Instead of playing whack-a-mole with everything that pops up online, the Biden campaign’s emphasis has been to try to control the election narrative in the mainstream press.
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden’s campaign jumped headfirst into the information wars last fall when it told all the major TV networks that it was not going to play by the old rules.
It was an early clue, at a time when Biden led in the polls but faced real questions about his ability to win the Democratic nomination for president, that his campaign’s general election strategy against Trump would be to work the referees, namely the mainstream press. Facebook has taken the position that it is a passive platform that has no role in filtering lies from truth. New reporting was published this week in the Wall Street Journal showing that the company knows its algorithm encourages anger and division, although Facebook rejects that claim and says it’s beefed up its fact checking since 2016.
A Biden campaign aide who spoke with Yahoo News said they are intent on pushing back on negative narratives and conspiracy theories — two different things that sometimes overlap — as they are building, rather than waiting for them to become fully formed. The Clinton campaign in 2016 was not effective in shaping the news cycle this way.
Complaints about media bias go back decades on the right, and do have some merit. But the right increasingly uses terms such as “liberal hack” — to borrow a phrase that a U.S. senator used to denigrate a CNN journalist — to deflect difficult questions or fact checking of specious claims, and to dismiss tough, fact-based reporting.
This dynamic increases the difficulty for the press as journalists attempt to cover the Trump-vs.-Biden general election. Trump’s strategy for defeating Biden has apparently little to do with drawing contrasts on their competing visions for the country, or with substantive policy debate. It’s mostly about personal attacks and creating a negative image of Biden to tear him down.
But the idea that the FBI’s handling of Flynn was part of a larger effort to undermine the Trump administration, which has been pushed in the right-wing press and by Trump allies, ignores the way Russian interference in the 2016 election and the many contacts between Flynn and others in Trump’s orbit with Russian officials raised legitimate concerns that were being investigated.
Then there are the fever swamps of online communities like QAnon, where dark and somewhat inscrutable fantasies of secret plots against Trump and his supporters take root. But there’s also evidence that conspiratorial thinking detached from all reality is reaching dangerous levels among a certain number of Americans. Forty-four percent of Republicans told a Yahoo News/YouGov poll that they believe Microsoft founder Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements. Such figures demonstrate the growing appetite for insane conspiracy theories with no basis in fact.
It’s not the Biden campaign’s goal to solve the problem of misinformation, writ large. Its job is to get enough votes to win the election. But Miller cautioned that even in that calculus, there is a view of base voters that can blind political operatives to the dangers of how misinformation spreads.
It’s just one example of how misinformation on social media platforms like Facebook and items from a satire website are indistinguishable — at first glance — from a deeply reported, edited and fact-checked news story, leaving the average person sometimes thoroughly disoriented. But the Biden campaign’s focus on mainstream media is also a recognition that journalism outlets are much more receptive to arguments about playing some kind of gatekeeping role than the new technology company giants. At the very least, journalistic institutions understand that amplifying or minimizing information comes with ethical concerns for the social welfare.
Google placed limits on political ads and on the degree of specificity with which campaigns can target users, although it did not ban them entirely like Twitter. “Part of the problem about some of the conspiracy theories in 2016 was that they built on preexisting tropes about her that don’t exist this time around [with Biden],” the former Clinton aide said.
When asked during the Yahoo News interview how his campaign would handle the kind of repulsive and groundless insinuations made by Donald Trump Jr., Biden responded more in sorrow than in anger.
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