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BRAD PARSCALE -- TRUMP'S BRAIN
From this week's The New Yorker, "#Winning” by Andrew MarantzMichael Bloomberg's getting behind Joe Biden is made all the more momentous by the digital war Democrats will be forever up against.
This New Yorker article is long, so if you prefer to skip the bio and history of Parscale's becoming Trump's brain, start at the fourth text break that begins "If Aaron Sorkin ever writes a sequel to "The Social Network"..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-man-behind-trumps-facebook-juggernaut
The Mueller report mentions Parscale only once, citing a retweet of an account called @Ten_GOP, now known to have been the creation of a Russian troll farm.
The campaign now has a huge database of mobile numbers belonging to people who are motivated enough to attend a Trump rally, many of whom might not have shown up on a voter-registration roll or any other official data file.
“We have almost two hundred and fifteen million hard-I.D. voter records in our database now,” Parscale claimed last year, although his definition of “hard I.D.” is not clear. Even if Trump were banned from every social network, his campaign would be able to reach supporters by text. According to Parscale, the campaign is on track to send “almost a billion texts, the most in history”—and texts are far more likely to be opened than e-mails, social-media posts, or news articles. “We’ve been working on this around the clock for three years,” a senior official who works on the 2020 digital campaign told me.
“We have almost two hundred and fifteen million hard-I.D. voter records in our database now,” Parscale claimed last year, although his definition of “hard I.D.” is not clear. Even if Trump were banned from every social network, his campaign would be able to reach supporters by text. According to Parscale, the campaign is on track to send “almost a billion texts, the most in history”—and texts are far more likely to be opened than e-mails, social-media posts, or news articles. “We’ve been working on this around the clock for three years,” a senior official who works on the 2020 digital campaign told me.
Bloomberg is currently building a digital operation that could come to rival Parscale’s. His unusually large and well-compensated campaign staff includes Gary Briggs, formerly Facebook’s chief marketing officer, and Jeff Glueck, the former C.E.O. of Foursquare. Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for the campaign, said, “In comparison to Trump’s operation, Mike Bloomberg is the only Democrat positioned to compete with him on every single digital platform.”
Bloomberg has spent nearly fifty million dollars on Facebook this year, and has given his digital staff an unusual amount of freedom.
Recently, the campaign paid more than a dozen Instagram influencers, including TankSinatra, FuckJerry, and MoistBuddha, to run pro-Bloomberg sponsored content. Viral stunts like this come at a cost, both in dollars and in personal dignity; and it isn’t clear whether the Instagram ads, which winkingly portray the candidate as a stiff plutocrat interested in buying an election, will appeal to the target demographic. But the Bloomberg campaign is an interesting test case: if enough well-placed memes can turn a mediocre hair product or a boring pop song into a hit, then why not a Presidential candidate?
Recently, the campaign paid more than a dozen Instagram influencers, including TankSinatra, FuckJerry, and MoistBuddha, to run pro-Bloomberg sponsored content. Viral stunts like this come at a cost, both in dollars and in personal dignity; and it isn’t clear whether the Instagram ads, which winkingly portray the candidate as a stiff plutocrat interested in buying an election, will appeal to the target demographic. But the Bloomberg campaign is an interesting test case: if enough well-placed memes can turn a mediocre hair product or a boring pop song into a hit, then why not a Presidential candidate?
For years, there was no Democrat-affiliated counterpart to the Republican-affiliated Data Trust. In early 2019, the D.N.C. announced that it would partly address this asymmetry, launching an information-sharing operation, the Democratic Data Exchange ... now run by a Democratic operative named Lindsey Schuh Cortes, has gone unmentioned in the press. An official familiar with the exchange told me, “We are staying small and quiet for now, by design. We’re not playing in the primaries, but the goal is to be up and running in time for the general. We hope that all the Democrats who are no longer in the race will hand over their data at that time, but participation will be voluntary.” ... it’s possible that Bloomberg would transfer the data his campaign acquired to the Democratic Data Exchange, in the common interest of defeating Donald Trump.
(Parscale repeated … on Twitter, ... “The swamp! They’re playing us and the media is their lap dog!”) The ad, predictably, went viral. Biden’s campaign wrote a letter to Facebook, asking the company to take it down. Facebook’s head of global-elections policy, a former Rudolph Giuliani campaign official named Katie Harbath, explained that the ad would stay up because the platform’s rules do not prohibit lying, at least not when politicians do it…
Around the time of [his congressional] testimony, hundreds of Zuckerberg’s employees signed an open letter. “We strongly object to this policy as it stands,” the letter read. “It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponize our platform.” The employees suggested six policy changes, all relatively narrow and easy to implement, including “Stronger visual design treatment for political ads,” “Restrict targeting for political ads,” “Spend caps for individual politicians.” Facebook took none of these suggestions. Instead, the company announced that it would “expand transparency,” including by adding more search features to the Ad Library.
Soon after, Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign ran a Facebook ad. “Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election,” the ad claimed. It was a deliberate provocation—a bit of fake news meant to protest fake news. The ad went on to clarify that the eye-grabbing claim was false, then continued: “It’s time to hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable—add your name if you agree.” The stunt garnered some good P.R. for the Warren campaign; it also enabled her to collect the e-mail addresses of many new supporters.
“No one ever complained about Facebook for a single day until Donald Trump was President,” Brad Parscale has said. When the Obama campaign used Facebook in new and innovative ways, the media “called them geniuses.” When Parscale did the same, he continued, he was treated as “the evil of earth.” Despite the bombast and the false equivalence, this is basically true.
Some of the public anxiety over Facebook is a response to how easily it can be abused, but much of that anxiety is about the outcomes the platform yields when it’s working as designed. Even leaving aside the Cambridge Analytica data breach and the allegations of foreign interference—even if nobody had ever violated any platform’s terms of service—many of the fundamental problems of social media still remain. Creepy surveillance, dissolution of civic norms, widening unease, infectious rage, a tilt toward autocracy in several formerly placid liberal democracies—these are starting to seem like inherent features, not bugs.
The real scandal is not that the system can be breached; the real scandal is the system itself. In a sense, it’s almost comforting to imagine that the only bad actors on social media are Russian state assets, clickbait profiteers, and rogue political consultants who violate the law. If that were the extent of the problem, the problem could surely be contained. ♦
Some of the public anxiety over Facebook is a response to how easily it can be abused, but much of that anxiety is about the outcomes the platform yields when it’s working as designed. Even leaving aside the Cambridge Analytica data breach and the allegations of foreign interference—even if nobody had ever violated any platform’s terms of service—many of the fundamental problems of social media still remain. Creepy surveillance, dissolution of civic norms, widening unease, infectious rage, a tilt toward autocracy in several formerly placid liberal democracies—these are starting to seem like inherent features, not bugs.
The real scandal is not that the system can be breached; the real scandal is the system itself. In a sense, it’s almost comforting to imagine that the only bad actors on social media are Russian state assets, clickbait profiteers, and rogue political consultants who violate the law. If that were the extent of the problem, the problem could surely be contained. ♦
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Just trim Bernie off the end and repeat for every bad call Joe has made. I have no idea how to get ahead of it.
The smear could be that "Joe is a closet hermaphrodite." And then the media will pick up the story about the hermaphrodite, and then the story will be "why won't joe admit he's a hermaphrodite?" and then when he issues a denial it's "What does he have against hermaphrodites?" And while the whole world is yelling about his spare ladyparts we'll all be like, "Huh?" And then the debate becomes about the junk in Joe's trunk and not healthcare, y'know.
I'm afraid it won't be anything tethered to reality.
