The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election
Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty
This story originally appeared in The Atlantic Feb. 10, 2020 The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the PresidentHow new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Gettyat 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked âLikeâ on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebookâs algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like âIn Trump We Trust.â I complied. I also gave my 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 presidentâs reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americansâ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. 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 story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the presidentâs conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited videoâserved up by the Trump campaignâthat used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today? As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: âThatâs right, the whistleblowerâs own lawyer said, âThe coup has started âŠâââ Swipe. âDemocrats are doing Putinâs bidding âŠâ Swipe. âThe only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing âŠâ Swipe. âOnly one man can stop this chaos âŠâ Swipe, swipe, swipe. I was surprised by the effect it had on me. Iâd assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasnât that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itselfâabout Ukraine, impeachment, or anything elseâfelt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach. What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposesâjamming 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. After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the worldâs demagogues and strongmen in power. Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads? Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this yearâs contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into viewâone shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous. The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it 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. THE DEATH STARThe campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump electedâwith its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Towerâhis 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as âthe Death Star.â Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trumpâs 2016 campaign, Parscale didnât become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Officeâand his efforts will shape this yearâs election. In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple âfarm boy from Kansasâ (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an âIvy Leagueâ school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company fundsâclaims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his âlast $500â (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas. Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took noticeâincluding the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. âI just made up a price,â he later told The Washington Post. âI recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.â The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born. Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump venturesâa winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscaleâa man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experienceâwas running the Republican front-runnerâs digital operation from his personal laptop. Parscale slid comfortably into Trumpâs orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentiousâwith no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operativesâbut he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidateâs. âBrad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,â says a former colleague from the campaign. Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bendingânone of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trumpâs inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them. Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscaleâs most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertisingâamplifying themes such as Hillary Clintonâs criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorismâParscaleâs team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100. (Illustration: Mishko; Jabin Botsford / Washington Post / Getty Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. âHe was a get-shit-done type of person,â says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. âHe was probably better at managing up,â Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidateâs son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trumpâs digital ignorance to flatter him. âParscale would come in and tell Trump he didnât need to listen to the polls, because heâd crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,â one former campaign staffer told me. âI was like, âCome on, man, donât bullshit a bullshitter.âââ But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.) David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscaleâs political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platformâs new tools. âWhereas some grizzled campaign strategist whoâd been around the block a few times might say, âOh, that will never work,â Bradâs predisposition was to say, âYeah, letâs try it.âââ From June to November, Trumpâs campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clintonâs ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump âgot elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign Iâve ever seen from any advertiser.â Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trumpâs surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a âgeniusâ and the campaignâs âsecret weapon,â and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the presidentâs 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered. Read: What Facebook did to American democracy Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. âWhen I give a speech, I tell it like a story,â he said. âMy story is my story.â DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTUREIn his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls âP.â In college, P had studied the âLittle Albert experiment,â in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enoughâabout 100,000 membersâhe began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes. Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) Pâs experiment was one plank in a larger âdisinformation architectureââwhich also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centersâthat experts say aided Duterteâs rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings. The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to âan invisible radiationâ that takes effect while âthe population doesnât even feel it is being acted upon.â) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people. Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminologyâmuddy the waters; alternative factsâbut theyâre building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture. Central to that effort is the campaignâs use of micro-targetingâthe process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. 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. Parscale didnât invent this practiceâBarack Obamaâs campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clintonâs followed suit. But Trumpâs effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trumpâs team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, âHillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.â An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of âthree major voter suppression operations underway.â (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.) The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses. The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sourcesâwithout usersâ consentâCambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed âpsychographic profilesâ for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: âDid you feel like you had to say that?â Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that âwith the right kind of nudges,â people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. âRather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,â Wylie said. âWe were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.â Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual âhoney trapsâ on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its âpsychographicâ targeting really had. But Wylieâwho spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecasterâsaid the firmâs work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come. âWhat happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?â he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this yearâs election. âThere are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do ⊠and make it much more sophisticated.â These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.) After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldnât be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs. To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launchedâand publicly accessibleââlibraryâ where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency. Read: The age of reverse censorship The campaign doesnât run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterationsâadjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the âDonateâ 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. Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel. While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, theyâre most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithfulâand Trumpâs advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of âillegal aliensââa term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to useâand the corruption of the âswamp.â Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of votersâ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new âpeer to peerâ texting appsâincluding one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviserâa single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking âSendâ one message at a time. Notably, these messages arenât required to disclose whoâs behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text. Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trumpâs reelection strategy. The mediumâs ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened. The Trump campaignâs texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (âThey have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now letâs CRUSH our End of Month Goalâ). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clearâand shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text. In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennesseeâs Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidatesâ conservative credentials. The textsâwritten in a conversational style, as if theyâd been sent from a friendâwere unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered. WAR ON THE PRESSOne afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the presidentâs son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporterâs credibility. I wasnât sure what to make of this gloatingâpeople in Trumpâs circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwangerâs âhistory of intense Trump hatred.â The story was based on a series of Instagram postsâall of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insiderâin which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters. The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a âraging lib.â Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were ânot appropriate.â Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, âwas bizarre and unsettling.â The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, itâs been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled yearsâ worth of posts into a dossier. Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfairâor politically damagingâto the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the presidentâs eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns upâa problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political viewsâBoyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.) Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boastingâbut the effort has yielded fruit. In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said theyâre planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. âThis is innovative shit,â said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. âTheyâre appropriating call-out culture.â Whatâs notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complainingâwith some meritâabout a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, todayâs most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. âJournalistic integrity is dead,â Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. âThere is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.â Itâs a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of contentâno more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trumpâs assault on the press, and the more âenemies of the peopleâ his allies can take out along the way, the better. âA culture war is a war,â Steve Bannon told the Times last year. âThere are casualties in war.â This attitude has permeated the presidentâs base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream mediaâwhile 91 percent turn to the president for âaccurate information.â This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. âRemember,â he told a crowd in 2018, âwhat youâre seeing and what youâre reading is not whatâs happening.â Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this yearâs election. Nor is that his goal. âItâs our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,â Lanza said. âTheyâre clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and weâre never going to be in concert. So the war continues.â From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train âswarms of surrogatesâ to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. âWe can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,â Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. âSo weâre not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.â Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and youâll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendasâwhich is precisely what makes them valuable. According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firmâinstead of paying the sites directlyâcandidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories donât fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails. DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKSShortly after polls closed in Kentuckyâs gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had âjust shredded a box of Republican mail in ballotsâ in Louisville. There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that heâd misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim. The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting âirregularities.â When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.) The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourseâposing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: âI think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.â) But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentuckyâs election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in Americaâa sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics. Of course, dirty tricks arenât new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic. Mishko Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created âsock puppetâ accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. âItâs almost as if thereâs a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,â he said. Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, âI donât think [they] work.â He may be rightâitâs unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square. According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trumpâs reelection prospects. Regardless of where theyâre coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast. Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto OâRourkeâs presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a âhall of mirrors.â He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an OâRourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton. Flaherty said he didnât know who was behind the efforts targeting OâRourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. âBut you canât watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someoneâs fucking with something,â he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Bidenâs campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidateâs legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primaryâopposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq Warâand featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant. FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIREAs the presidentâs reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics? On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabamaâs special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two âfalse flagâ operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidateâs account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed âDry Alabama,â was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.) When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. âIf you donât do it, youâre fighting with one hand tied behind your back,â Osborne said. âYou have a moral imperative to do thisâto do whatever it takes.â Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. âItâs just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,â Flaherty told me. âI know thereâs this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, theyâre like, âLie!âââ Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. âI donât think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,â Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. âThey can stick to things that are true.â One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the presidentâs campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowanâs plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creativeâand controversialâmeasures in mind. For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning âhometown newsâ stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that theyâre paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics. When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the âsuper-predatorâ ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were âfair gameâ because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to voteâa tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was jokingâbut said she would pursue any strategy that was âin the bounds of the law.â âWe are in a radically disruptive moment right now,â McGowan told me. âWe have a president that lies every day, unabashedly ⊠I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.â This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and âdeepfakesâ (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their partyâs values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge. Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last yearâs presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake newsâan approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S. Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. âItâs not going to solve the whole problem,â he told me, âbut itâs going to help with volume.â There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself. Once you internalize the possibility that youâre being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, youâre too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won. POWERS OF INCUMBENCYIf thereâs one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, itâs that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facilityâbut Parscale put an end to the practice: He didnât want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they werenât supposed to see. Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicansâinside the organization or outâhesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism. Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. âHe knows he has the confidence of the family,â one former colleague told me, âwhich gives him more swagger.â When the U.K.âs Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscaleâs spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. âThe president is an excellent businessman,â he told the tabloid, âand being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.â But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscaleâs standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trumpâs attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.) Some Republicans worry that for all Parscaleâs digital expertise, he doesnât have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trumpâs message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? âPeople start to ask the questionâyouâre building this apparatus, and thatâs great, but whatâs the overarching narrative?â said a former campaign staffer. But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didnât have in 2016âthe powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that heâs willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming âinvasionâ and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members. Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safeâbut within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the âcrisisâ having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line? Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news It doesnât require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what theyâre injecting into the bloodstream. After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC. The votes havenât even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result. NOTHING IS TRUEThere is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person. Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandalâthe one in which Joe Biden is the villainâand claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to âgive illegal aliens the right to vote.â At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that âthe governor of Virginia executed a babyââprompting a woman in the crowd to scream, âMurderer!â This incendiary fabrication didnât seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the caseâthat the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally âexecuted a baby.â But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governorâs abortion comments to back up Trumpâs smear. After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normalâif only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point. One woman told me that, given the presidentâs accomplishments, she didnât care if he âfabricates a little bit.â A man responded to my questions about Trumpâs dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media âought to try telling the truth once in a while.â Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. âHe tells you what you want to hear,â Willnow said. âAnd I donât know if itâs true or notâbut it sounds good, so fuck it.â The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers âa mixture of gullibility and cynicism.â When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed theyâd known all alongâand would then âadmire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.â Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to âbelieve everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.â Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the electionâs legacy will be clearânot a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself. This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline âThe 2020 Disinformation War.â McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party. |