8, 10, 11% of the electorate that's persuadable and moved on that issue through other mechanisms. And I think we need to just like every time we talk about persuasion in this campaign, realize what a small slice of the electorate we're dealing with these days in you know certainly in presidential

politics been a lot of statewide politics and realize how different persuadable voters are from certainly the people who would read a book like mine or listen to a podcast like yours so there's this imbalance, and I want to talk about it from both perspectives, with how the two sides look at the disinformation issue. On the Republican side, there is a ton of energy put into how can we manipulate Democratic voters to help us and use these tools to help us, and very little to thinking about how do we defend against this. And on the Democratic side, there's very little energy put into how do we manipulate Republican voters using misinformation tactics to help our

candidates, and just a ton of energy put into how do we combat it, right? And so I don't know which side, why don't we take the Republican side first, and whether that is a fair summation of your interviews and your research on this. I was reporting this mostly through over the course of 2022. And I spent most of the time with Democrats or folks on the left, you know, primarily in the US, I also did, there's a chapter that's set in Brazil, before the first round of voting there, because I think a lot of the dynamics and challenges are very similar. You know, but I didn't set out to write a book about what Democrats are doing

to combat disinformation. I wanted, and the Victory Lab, as you know, was about both sides because there was a lot of interesting innovation that was happening. Oh, I should have worn my Project Orca sweatshirt for this interview. I totally, oh, that was a total miss by me. But yeah, the Victory Lab was, it was an attempt to look at both sides. It's just the Obama people were better. Yeah, but I wrote about the Bush campaign in in 2004 which had been incredibly innovative on a number of

fronts and so i kept on asking some of the smartest people i knew in republican politics who would be sort of you know most plugged in like hey you know i'm writing about this counter disinformation stuff i'm feeling finding all sorts of you know democratic firms that are specializing this the dnc has a point person the democratic congressional campaign committee has a point person on this like there are a lot of people in democratic politics by 2022 who's like business card said counter disinformation strategist like i just want to make sure i'm not missing anything like on the right like is there nobody who's doing this and time and time again people will be like no we don't do this and it's

because they didn't think of disinformation as a actual category. And folks on the right, and this is actually something that I think pretty much unites the kind of Trumpy MAGA folks and the kind of establishment elite professional Republicans who used to be your friends, Tim. I know. Sad. who used to be your friends, Tim. I know. It's sad. Is that there are sort of united in thinking that disinformation, in quotes,

is a concept that Democrats invented in 2017 to explain away losing a presidential election and that they had begun to use as a predicate for collaborating with government and academia to pressure tech companies to censor conservatives. And there are instances where some part of that

dynamic has played out. It's not entirely baseless as a claim, but they become dismissive of the whole idea that this is a different type of political speech. And I think that that shapes both the willingness to participate and contribute to it, but also the view that there is no need to develop a particular mindset or expertise for responding to it. And that remains the case in Republican politics today. It's not baselessly exaggerated, you know, but it's not baseless. I mean, it's just reality. Part of the reason why Elon took over Twitter is that they were taking down more right-wing speech and claims than they were lefty. Now, part of that is because there was more right-wing speech and lies out there, and there's more active disinformation. And I think, to me, this is what explains it, is that there's more of an intentional effort to manipulate coming from the right than there is from the left.

I just think that's an objective fact. In some ways, this is where I get my old Republican rat fucker hat on, which is why I'm kind of like, why? I mean, maybe instead of having a lot of Democrats with business cards that say counter disinformation, there should be Democrats with business cards that say disinformation. They probably wouldn't put it on their business card. But right, why are they doing it more? And one character from the book, just full disclosure, is a friend of the pod, Dimitri Melhorn, who works with Reid Hoffman on various projects. This tension is represented in his actions, right? So in 2017, they led an effort in Alabama to use some of these tactics to tamp down support for Roy Moore. There was some fake news

websites targeting conservatives. There was an effort to get conservatives to write in somebody else rather than Roy Moore. To me, all of it seemed pretty, I thought that there was a lot of ado about not much in my one man's opinion. But it was using some of these tactics that are very frequently used on the right by foreign governments. And the response to that, maybe rightly, was that like, okay, this was, you know, maybe too aggressive. This was, it goes against values. And the Democrats are now, you know, trying to figure out, you know, spending more, much, much, much, much, much more energy and resources on combating it than trying to fight. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So if you go back to 2017, when this special election in Alabama happened, the menu of options available for Democrats who are just beginning to think about

this, it was like really long and open and like, yeah, wild west people were throwing out all sorts of things. one of which was like well why don't we you know trump's a big threat why don't we fight fire with fire and why aren't we doing this too yeah so some of hoffman's money ends up funding these two separate projects in alabama about a year later a year after the election the washington post and the new york times end up doing these doing these sort of investigative stories about the projects and that identify that Hoffman was a significant funder of both of them. And the response was, wow, we're getting hit for being hypocrites. This is a bad news cycle. And Hoffman and Melhorn in

particular, they had spoken pretty high-mindedly about Trump as a threat to democracy, and they had set themselves up as sort of defenders of liberal democracy. And so when you have tactics that seem at odds with that, then charges of hypocrisy are reasonable to make. And so they very quickly put out a statement, basically, that was broad and vague, but basically said, hey, we don't support this with our money. And it short-circuited what had been a very open debate on the left about whether these types of tactics were an appropriate set of tools to be using to fight Trump. Because Hoffman had emerged as one of, if not the biggest source of new money in democratic

politics. Basically, everybody in lefty politics, center-right politics, either was getting his money or wanted some of his money at that point. And, you know, Demetri Melhorn almost single-handedly set a moral code for Democrats that, you being adopted by the big established super PACs, the Democratic Party organizations, because he controlled the purse strings, especially around a lot of innovative tech forward political stuff. And so you can find all sorts of Democrats, activists, consultants who will off the record say, like saying the same thing they were in 2017. Why aren't we fighting fire with fire? Why are we operating according to like a totally outdated code of how you compete online these days?

And the best answer is because of what happened in Alabama in 2017 and the fallout from it. That said, I do really find it hard to imagine, we're now in March of 2024, that if we reconvened in eight months after election day, and assuming that Trump is on the precipice of returning to the White House, that some of those self-enforced moral standards might go out the window and that we will have seen like a major effort, maybe by a democratic super PAC, maybe by people who, you know, not by the Biden campaign itself, but to try to apply some of these tactics to defeat him. Just in fairness of full disclosure, I don't think that the Democrats are fully white hat on all this. Like there are some areas, you know, like in the quasi journalism space, you know, there are some areas you know like in the quasi-journalism space you

know there's some efforts out there where like democrats have created kind of lefty news and so this is sort of like this gray area like is this disinformation where it's like you know it's like the roanoke gazette or something and it's really kind of democratic operatives running a news site and it's like is this news is it not is it presenting itself as something it isn't so they're doing a little bit of i mean like the scale of that compared to what's happening from foreign and from the right i think is not much but it's just worth mentioning that it's not like they've totally left it absolutely and i but i do i will say and i think a lot of this is because of being responsive to donors is a lot of those sites you dig through them and it's hidden

and whatever but you get to the about us and there is some disclosure. They say the truth. Yeah, you know, like they say, you know, we're devoted to progressive causes, blah, blah, whatever the sort of boilerplate is. And a lot of the vogue in progressive communications now is to think about how to create your own communications network that can make up for the weaknesses of traditional mainstream news organizations that were once sort of used as arbiters of truth and the Democrats relied on to amplify and communicate to large audiences. Okay, we're going to move through just a couple other things before I lose you, Sasha. TikTok, just really briefly, obviously, there's a lot of discussion about this on the policy side,

we'll be talking about that more. I'm more interested in hearing from you. It is like even more of a black box in all of these other sites, right? So at least with Twitter, you know, or Facebook, like you can get an individualized link for everything. And it's like pretty, like relatively easy to get. TikTok is like, you know, every once in a while, I'll be scrolling through my For You page, and there'll be something that's just totally made up that has 900,000 views. You've never heard of the person. You've never seen this. You know, I just think that what is happening on there, how to monitor it is very challenging. So how are these guys looking at that? Like, how do you monitor this?

I mean, at least on the other stuff, it was opaque, but doable. I just don't know if it's even doable to monitor the information that's on TikTok. I don't think it conventionally is, and I'll throw into the mix. The other place that people in campaigns are worried about this year are private messaging apps. Yes. WhatsApp is a great example, especially in immigrant communities where it is turned into a kind of weird hybrid of like a broadcast platform and a group text. But sometimes you'll have thousands of people, tens of thousands of i was doing a lynn wood story remember that clown who was pushing the election fraud i was doing i was writing about him back in 21 and and his i think it was signal i'd have to go back and look at it yeah but it had like a hundred thousand followers on it or

something like that and it was you have to subscribe to it or you couldn't see it yeah you have to subscribe be approved invite only and, you know, one of the things that I write about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, like one of the things they've started doing when they send a field organizer out, and they're particularly focused on this in like Southern California, where you have large Asian communities that are particularly relying on these community WhatsApp channels, South Florida, where Latino voters are, is they tell the field organizer, not just like open up an office, order some pizza, get your volunteers in and train them, but go meet people and just ask to get into all the private

Facebook groups, into all the WhatsApp groups and send reports to Washington on what's moving there every day. Because just like TikTok, there is no way for an outsider to peek in. You have to become an insider. That's a good act. A lot of times we get people that are like, what should I do? What can I do in my community? Infiltrate the WhatsApp feeds in your community and report up to the campaigns. Yeah, absolutely. Lastly, on this topic, and I have two other really quick things off the topic of this book, is Jiori Craig is a character you close the book with disinformation worker on the democratic side it ends pretty pessimistic frankly about the state of affairs and so how dark are the democrats just about whether this is even a solvable thing at this point or solvables maybe

have too big of a word but even an addressable is maybe a better word yeah so jory craig was the main character the book started doing this in 2017. And over the course of the time I spent with her, she grew more and more fatalistic, I think, about whether the stuff she was doing was having a major impact. I think she feels like Democrats have gotten better at tracking and making some of the assessments we talked about and making the decisions about how and when to respond. But the scope of the problem is getting worse, largely because the platforms are more actively disdainful of the idea that it's their job to deal with this.

And so... And literally, in the case of Twitter, we could have done a whole episode on Elon Musk, but it's just worth saying that he not only is not interested in combating disinformation, he seems actively interested in advancing disinformation. Yes, that's right. And like the Jim Jordan hearings in the House, Republican attorneys general are suing tech companies. It's all scaring other companies like Facebook in particular,

Meta, who had at least sort of made gestures to caring about this because they were concerned about basically drawing regulatory interest in Washington. Now they see far more cost in antagonizing Republicans than there is upside in staving off regulation. So I could come up with some scenarios where maybe things turn in a different direction in two years or four years because of things that happened at Washington, because of things that happened in Silicon Valley. But I think the near-term outlook is, this is becoming a harder problem to solve. And all the tools that Democrats have developed are giving them some good tactics and sort of mitigation and response, but not to like wrestle

the problem in its entirety. My advice to Democratic policymakers in DC is to focus more on algorithm regulation and just creating rules around how they can do it. Because like doing the whack-a-mole with individual content, it's a bad look. I just like, it's a bad look if a company is just deleting information from one side, even if it's fair, it's still a bad look. And like the big problem for me is the algorithms. It's so bad on Twitter now that like if you quote tweet somebody to dunk on them, like then your algorithm just gets fed crazier and crazier shit, like by friends of the person that you dunked on. Right. And so it helps them expand. And we talked about this a little bit at the start and then tick tock with

the for you page. And the more they move to algorithmically delivered information versus follower to follower information to me, it's kind of kind of like okay if one follower wants to post false shit to their followers like that's bad but maybe unsolvable like the algorithm thing feels like the addressable issue okay i want one fight and then we'll talk about gay marriage fight is maybe the wrong word we felt we have a long standing dispute on this at least on the republican side where i'm of the view that they are very good at being shit-throwing monkeys and getting bad information out there, and not as good as they say they are at actually data targeting. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors. They'll tell you, oh, we tested this issue, and we know that it moves people. And it's kind of like, that's a lot harder to determine than it is to say that you you know to do a test

that says it right and there's one example this was the ron desantis campaign put huge effort put huge resources into this you wrote about it and you know they did this thing like oh we're going to test one message in a tumwa iowa and then another message in sioux city and we're going to test one message on text and we're going to get the results, and it's going to say, oh, this message is 3% better than the other message. And I read the article of interest, and they clearly took it seriously. They spent a lot of money on it. But my takeaway after reading the article was every dollar that went to that was totally wasted, like that their big problem was mass communications with their candidate, and that

like the data analytics side of things, you know know is that there's a lot of people selling bullshit out there so tell me that i'm wrong about that no i don't think you're wrong so like i i don't think we disagree as much as you want for the sake of a fight okay that's too bad look they spent 150 million dollars or something and this is i was writing about the super pack right yeah they spent a monstrous amount of money and i I think both things are true. The fate of his candidacy was shaped by his limitations as a communicator, his strategic indecision about how to deal with Trump, and all of the advanced analytics and experiments and data in the world would not have changed that. That said, the testing was focused

mostly on efficiency. So it was, you know, where do we deliver a certain message? And how do we deliver it? Do we do it with TV? Do we do it with direct mail? Do we do digital ads? And there it's like you're spending $150 million and you can learn how to be 10% more efficient in targeting your direct mail and TV, that's not nothing. I don't know. See, to me, all of the potential efficiency gains were offset by the cost of trying to figure out what was more efficient. Maybe. I mean, they were spending so much money in that period of 2023 that they had the opportunity to build in and experiments to them to learn from it.

And I think there is, you know, a lot to be said for that. That said, when I wrote the piece, I hope I laced through my skepticism of what they were finding from it. And also their reasons for talking about it, which, you know. You did lace through. I guess you have to be a real journalist. Like, to me, I wanted, like, this is clown shit. Like, I need a quote in there from somebody that's like this is crazy like this

is crazy they keep losing they've lost 15 points since they started these tests i mean i actually had a quote from jeff rowe this was not a piece in in puck news but i still quoted jeff rowe who who said like it's cya why we're doing this because they were fighting with the campaign and they needed to convince donors that they weren't just blowing through 100 million dollars with no results and so but i did want to explain the context of why and i always try to do this when i'm writing about this i was like so much of the research i'm writing about is happening in seeker and i want to give some indication to a reader why people are motivated to talk about some parts of their innovation agenda at times and not others. That's fair. Okay, lastly, you did write an 800 page book about gay marriage.

And you kind of wrote it at this time, where really, hopefully not forever, but maybe at the peak of the strength of the gay rights movement, you know, and I think that there's been clearly some backsliding between the don't say think that there's been clearly some backsliding between the don't say gay, there's been backsliding on gay marriage really, but on the don't say gay bills, things of this nature. So anyway, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on that three years out.

Do you feel the same way you did about the victory lab, that maybe you're in a moment and, you know, you didn't expect that things would get like this, you saw it coming? I'm curious to some big gay thoughts from you before we end. So I think I was naive in part because,

and you made this distinction in passing, but let me dwell on it, separating politics of marriage and the legal stature of marriage and a whole bunch of other issues of media concerns of the LGBT community. And this internal debate I write about throughout the book among gay rights

activists about how much to focus on marriage versus focusing on hate crimes or employment protection or AIDS funding or a bunch of things. And the argument that the people who wanted to focus on marriage made was marriage will lift all boats. It focuses on our relationships, on who we are, this sort of central thing, and hate crime's a secondary, and it's about protection. If we can convince a majority of Americans that our relationships are the same and interchangeable as theirs, that that will be a foundation on which all of our other political goals related to anti-discrimination and such will be built. And I thought that was a pretty persuasive

argument. So when I write this book, it came out in 2021, and I was writing it through the Supreme Court decisions, I did think that the progress on marriage would extend to other issues. And I saw a anti-gay part of the social conservative movement seemingly lose their interest in fighting over gay rights issues get very weak they got very weak some of the organizations like the national organization for marriage big players barely exist anymore other religious right groups started focusing on other things in retrospect i realized a lot of this was donald trump that he in 2016 signal hey i have a you know a lot of groups I want to pick on, immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, women, but did not give an indication that targeting, even personally, seems less

invested, frankly, in the trans stuff. Obviously, there are a lot of people around him who are, but I do think that Trump basically suppressed a lot of the anti-LGBT politics in his party over four years. And when he left the scene, a lot of that returned to the surface. And what had happened quietly, but I cover this at the end of my book, but probably not in enough depth and context, is the way in which the anti-gay rights activists realized even before the cases became to the superior court that they were going to lose this and they started redirecting their energy and attention and infrastructure and money towards the anti-trans stuff towards schools and schools yeah like really retro vintage yeah 70s are back overseas stuff you see a lot of the people who were fighting gay rights in the u.s in the 2000s up to 2010 are now in like zambia trying

to change their laws to keep gay sex criminalized and so what i had not realized is the extent to which the clear defeat for them on marriage did not mark a sort of permanent, you know, giving up on gay rights, but that they had sort of tactically gone to places where public opinion is better for them. You know, gay marriage still pulls over 70%, over 50% of Republicans approve it. And basically professional Republicans realize like, this is not a smart place to play, but we can find a whole lot of issues around sexual politics and the LGBT community that place to play, but we can find a whole lot of issues around sexual politics and the LGBT community that still are popular, or we can be on the front foot defining the conflict instead of reacting to it. And I think that, you know, we're going to see a lot

of this around the parents' rights and gender identity issues for years, decades to come. It's really smart. I'm glad I asked about that. Okay. Sasha Eisenberg, The Lie Detectives in Search of a Playbook for playbook for winning elections you can read it in an afternoon so go get it the engagement you can read it in a decade go get that as well if you care about the fight for gay marriage uh appreciate being on the bulwark podcast brother love you man good to see you we'll see you soon my mama told me when i was young we were all born superstars. She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on in the glass of her boudoir. There's nothing wrong in loving who you are, she said, because he made you perfect, babe.

So hold your head up and you'll go far Listen to me when I say I'm beautiful in my way, cause God makes no mistakes I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way Don't hide yourself in regret, just love yourself and you're set I'm on the right track, baby. I was born this way Ooh, there ain't no other way baby. I was born this way baby. I was born this way Ooh, there ain't no other way baby. I was born this way right track baby. I was born this way I was born this way. I was born this way The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.