Team Trump Locked and Loaded for 2020 With a Sophisticated Hi-Tech Digital and Social Media Disinformation Campaign. The Dems Need to Catch Up.
February 25th 2020
Nashville MAGA Rally 5-29-18 (Tabitha Kaylee Hawk)
By Bill Berkowitz
Cunning, sophisticated, and technologically adroit, Team Trump is not only aiming to re-elect Donald Trump, it intends to eviscerate fact-based information, while changing the culture and obliterating fact-based journalism.
They have a war chest exceeding $1 billion dollars, and an experienced, eager, and committed support staff creating micro-targeted ads for use on Social Media platforms and a host of other venues, and they’ve compiled sophisticated data points on American voters. They have an uncanny ability to weaponize information, and they’ve created a list of, and done deep research on, reporters critical of Trump. They have no moral compunction to deal with facts, or the truth, and smear whomever they decide should be smeared. As the 2020 presidential election begins to take shape, these are some of the tools Team Trump has assembled in its arsenal.
The Atlantic magazine’s McKay Coppins recently reported that the Trump campaign “will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.”
Trump’s disinformation campaign was in full swing during the impeachment proceedings. Coppins pointed out that “Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.”
The strategy employed by Team Trump has been used before. Now, however, it embodies a most sophisticated use of technology and techniques “that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world,” according to Coppins. “Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.”
Election 2020 promises to be one where spin and misdirection are off the charts, exemplified by, Coppins pointed out, “coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting.”
In addition to working for Trump’s reelection, Team Trump is “building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture,” Coppins wrote.
“Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages,” Coppins noted. “The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.”
Weaponizing micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica, “began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels,” Coppins pointed out. The conservative billionaire Robert Mercer got involved and brought Steve Bannon on board. “Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica [which was dissolved in 2018] worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits.”
Coppins sets up his piece by creating an alternative Facebook page, liking a number of pro-Trump pages, adhering to Facebook’s algorithm suggestions of following the likes of Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a number of Trump fan pages. He gave his “cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.”
The story also profiles Brad Parscale, “a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard,” who ran Trump’s digital campaign in 2016, and is at the helm of this 2020 effort. According to Coppins, Parscale “seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.”
Coppins wrote: “The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.”
Seamlessly stitched into all this is the war on the press, especially reporters from CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. That being said, other sources are monitored as well. The aim is to destroy the credibility of any reporter that dares write a piece, or tweet anything negative about Trump. It really doesn’t take more then a New York minute to target some offender and unleash a full bore attack. In this area, Don Trump Jr. has played a significant role drumming up outrage and vitriol amongst his 3 million twitter followers.
A new front this year will be local news stations and reporters. According to Coppins, Parscale has “indicated” his intention “to train ‘swarms of surrogates’ to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers.”
What will the Democrats do? Will they fight fire with fire? Will they unleash false flag operations? Will they push boundaries that might make Democratic donors and liberal supporters uneasy? Can Democrats compete on this new playing field?