Emails obtained by POLITICO reveal a Democratic Party grappling with an onslaught of twin threats: foreign election interference and disinformation by Trump and his allies
The Democratic National Committee sent an urgent alert on Monday to every presidential campaign aimed at avoiding a repeat of the cybersecurity fiasco the party suffered at the hands of Russia and Wikileaks in 2016.
During tonight’s debate, the DNC will use a software tool called Trendolizer to track trending disinformation. Trendolizer — think TweetDeck but with lots of fancy graphs — scrapes data from social media and across the internet to surface hidden content that is on the cusp of going viral. Its “Hotness” filter alerts users when something new is about to take off.
“It is up to every campaign to figure out where that inflection point is,” said a senior member of the DNC Tech team. “When and how do you push back?” But what isn’t talked about as much is that what might make a Democratic nominee “electable” in an era dominated by disinformation warfare, is whether or not the candidate has a strategy and team to combat the kind of false attacks that Trump used to nuke Hillary Clinton and is now beta-testing against Joe Biden. That capability is undoubtedly more difficult for Democratic voters to assess than a candidate's typical attributes and flaws.
By mid-September, the DNC had reported over 40 “misinformation incidents” that caused over 4,000 social media accounts to be removed. They helped campaigns connect with an assigned FBI field agent and a contact at the Department of Homeland Security. The DNC regularly warns of sophisticated new phishing attacks.
In psychology there’s something called the spotlight effect, which refers to the human tendency to believe that many others notice something about you that you notice about yourself. In reality most people probably don’t notice or care about the mole on your chin that you’re anxious about or that you’re having a bad hair day.
“The solution is to not state the false belief,” he said. "If you put the problem in a marketing context, you kill a brand by ignoring it. The head of McDonald’s never talks about Wendy’s. It varies case by case, but if I were a political strategist I would contest Trump on content reasons and policy reasons, but not attack him on his own lies.”
Flaherty noted several lessons about the episode. One was to err on the side of responding rather than ignoring. “The platforms aren’t up to it,” he said. “Why is the responsibility on me as the campaign’s digital director? It’s ludicrous to me that my place in the ecosystem is to flag this stuff for them rather than them coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, you might have a problem!’”
Biden’s response to Trump’s false attack about Ukraine has received mixed reviews. Most senior advisers at rival campaigns did not want to criticize Biden’s team either because it seemed like blaming the victim or because it’s too early to know how to assess his strategy.
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