The NPR Politics Podcast - Can Facebook Still Be Trump's Fundraising Juggernaut?

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

The site's parent company announced that Donald Trump would be able to return to the platform with new guardrails on his account. But will Facebook be as lucrative a fundraising tool for the former president given the new limitations on online ad targeting? And will Trump even choose to return to the site?This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, disinformation correspondent Shannon Bond, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jessica. I'm currently at the airport recording this timestamp from under my jacket, just like my favorite NPR politics podcast hosts do. This podcast was recorded at... That is awesome. 1.51 p.m. on Monday, the 30th of January. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully by then I'll be in France. What? Okay, enjoy the show. Okay, the next tip is if you get a little too close to the mic, you end up over-modulated. So it's like this careful balance when you're under that coat of not getting too excited to be under a coat.

That's why producers and editors are great. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. So we're coming off a difficult weekend. Americans responded in horror to the terrible video released Friday of Memphis, Tennessee police officers beating Tyree Nichols. He died from his injuries three days later. There were demonstrations over the weekend and a lot of questions like, how does this keep happening? The officers have been relieved of duty. Five have been charged with second degree murder.

And a political conversation about the relationship between police and those they are sworn to protect has begun again. We are watching it all this week. And when there's more to report, we will be back in your feeds with that story. But today we've invited NPR's Shannon Bond on to talk about some news about former President Trump that could have big political and fundraising ramifications as Republican presidential hopefuls weigh a full-fledged campaign. Hello, Shannon. Hi, Tam. So you cover tech for us. And the news we got is that Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram. This is two years after he was banned for inciting violence when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th. So what is the deal here? Is he going to have full access?

He doesn't have it yet. What's happening? Yeah, we don't know the exact date he's going to be able to start posting again. What the company has said is they're going to let him back in the coming weeks. And I mean, you'll remember the reason he was kicked off in the first place right after January 6th was that a parent company met us, said at the time they just thought having him on their platform was too big of a risk to public safety. And so they kicked him off. They later came back and said it was going to be a two-year suspension. That two-year suspension just expired.

And what Meta is saying is that that risk to public safety has receded. But they're also saying, you know, he does need to follow the rules like any other user and also has they put into place partially because of what happened on January 6th. These additional what they're calling guardrails for public figures in these sort of moments of crisis. And so that means if Trump comes back onto Facebook and continues to break the rules or continues to post claims of election denial, QAnon conspiracies, you know, they to break the rules or continues to post, you know, claims of election denial, QAnon conspiracies, you know, they're saying there are penalties. You know, he could have his posts removed. He could not be able to advertise. And, you know, if it's really egregious, he could be suspended again. And so that's sort of the fine line the company is going to walk. Well, and those things you mentioned that he would not be allowed to post are all things that he has posted with regularity on his own Truth Social site, the social media site that he has created.

Domenico, do you know how Trump has reacted to the news? Well, he did post a statement on his account, Truth Social, which he started kind of after he was suspended from Twitter and from Facebook following January 6th and his encouragement of the rioters there. And he essentially, you know, in pretty standard bluster, you know, said Facebook, which has lost billions of dollars in value since deplatforming your favorite president, me, just announced they're reinstating my account. Such a thing should never happen to a sitting president or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution. So, you know, that's one big piece of this. He thinks that, you know, a large part of it is the money that his team has spent on Facebook for ads. I mean, they did spend

a significant amount of money when he had run his past campaigns, over $150 million. His campaigns have spent on Facebook to try to, you know, invest to raise money. And that's really the big issue here is it's money. I mean, this is about fundraising, less for Facebook, more for Trump. You know, the conservatives have used Facebook for quite some time. And campaigns, including Democrats, use Facebook to identify their voters and to micro-target them based on their behavioral data. So one question I have is, in theory, Trump will be allowed back on Facebook relatively soon. His campaign never left Facebook. And he is, of course, running for president again and was out on the campaign trail this past weekend in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But it's a true privilege to have

this opportunity to speak with you on my very first trip back to New Hampshire. This is about the beginning. You know, this is it. We're starting. We're starting right here as a candidate for president. He's already allowed to be back on Twitter, and yet he hasn't tweeted again. So I guess I guess I'm wondering, are these platforms going to be an important part of his messaging? Is he actually going to return? Well, I mean, it remains to be seen with Twitter, but I think you can be guaranteed that you're going to see Trump's status and placement on Facebook. It's been less about Trump getting his message out and more about, like I said, the ability to fundraise. And his team is going to figure out ways to do that because behind the scenes, his advisors were really concerned that this was going to lead to a decline, even potential collapse of him being

able to raise money. And if you remember in 2016, he wasn't the best fundraiser and they really figured out how to use Facebook to sharpen how they would raise money and from who and who was going to give that money over and over again. So you can be guaranteed that they're going to be using that to be able to try to fund their 2024 campaign. And it's a difficult line for Facebook to walk because while he violated their rules in the first place with January 6th, they have a very public presidential figure who is running and, you know, how do you balance that as a as a social media company to say, you know, that that they're not going to put him on? Are they giving an unfair advantage to a Democrat, for example, or somebody else who's a rival of Trump's if they don't allow him in some form to be able to be on their platform? It's not for me to decide, but it's that's certainly the line that they've had to talk about internally. I kind of think, you know, now at this point, now we know it's easy to say this now that we know they're letting him back. But kind of now that we look at it this way, the fact that Twitter let him back and the fact that he's a declared presidential candidate, I think it would have been very difficult, frankly, for Facebook to continue this ban. And so I think it's not a great situation for them to be in. But as Domenico says, you know, it just opens themselves up to so much, so many accusations of bias that they're already fighting off. Right. It just seems for all the headaches and problems that Trump is probably inevitably going to cause Facebook, it might have been more headaches and problems if they had kept him off. And to the point about how important it is to him, I mean his campaign did lobby Facebook to let him back on.

So for all of his sort of luster about maybe he doesn't need it or Facebook needs him more than he needs it, they were asking for him to be let back on and I think that tells you a lot. I'd say the easiest way to sum up the difference between Twitter and Facebook and the importance they are to Trump, It's messaging versus money. Twitter is sort of for him to be able to get out what his points are, to speak to influencers, to speak to journalists, and to be able to push that message. Facebook is the money where he's been able to fundraise and been able to organize. If he does choose to return to Twitter, will that dynamic be the same? I mean, one of the interesting things that's happened at Twitter is that Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, has sort of like taken over that position Trump used to have as like the permanent main character and like driver of conversation on the site, driver of news cycles. You know, I don't know. Is there a world in which Trump like doesn't want to compete with that and maybe he'll come back to Facebook but not to Twitter? Who knows? All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and more on what this all means for the social media companies when we get back.

Hey there, I'm Elena Moore, a producer on the show. One of the biggest stories we've worked on so far this year was the long and messy fight over who would lead Republicans in the House of Representatives. In our recent bonus episode, we talked about what it was like to cover that story. The late nights, the lip reading, and the votes. The chamber went silent. All 15 of them. And in our Slack channel inside NPR, they're like, what's happening? And I'm like, guys, they're going to vote again.

I think that he has it. importantly, you can keep NPR going. Sign up on our show page in Apple Podcasts or visit the link in our episode notes, which is plus.npr.org. And we're back. And Shannon, we've talked to you before on this podcast about Trump and Twitter and Facebook. But you know what? A lot has happened in the two years since he was banned from those sites. We're in a different moment. The tech companies are in a different moment. Things have changed. Yeah, that's right. It's a very different social media landscape, right?

I mean, let's be clear. Facebook is still massive, right? It's still the largest social network. It has the largest number of users globally. But, you know, I think you can argue it doesn't have the cultural significance that it had back in the, you know, pre-January 6th days, back in the sort of the Trump payday. I mean, first of all, I think a lot of the stuff that we used to think about, you know, trends and just that kind of cultural influence is now shifted to TikTok. And certainly younger people are much more likely to be using TikTok even than they are to be using Instagram, right, which is also owned by Meta.

So there's that. Twitter is in chaos under Elon Musk, has had just this whole upheaval of its own. And Twitter was always smaller but, of course, influential. The business of social media has also changed. A big thing that has happened for Facebook is that Apple made these changes about how you could use user data to target ads. And so people have probably seen you get those pop-ups like allow this app to track you. And a lot of people are saying no to that. And that's the basis on which Facebook had built its advertising business. So Facebook is having to rebuild its advertising business. You know, it lost revenue for the first time last year. It lost users for

the first time last year. Again, still big and very powerful, but maybe not quite as dominant as it once was. And in part, I think because of the influence of Trump, there are all these other, you know, upstart social media sites that are really pandering to conservatives. I mean, it's not just True Social. It's also Parler and Getter and Gab. You know, there are just other places that, you know, that are, you know, trying to capitalize on this idea that big tech is biased against conservatives. And so there has been a bit of a fracturing. And so this idea that, you know, he would come back to Facebook and Twitter and it would be exactly like it was in 2016, let alone, you know, 2020, I think it's just not the case. Like, I mean, I think he will probably come back and start using them again, but the landscape has shifted a lot. And I think one

of the questions then, as Domenico was saying, Facebook for political campaigns is all about the fundraising. And is that still going to be the case in this election cycle? Like, is there going to be as big a return on the investments, you know, in ad dollars in terms of getting contributions, you know, if the campaigns are not able to target the way they used to be? And so does social media have the hold that it used to have? You know, that's something we're going to be, I think, all watching really closely over the next two years. I think the other thing, Domenico, that we're watching is, has Trump changed in those two years that he's been somewhat quieter in those two years that he's been posting on Truth Social, which is this sort of closed ecosystem where he's surrounded by his supporters and no one else? Well, I don't know how much he's changed message-wise. I mean, it's certainly very similar

to a lot of the stuff that we've heard before, you know, for those of us who've followed some of it, you know, very much fueled by white grievance, anti-immigration, just the whole host of culture bucket issues that he has continued to talk about and sort of have his finger in the wind on, you know, this is stuff that he's done since the 1970s, you know, being able to sort of touch on some of these, these things that really can fire up or anger one part of the population. You know, I think it's interesting now that even though yes, Shannon says that, you know, social media is becoming less important, perhaps to campaigns. I don't envy these campaigns because they have so much more stuff that they have to focus on now than they did 10 years ago even.

I mean, social media may be less important and less dominant, but it's almost more difficult to track all of the stuff that they need to do across those social media platforms. So social media strategy, digital strategy, and ad strategy are as important as they ever have been and more difficult to implement because not just are you advertising on local broadcast, not just are you advertising on Facebook, but now you're having to go through every different piece of a la carte, you know, incoming that people are taking in because we are so much more fractured in how we get information and where we live digitally that the campaigns have to be present in all those places too. Yeah, I think that's right. And there's a lot of fragmentation.

But I also think in terms of the question of how Trump has changed, I mean, Domenico is right. I mean, this is the stuff that he has been like winking at, dog whistling at for a long time. I think there has been a shift seeing him using truth social where some of that stuff that was maybe he was like nodding at it. He's just saying it out right now. Right. Like he's been sharing. He's been straight up sharing QAnon memes. Yeah.

I mean, there was a time when his campaign was like, oh, no, we don't have QAnon people coming to our campaign events. Like, oh, take down those Q signs. Now he's embracing it. He's completely all in on it. I think it's reflective of how mainstream some of these formerly fringe ideas have become with the heart of who he perceives as his base. But the more that that becomes a piece of what he thinks is mainstream for how he's going to fire them up to be able to help him win a primary, it makes it even harder for him to win in a general election, as we've seen his brand really be sort of toxic in purple places in competitive states and competitive swing districts for the last couple of election cycles.

It's just the idea of this QAnon stuff being out fully exposed. It's perhaps no longer in the dark corners of the internet. Yeah, and I think that's going to be the real then challenge, certainly for Facebook, because even with all these changes we've talked about, a big platform like that does still have rules and guardrails like we talked about. They have said, you know, if he breaks those rules, he will face consequences. You know, if he posts anywhere the way that he posts on Truth Social on Facebook, like he's going to be testing those limits almost immediately. And I think it'll be a big test for the companies of how they handle that.

But I also think, and it goes right, a lot of this stuff has gone very mainstream. And so then do you have the platforms just sort of kind of giving up that they can't actually contain the spread of some of this more harmful material where there is a real concern about real world incitement of violence? Well, we're going to have to leave it there for today. Shannon Bond, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.