Today, Explained - Make America Doubt Again

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

McKay Coppins built a fake Facebook profile to fully experience President Trump's 2020 digital strategy. It didn't take long for him to start doubting reality. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. There's this sort of random guy who's playing a critical role in the 2020 election, and you've probably never even heard of him. Lucky for you, McKay Coppins just wrote about Brad Parscale for The Atlantic. Brad Parscale is this 6'8 guy.

He's got a shaved head, a triangular beard, and he had basically no political experience before 2015. He likes to tell the story of his ascent as this kind of rags-to-riches story. You know, he talks about how he grew up a farm boy from Kansas, when in fact he grew up in suburban Topeka, and his dad was kind of an affluent attorney. He says that he graduated from an Ivy League school. He was actually Trinity University in San Antonio. But basically what happened is after college, he went to work for his parents' software company in California, and the company failed. And after that whole episode, he ended up back in San Antonio.

He says he was broke and desperate and had $500 to his name. And I've spent 15 years building a company that I started with just $500. In fact, he had several rental properties that he also owned, but he used it to start this web design business in Texas. And he was kind of, from very early on, like kind of a hustler. Like he tells stories about how he would go to Borders bookstore and just cold pitch people

in the tech aisle of the bookstore, trying to get them to hire him to build websites for them. And sort of on the strength of his hustle and his kind of fast talking abilities, he was able to build this business into something real. He built websites for gun shops and plumbers and things like that, and eventually started to attract bigger clients, including in 2011, the Trump Organization.

Jared and Ivanka first hired you, right, to help with the Trump Organization. Ivanka and Eric Trump hired me for the real estate website. And once I got the real estate website, then I started to work my way through the Trump. So how closely connected with the family have you been? I think at this point, I have a very good relationship with them. But the only reason he got this job was because he offered to do it for kind of an insanely low price. And over the next several years, he designed websites for like a Trump winery, a Melania Trump skincare line.

And then in 2015, he was asked to build a very simple web page for a Trump presidential campaign, which everyone at that time figured was sort of a publicity stunt or would never actually get off the ground. But one thing led to another, and he ends up basically running Donald Trump's front-running presidential campaign's digital operation from his personal laptop. Now, I should say, at the beginning of the Trump campaign, Parscale's kind of most valued contribution early on was designing a merchandise page for the Trump campaign website that sold MAGA hats.

And that's kind of as advanced as the Trump campaign got. But what happened was after Trump became the nominee, they looked around and realized that they were not going to catch up to the Clinton campaign and fundraising. And crucially, they weren't going to be able to compete on TV, which traditionally was how campaigns believed elections were won. local ad time as you could in the swing state markets and kind of blanketing the airwaves with your message. When the Trump campaign realized that they couldn't compete that way, Brad Parscale sort of stepped in and said, hey, why don't we just go all in on Facebook and Google? From June to November of 2016, Trump's campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, whereas Clinton's just ran 66,000. And this was seen as incredibly effective. In fact, a Facebook executive later wrote in a memo that leaked to the public that Trump got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser.

And that was all Brad Parscale's doing. Central to the Trump campaign's digital advertising was the use of micro-targeting, which in effect was taking the electorate, slicing it up into very specific, very small, very distinct niches, and then tailoring digital ads that would appeal to them for various reasons. So one example, if the Trump campaign wanted to run an ad that called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, in past eras, you would have to put that in a campaign commercial and put it on TV and all kinds of different people are going to see it. Some people are going to like it. Some people are going to hate it. What you can do with micro-targeting is you can create that ad and then serve it directly

via Facebook to 800 pro-life Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa. I should say micro-targeting wasn't invented by Parscale or the Trump campaign. The Obama campaign famously used it in 2012. Hillary Clinton's campaign used it a little bit. But the difference was that the Trump campaign both used it at a much larger scale than past campaigns and also did things with micro-targeting that pushed boundaries that other presidential campaigns probably weren't willing to do. For example, toward the end of the 2016 race, in the final weeks of the race, the Trump campaign started serving ads directly to Black voters in Florida that said Hillary Clinton thinks African Americans are super predators. They weren't trying

to win Black voters over to Trump. They were basically just trying to depress Black turnout. In fact, there was a Trump campaign official quoted at the time saying that this was one of three major voter suppression operations underway. By the way, we only know about that specific example because they decided to boast about it on background to a reporter. For the vast majority of the ads that they ran, we don't know who exactly they were served to, what exactly the content was, and what effect it had on the electorate. So after the election, stories start to appear in the media hailing Parscale as a genius and Trump's secret weapon. And he kind of becomes the face of Trump's surprise victory.

An insider's take now on how Mr. Trump actually won. The man behind the digital operation now credited with helping find and turn out the voters who made the difference, Brad Parscale. And so in 2018, when Trump decided to start staffing up his reelection campaign. Today, we learned who's going to take the helm of his reelection bid. His 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale, who's named as campaign manager. It's interesting. I've talked to people who have known him now for many years, and they do say that he started to change after that 2016 election. He goes to rallies and gives speeches to the roaring crowds, throws out MAGA hats. Because what do we want? Four more years, right?

So how do we say that? Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. So he is kind of becoming a political celebrity in his own right, but his genius is continuing to give all the credit to Trump and maintaining close relationships with the Trump family, in particular Jared Kushner and Ivanka, who he continues to kind of talk to on a regular basis.

Okay, so in 2016, Brad was responsible for 5.9 million Facebook ads, and his campaign was called the best digital ad campaign the world has ever seen from any advertiser on Facebook. What should we expect this time? The campaign this time is going to be, you know, 10 times more sophisticated and better funded than the last one. Brad Parscale has said that the Trump campaign plans to spend a billion dollars on this year's election, which would make it the most expensive presidential campaign in history. And the digital tactics are central to the entire operation. It's how they get their message out.

It's how they fundraise. It's how they distract or overwhelm the media narratives that are unhelpful to them. And there's kind of an array of new technological strategies and platforms that are making them even more dependent on this stuff to win the 2020 election. After the break, McKay builds a fake Facebook profile to experience President Trump's 2020 digital strategy for himself. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com. Explained. Ramp.com. Explained. R-A-M-P.com. Explained NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an

advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. McKay, you spent a ton of time for The Atlantic investigating these campaign tactics the Trump administration used in 2016 and is now using again already in 2020. What made you want to write about this? I kept encountering people who seemed to truly believe demonstrably false things about political news or the impeachment proceedings or any number of other issues. And so I wanted to know what was happening inside this kind of alternative information ecosystem that Trump and his allies have created on the right. So I decided to try to experience it from inside.

So basically, last fall, around the time the impeachment inquiry was launching, I sat down and created a Facebook account that was separate from the normal one that I used. I, you know, chose a new name and took a profile picture that kind of obscured my face. What was the name you chose? Was it Pierre Delecto? you know, chose a new name and took a profile picture that kind of obscured my face. What was the name you chose? Was it Pierre Delecto? It was a lot more boring than Pierre Delecto. I think it was something like Greg Anderson or something like that. Nice. Very generic.

You know, a forgettable white guy name. That's what I was going for. Did you use your real photo or was it a fake photo? Actually, no one's asked me about this remarkably. I had a red MAGA hat from the 2016 campaign. And I literally put it on and raised the phone above my head so you could only see the hat and not my face. And that was my profile pic. And that's probably all you needed. No one would question it as long as you wore that hat, right? Yeah, my sense was because part of this was I wanted to join a bunch of

private Facebook groups for kind of Trump super fans. And I figured I'd have a better chance of getting accepted if I had a red-capped profile pic, which seemed to work. Did you go create like a fake set of interests? Were you liking like, you know, Ted Nugent and, I don't know, John Voight fan pages? I basically followed the suggestions that Facebook gave me. So I followed Ann Coulter, Fox Business, a bunch of Trump fan pages with names like InTrumpWeTrust so that I could as organically as possible

create the experience that an average Trump fan who logs onto Facebook and creates an account would have. It sounds almost too easy, and yet you were like seemingly the first person to try and do this for an investigative piece. So where does this fake account take you? At the time, I kind of thought that it wouldn't really yield that much fruit for my story. I basically figured it would be a good way to kind of keep tabs on the content that the Trump campaign was putting out, the spin they were using, because I felt like I had a pretty good sense of what the Trump White House's messaging was around Ukraine and impeachment and all the other issues that they talk about. But what

happened instead was actually sort of alarming to me. I would check this Trumpified Facebook feed several times a day. And there were times literally where I would sit down and watch one of the impeachment hearings in the House live on TV. And I would kind of come to my own conclusions about the testimony that was presented. And then I would look at my phone later in the day and find, for example, a video that the Trump campaign had sort of slickly put together that took out of context clips from the same hearing that I had watched, but recast it as kind of an exoneration for Trump or a triumph for the president. And I literally found myself wondering sometimes, like, wait a second, did I misunderstand what happened? Is that what actually happened today? And over time, like day after day, week after week of being exposed to this kind of stream of pro-Trump propaganda, it started to take a toll on me. You know, I had assumed because I was doing this as a journalistic exercise and because I was

inherently skeptical about all of this, and because frankly, I have a pretty high media literacy rate, this is my job, that I wouldn't be taken in by kind of these distortions or lies or, you know, disinformation. But what I found instead was that because I was so suspicious of what I was seeing, I started to become reflexively cynical about every headline that I saw, even if it came from like the Washington Post or the New York Times. It wasn't so much that I believed the president and his allies were, you know, telling the truth. It was more that it felt like, you know, truth itself about all these issues was harder and harder to locate. What you're talking about here is like the persuasive nature of fake news, right? This is something Steve Bannon has talked about. He wants to flood the zone with shit.

Right. So that we can no longer tell what is real and what is fake. But this is the key. It's not really designed to be persuasive. Like, it's not designed to convince everybody who sees it that it's true. It's just designed to disorient you or confuse you or sow just enough doubt that you're not sure exactly what's true and what's not. And the calculation is that most people in those conditions will sort of throw up their hands and say, eh, who knows what's real?

I've got my own life to worry about. I've got my job. I've got my kids. You know, I'm just going to disengage and, you know, go watch TV. And this isn't just through micro-targeted Facebook ads, right? The campaign has other strategies? Yeah, the micro-targeted Facebook campaigns have proved effective, but you also have mass texting, you know, Twitter bots,

and basically every platform that you can consume content, President Trump, his campaign, and kind of the vast coalition of allies is there sort of making noise and trying to disorient and distract. How have the different social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, even the Google products, how have they decided to either let this information flow freely or to police it? The various platforms have basically taken somewhat different approaches, but I think it's safe to say that all of them are comfortable with a good deal of disinformation on their platforms.

So, you know, Twitter, for example, announced that they're not going to take political advertising this cycle. Its CEO, Jack Dorsey, tweeted yesterday, while internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risk to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.

Facebook has been kind of interesting because after 2016, they were sort of excoriated for allowing fake news and disinformation to spread on their platform so freely. And Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better and he rolled out a bunch of reforms. But last fall, he announced that political candidates would continue to be allowed to run false ads on Facebook, which I should note makes them different than commercial advertisers. If you're a company and you want to place an ad on Facebook, you're subject to fact-checking.

You're not allowed to make obviously false claims about your product. You'll be punished. Your ad will be pulled from Facebook. Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact checking on political advertisements? Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad. And I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.

So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think it's just a pretty simple yes or no. I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for. So you won't take them down? So you won't take them down? You may flag that for are saying. So you won't take them down. Judge their character for themselves. So you won't take, you may flag that it's wrong, but you won't take it down. Congresswoman, it's, it depends on the context that it shows up.

Organic Post adds that the treatment is a little. I think it's safe to say, though, that this is a subject of enormous debate inside these platforms. Like, there is not a consensus view on how to approach this issue. And to some extent, I kind of understand where they're coming from. I mean, I don't really like the idea of a bunch of Silicon Valley executives being the final word on what political speech is allowed on their platforms, especially as these platforms become the de facto public squares in American life.

So I guess the million-dollar question, or in this case, definitely the billion-dollar question, is what do Democrats do if Trump is going to run this campaign based on extreme falsehoods and be extremely effective in micro-targeting people, in texting people, in flooding the zone with shit to the point where people don't want to even hear about politics and don't even go out to vote. What do Democrats do? Do they have to play the same game by the same rules? Well, this is a subject of open debate among Democratic strategists right now. The one thing there is consensus on is the idea that Democrats have to invest much more heavily

in their kind of digital architecture. That if they're going to compete, they need to be able to be as well-funded and as technologically sophisticated as the Trump campaign to get their message out. But there are a number of Democratic strategists who go a lot further and basically say that in order to beat Trump,

they're going to have to co-opt some of his tactics. And that means pushing out conspiracy theories and disinformation and trying to suppress turnout among Trump voters. There's one guy named Dimitri Melhorn, who's a Democratic consultant, sort of infamous for experimenting

with digital dirty tricks. So, for example, during the Alabama special election in 2017, Melhorn had a group that funded two different false flag operations against the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. For one scheme, there were a bunch of faux Russian Twitter bots sent to follow Moore's

account to make it look like Russia was backing him. There was another effort where they created a fake social media campaign called Dry Alabama that was designed to make it look like Moore was being supported by fictional Baptists who wanted to ban alcohol in this state. And so these were relatively small-scale efforts. It's not clear that they really had much effect in that race. But Melhorn and some people like him basically say, we have to fight fire with fire in order to beat Trump or else we're going to lose this election. And where does that leave our democracy?

I think the problems we're encountering right now with disinformation and censorship through noise will extend well beyond this election cycle, regardless of who wins. If we end up in a place where both major parties in the United States believe that the only way to win is to essentially warp our information ecosystem to the point where nobody knows what's true and what's not, then that has profound repercussions for the health of our democracy, and it will be bad for everyone in the long run. We're not the first country where this has happened. There are countries where on any given day, the average person goes through life, reads the Internet, sees the news, has no idea what's true and what's not, has no idea whether any of it is real or if it's all propaganda. And that is ultimately a victory for the people in power who do this stuff. They don't need you to believe them.

They just need you to be confused and to give up. And I think that if that's where we end up as a country, that's a really dangerous situation. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His piece, The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Re-elect the President, appears in the March issue of the magazine. We reached out to Brad Parscale through his website. Brad didn't write back, but a guy named Tim Murtaugh did. Tim, turns out, is the director of communications for President Trump's re-election campaign. And I'm just going to read what he said about McKay's Atlantic piece, Word for Word.

The story itself is disinformation. They wrote 8,000 words trying to paint a scary picture, but couldn't come up with one specific example to back up their premise. It's nothing more than a stream-of-consciousness fever dream from liberals already making excuses for an election loss they see coming eight months away. That's where we left it with Tim. For the record, I've read McKay's piece, and it has examples, as does today's episode. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.

Is Greg Anderson still on Facebook? I deleted the account right before the story was published because I was paranoid about the private groups that I had joined. So the answer is no. He is in Facebook heaven now. There's only Facebook hell. Yeah, that's probably right. I think that theologically that makes sense to me.