Sasha Issenberg: Politics, Disinformation, and 2024

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Tim Miller.
Well, we have a rematch.

Speaker 3 Officially, we've all known this, but President Biden and former President Trump have both officially won enough delegates as of last night to be the presumptive nominees for the party.

Speaker 3 Remember, it's Wednesday, so if you want hot political takes on that, head on over to the next level feed. I am here today with a very smart political mind himself, old friend Sasha Eisenberg.

Speaker 3 He is an author and journalist. His brand new book is The Lie Detectives, in Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.

Speaker 3 You might remember, Sasha, he wrote The Victory Lab in 2012 about the Obama data nerds, and he also wrote a magnum opus about gay marriage called The Engagement. We might do some gay stuff at the end.

Speaker 3 Sasha, thanks for doing this, brother.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me, Tim. Great to be with you.

Speaker 3 Before we get to your book, any big grand thoughts about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, part deux, and how we got here?

Speaker 2 I mean, the one thing that just as somebody who's dreading just the kind of soul-crushing nature of this election season we have in front of us that maybe got me excited.

Speaker 3 Listen to the Bulwark podcast more. That's how you can handle the crushing dread, you know?

Speaker 2 Was like Trump's comments about entitlement programs on CNBC this week, which just like, it was this glimmer of return to old politics.

Speaker 2 Like maybe we'll just have, you know, stupid democratic demagoguery on entitlement cuts like we grew up with instead of some of the other insanity.

Speaker 2 But it was, it was like a porthole back to like, you know, campaigns in 1996, what might come of that. So moderately optimistic.

Speaker 3 The other funny thing about that CNBC interview that you're referencing, so Trump was on Squawkbox the other day, which is when he appeared open entitlement cut, which is crazy, which is very untrumpy.

Speaker 3 It's like one of his insightful lizard-brain things was that he was the one Republican in 2016 who wasn't supporting entitlement reform. So it was a strange strategic choice for him.

Speaker 3 But the other interesting thing back to old politics about that interview was like why he was doing it, which is that he needs money. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 3 You know, and like in the past, Trump has been outspent in every campaign, but they're in such dire financial straits right now. And the RNC had to cut 60 people.

Speaker 3 The money is being repurposed to his various legal entities. And so he's on CNBC because he needs rich guys to give him money.

Speaker 2 And the other data point in that this week is that his apparent sort of flip-flop on TikTok was driven by Jeff Yass, the Republican mega donor and club for growth guy who.

Speaker 2 had been sort of slow to come into the fold and has now is now sort of ready to put up money. He also owns 15%, I think, of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and hired Kellyanne Conway.

Speaker 2 And by all accounts, Trump went from being an anti-TikTok guy to a pro-TikTok guy overnight to placate a large donor, which is another part of the, at least the mythology on this around Trump in 2016 was the, you know, I don't owe anybody anything because I fund my own campaigns, which

Speaker 2 was not entirely true, but I do think was, you know, part of what seemed to make him a different type of political figure.

Speaker 2 And now I wonder if we're in a season where he's going to do sort of more conventional rich guy bidding.

Speaker 2 And we see that on a, you know, not just in terms of where he does his interviews, but on policy changes as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, the swampiness of it is maybe more of a vulnerability for him than the TikTok policy change itself, right? Yeah.
You know, and literally, he's got Kellyanne Conaway's being paid.

Speaker 3 This is like classic swampy stuff.

Speaker 2 It's a rare example of a kind of lobbying story that could break through to news just because the TikTok thing is relatable, because because the China angle is something that sort of plays so well into Trump's politics because Kellyanne Conway is a household name.

Speaker 2 All of it is the rare thing where some of these other stories that we've read in the Times of the Washington Post, that some donor who once went to Mar-a-Lago got like a sub-agency at a cabinet to do this thing.

Speaker 2 It was always so arcane. This is actually kind of graspable, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 3 I want to talk more about TikTok in a minute, but why don't you just give people the elevator pitch on the line, detectives, so we can get into, you know, I think a lot of really sort of important externalities and an ever-changing thing.

Speaker 3 I guess it was, were you a little bit concerned to make this a book, given how quickly things are changing? Why don't you kind of tell people about that and about the premise of the book?

Speaker 2 I made it a short, fast book, both in sort of how quickly I turned it around and how quickly it is to read, which I believe my last one gave you a hernia, Tim. It did.

Speaker 2 Think of this as corrective surgery.

Speaker 3 Thank God it was during COVID, you know, because I was just like, really, Sasha? 812 pages? I don't know how many pages it actually was.

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't think marriage as much as the next guy, but that was even, it was a little much for me and my TikTok brain.

Speaker 2 So this one you can read in an afternoon. We've heard a lot about disinformation and its place in our politics since 2016.

Speaker 2 And solar sex has been the sort of like dominant subplot to almost everything that has happened. in our politics.
Certainly all the stuff around the 2020 election, January 6th, COVID response.

Speaker 2 And I think we've all heard a lot about what the threat is to democracy, about how it's used as a geopolitical tool.

Speaker 2 I think we've read a lot about what the platforms, social media companies are or are not doing.

Speaker 2 The one thing that seemed to be missing was what does it mean if you are inside of a campaign, and that could be a candidate's campaign or a party committee or a super PAC,

Speaker 2 and you're in this new environment where your opposition is not your opponent. It's not the other candidate, it's not the other party, but is

Speaker 2 somebody who is spreading stuff about you online, whose name you probably don't know because they're, you know, an anonymous meme maker in their basement, or they belong to a foreign intelligence service, or they're somebody who has figured out how to make a buck selling ad clicks on to fake websites.

Speaker 2 And the whole playbook that folks like you you know, sort of were raised with about how you think about communications, what you say, when you say, where you say it, what you choose to respond to, what you don't respond to.

Speaker 2 That was all shaped in an era of television, you know, big central newspapers where the candidates were the loudest voice for their campaigns, and we're no longer in that environment.

Speaker 2 And so this book was my effort to sort of explore what the smartest people in politics were thinking, are thinking about how you run campaigns in this media environment.

Speaker 3 All right. So just before we get to 2024, let's go back a little little bit to where this starts.
So, the book starts after 2016.

Speaker 3 You'd written, I guess, in October with somebody I talked to a couple of months ago, Josh Green, who's also got another really good new book out about the populist left.

Speaker 3 And you guys wrote about Trump's anti-democratic voter suppression tactics and how they aimed it at three groups that Hillary needed to win, kind of idealistic white liberals who thought maybe she was too swampy, younger women, and black voters.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of particular interest in what they did with black voters. And so, talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 And this was maybe a proto effort, but there was a lot of focus on what was happening in the Russian side of things.

Speaker 3 But the Trump campaign was using some pretty interesting, interesting is maybe the nicest way to put it tactics in 2016

Speaker 3 that the other side really wasn't. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So my book, The Victory Allowed, came out in 2012, and it was about all these innovations and campaigns.

Speaker 2 They're actually involving new data that was available that allowed campaigns to profile voters and sort of tailor their contact with them. And it was a largely happy story about politics.

Speaker 2 It was campaigns were investing in things like training volunteers to knock on doors because they could be more targeted and efficient with it.

Speaker 2 You know, the communication you were getting from campaigns was more likely to address the issues you cared about because campaigns no longer felt like they had to communicate with 50% of the electorate at one time.

Speaker 2 They could dig in on small groups of interest.

Speaker 2 Voter turnout has gone up in the 21st century. And I sort of argued that part of that was because campaigns were focusing on GO TV in a new way.
And so this was a happy story.

Speaker 3 I mean, it was literally about engaging new people and getting new people involved in the process. And like, that was the whole premise of what the Obama

Speaker 3 operation was.

Speaker 2 And I've had a lot of reason in the 12 years since to worry that I was naive about that.

Speaker 2 Yes. So, you know, I wrote very little about the internet.
But

Speaker 2 obviously, so much of what we see about new technology and campaigns over the last decade seems like people using it as a force for ill in a way that I did not anticipate.

Speaker 2 And that really crystallized when Josh Green and I, we spent several days in San Antonio with the Brad Parscale-led Trump digital operation.

Speaker 2 And there was that moment where we quoted a senior Trump campaign official talking about these voter suppression efforts they had underway and how they were using Facebook dark posts to target those sort of specific demographic groups you mentioned.

Speaker 2 And it was the first time I had personally encountered somebody using the language of sophisticated, modern, data-driven campaigning to

Speaker 2 drive voters away from the process, actively confuse them. And clearly, you know, what's happened in the seven or eight years since has given me all of my reasons I think that was not an anomaly.

Speaker 2 That one, social media does lend itself to sort of efforts to confuse or mislead people and that created all these avenues for bad actors.

Speaker 2 I mean, not like Gary beusey but like bad actors to to get involved in our our political process and what was interesting to me is like what does that mean when you're on the other side of it right if you're joe biden or you're the dnc or you're nikki haley or like and you're up against folks who are playing by a new set of rules or no rules at all what does that mean for you biden team did learn a little bit about this in 2020 and like actually you know sort of they weren't blindsided by it at least and so talk about kind of what they learned and how they decided to deal with the efforts in 2020, which just to be clear, I think it's going to be kind of patty cake compared to what we've got coming over the next eight months.

Speaker 3 But talk about their 2020 efforts and how they decided to engage or not engage on some of the disinformation side of things.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, in the summer of 2020, I mean, Biden was blessed with a couple of things that most campaigns don't have, a lot of money and a lot of, and relatively speaking, a lot of time.

Speaker 2 And so, they invested in this sort of massive research project to identify what bits of disinformation were, and this is a quote from Rob Flaherty, who's now the deputy campaign manager, market moving.

Speaker 2 And their view was, yes, lots of people are going to be online every day making up and spreading lies about Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 And, you know, maybe not things that are outright lies, but things that are misrepresentations or attacks that are going to move virally instead of moving through TV ads.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 probably the smart thing to do in like, you know, 97% of the cases is ignore them because they're not reaching a lot of people. They're not reaching a lot of people who might ever vote for Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 I mean, so much of the sort of trash online is Trump supporters flattering each other by coming up with crazy stuff that they use to gin one another up, but is it not actually sort of a strategic threat?

Speaker 2 And they wanted to really be focusing on things that were what Flarity calls a 50-plus one problem. Is this going to make us harder to win the votes we need to win?

Speaker 2 And if not, I quote him saying, like, okay, this might be a problem for democracy. This might be a problem for our society, but it's not not a problem for us as the Biden for President campaign.

Speaker 2 And this was a really tricky problem for politicians, especially on the left after 2016, because

Speaker 2 so many of them couldn't really separate their worry about disinformation as a geopolitical or social problem from their self-interest hour-to-hour, day-to-day running for office.

Speaker 2 And there was this, I think, sort of resistance era instinct among well-meaning people that was like, you know, and this manifests itself in all sorts of anti-Trump politics.

Speaker 2 Like, we have to do something. And the thing about online disinformation is that often doing something is totally the wrong answer, right?

Speaker 2 So there's a kind of Streisand effect, which is like you draw attention to stuff that maybe is not getting a big audience by paying attention to it.

Speaker 2 Two, the whole structure of social media is built to reward engagement. So if you are responding to a

Speaker 2 lie to fact check it or debunk it or SAS it or whatever, you are helping to drive eyeballs to it. And then the third part, which is a little more nuanced, is,

Speaker 2 and you know this, Tim, as a campaign professional, like every day you have things that you want to accomplish. You want to make the news about X.

Speaker 2 You are using all the tools at your disposal to do that. You have a limited capacity to drive attention towards your priorities.
You want to communicate with your supporters.

Speaker 2 You want to win over persuadable voters. You want to communicate with your donors.
And if you spend every day responding to

Speaker 2 what somebody else is putting in front of you, you're not going to be doing the proactive communications. And so the Biden folks, that was sort of the framework that they brought to this.

Speaker 3 This is also different. I mean, there's some parallels between comm strategy, right? You'd think about this from a PR side, like, are you going to respond to this attack or not?

Speaker 3 But in an advertising space, this is really new. I'd just like to put a finer point on this.

Speaker 3 Like in 2010, if your opponent was on TV with an ab accusing you of something that's false or hyperbolic, you know, there wasn't really a should we respond to this or should we not, right?

Speaker 3 It was like you kind of had no choice but to, because like, this is the channel. There's just one big channel and it's TV ads during the six o'clock news or whatever.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, unless you thought it was a dumb attack, which I guess happened occasionally, but most of this was based in polling and based in research, like you had to respond to it, right?

Speaker 2 And you guys had a just sort of, you know, both you could quantify and you had an innate understanding about what volume and reach of the attack attack meant, right?

Speaker 3 So, I mean, you could literally quantify it. Like, they would tell you how many points have they bought? How many impressions?

Speaker 2 So, you would know in a campaign, okay, they put 200 points and it's on the 6 p.m. news.
That means one thing. They put a thousand points and it's running on prime time.

Speaker 2 That gives you a sense of who, whom it's reaching. Did this make it on the front page of the Chicago Tribune? Or is it stuck on B12 in a small story? That'll shape how much of a problem is for you.

Speaker 2 Is this getting traction on talk radio? Like you knew sort, you had a map, mental map of the media environment, and just instinctively knew what was breaking through and what wasn't.

Speaker 2 And some social media platforms are more transparent than others, but still the basic question of who is seeing this, whom is this reaching is just like not, doesn't translate well.

Speaker 2 I mean, so even we see stuff like, oh, 100,000 people viewed this. Do they live in the state that you're running in? Do they live in the country that you're running in? Are they over 18 years old?

Speaker 2 Can they vote? Are they a bunch of people who will never support you or will always support you?

Speaker 2 These are really difficult technical questions to solve given how opaque the social media platforms choose to be. And so

Speaker 2 the whole playbook that folks in your generation, not to make you feel old, like works from doesn't translate to digital media this way.

Speaker 2 And so what the Biden folks wanted to do was their take was that campaigns, campaigns, sort of especially post-2016 when there was a focus on this in the U.S.,

Speaker 2 were

Speaker 2 thinking about disinformation as a supply-side problem.

Speaker 2 So in their view, we looked at a particular piece of content, and it could be a deep fake video, it could be a Twitter post that had a false claim in it, it could be a conspiracy theory, whatever.

Speaker 2 And campaigns were inclined to play whack-a-mole with those as they popped up.

Speaker 2 So they did their best with the data that they had to determine who is this reaching and like, is it moving, trending quickly or slowly? And then respond to each one as it came along.

Speaker 2 And maybe that was pushing back in a kind of traditional comms way. Maybe that was going to the platforms to try to get it taken down.

Speaker 2 But their view was that that was the wrong way to think about this. And that it was better to think of this, as they said, as a demand-side problem.
What does that mean?

Speaker 2 It means the stuff that is going to cause a problem for Biden, the stuff that's going to stick and change opinions, is stuff that responds to existing doubts, concerns, and anxieties that voters have.

Speaker 2 And let's identify what those are so that we can anticipate which of these viral narratives actually have the power to move people.

Speaker 2 And so they did this big research project starting in the summer of 2020. And they used some of the data that was being collected about which viral narratives were moving online.

Speaker 2 So at the time, this included, you know, and they use Trump's shorthand a lot for this because it was, he's good at that. So Sleepy Joe, right, that he's old and mentally diminished.

Speaker 2 Creepy Joe, we hear a lot less about this one these days, but the idea that

Speaker 3 they tried to make a thing out of that.

Speaker 2 Handsy with young women. Stuff about Kamala Harris, both sort of narratives that she was too far to the left and too far to the right on criminal justice issues.
They made up.

Speaker 2 a couple, they called them red herrings, just to put them in the poll to kind of create a baseline of what people would say that they responded to. One of them was

Speaker 2 that Joe Biden belongs belongs to an all-white country club, which is in no way true, but they hold it just to get a sense of what people would say yes to regardless.

Speaker 2 And then they mapped, they asked two questions. One, are you familiar with this? And two, would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden?

Speaker 2 And they mapped this on a graph and they had two axes, one of which showed the reach, how many people had heard this, and the other one showed how potentially damaging it was in terms of people whose opinions would be changed.

Speaker 3 And what they found was, for example, the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, a lot of people by getting into the fall of 2020 had had heard about this they were familiar with with these claims i'm sorry sasha i'm sorry i've got to interrupt you there that is not possible because the social media companies stifled the hunter biden story and the hunter biden laptop and this was an election interference effort by big tech and the deep state and the illuminati you've been told that in several republican oversight hearings that were premised on this that know that one of the reasons why joe biden won is because this this was silenced.

Speaker 3 So I don't understand.

Speaker 2 So as it happens, even before the laptop, this was the subject of an impeachment of Donald Trump. Stuff had broken through.
Got it. Okay.
But this was sort of revealed through focus groups.

Speaker 2 So a lot of persuadable voters had heard this. They were familiar with it.
But it didn't actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden because his focus group showed.

Speaker 3 It was about Hunter Biden and they're different people.

Speaker 2 Well, yes. So that's what I'm saying.
They would not vote for Hunter Biden. Yes.
They did not see Biden as motivated by by personal financial interests.

Speaker 2 So they'd heard all of it, but it didn't actually change their views of him. But the sleepy Joe stuff

Speaker 2 did affect them. Why? Not because they were actually, and this came through in the focus groups, concerned about Biden's physical fitness.
They saw Biden as this fundamentally weak political figure.

Speaker 2 I think probably a lot of this has to do with being defined as vice president, sort of the way he stumbled through a big field in the Democratic primary without ever really being the main character.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the voters' doubts, as I quote one pollster saying, were that Biden would not be the author of his presidency.

Speaker 2 They saw weakness. They didn't really know what he stood for.
They worried he would be controlled by other people in the White House.

Speaker 2 And that manifests itself in being more receptive to stuff about his age and mental fitness.

Speaker 2 And so for the comms department, the folks who schedule what Joe Biden does in front of cameras every day had been pushing stuff like, let's do photo ops of him on a bicycle so people will see that he's fit and energetic.

Speaker 2 Let's have him run up the stairs to his plane.

Speaker 3 Those ideas seem to have backfired a little bit.

Speaker 2 Well, he slipped one or two times, which like literally, you know, back heel fire. Yeah.
But what this research project showed was like, they didn't really address what voters were worried about.

Speaker 2 They weren't worried that he couldn't ride a bike or walk. They were had this deeper worry about his political presence.

Speaker 2 And so the solutions they came up with in some way are sort of banal, but like they started buying ads against social media searches. So if you went on Google and searched for Biden and senile,

Speaker 2 you would probably be pushed to an ad,

Speaker 2 a 15-second ad

Speaker 2 that showed Biden speaking to camera, seemingly unedited, talking about like what he wanted to do on the economy.

Speaker 2 And that was the stuff that seemed to the group of voters who were worried about the age issue, that was actually the thing that was the most persuasive to them. And so they thought of this as

Speaker 2 avoiding the problem of drawing attention to the actual claim by attacking the underlying anxieties.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 So now we fast forward to this time, and the sleepy Joe stuff is going to be even more of a concern for people because he's older.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's older. I cover math and politics, Tim.

Speaker 3 Yeah, every day. Every day he's one day older.
This is something we've mentioned quite a few times on the Bullwork podcast. And so we've got that.
So now you're kind of combining both, right?

Speaker 3 There are some people who still perceive him as a weak political leader. To me, like that seems easier to come at this time.

Speaker 3 And you sort of see that with their opening ad talking about how he did infrastructure weak, right?

Speaker 3 And like the other guy's also old and talked about how he wanted to do it every week and didn't do it.

Speaker 3 I do think that like unable to get things done weak this time it feels to me like that's the easier problem to solve.

Speaker 3 And so it's kind of the inverse of 2020 where it's the other problem, the actual, the age, the fitness, the, you know, mental acuity.

Speaker 3 And you're already seeing, like, I don't have full access to everything that's happening on the internet, but just casually, like looking through my TikTok, my other social media feeds, like you see these Joe Biden old mashups.

Speaker 3 Trump put out some meme where he's going to the visiting angels' retirement home. So, how does that look this time as compared to 2020?

Speaker 2 It obviously is a more immediate concern now. Biden is more of a focal point of this campaign than he was in 2020 when obviously Trump was in office and for a variety of reasons.
COVID, yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that there's this often folks will look at the campaign and say

Speaker 2 they're not responding to X or Y that is getting a lot of attention on TikTok or on Facebook.

Speaker 2 And obviously we do see in the, he started, as you suggest, that ad by saying, hey, I'm, you know, I'm not a young guy anymore, whatever the line is.

Speaker 2 So that they are being a little more direct than they were about this in 2020 when they, I think, did not want to, when the thinking of the communications was, let's do a lot of things that are under the water line addressing this, but not

Speaker 2 help put age in the headlines every day. Now I think that they realize that that is like, you can't be subtle about it.
Not an option.

Speaker 2 But I do think that, you know, know, we tend to, as outside observers, sort of backseat drive campaigns by looking at what they say.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think what I have learned about how they approach this in 2020 is that particularly when you deal with these sort of viral disinformation problems, that their responses are not always

Speaker 2 saying the thing that they're responding to, right?

Speaker 2 And that they will be thinking about ways to address, you know, the age issue, specifically among the whatever 8, 10, 11% of the electorate that's persuadable and moved on that issue through other mechanisms.

Speaker 2 And I think we need to just like, every time we talk about persuasion in this campaign, realize what a small slice of the electorate we're dealing with these days in, you know, certainly in presidential politics, but in a lot of statewide politics, and realize how

Speaker 2 different persuadable voters

Speaker 2 are from certainly the people who would read a book like mine or listen to a podcast like yours.

Speaker 3 So there's this imbalance, and I want to talk about it from both perspectives with how the two sides look at the disinformation issue.

Speaker 3 On the Republican side, there is a ton of energy put into how can we manipulate Democratic voters to help us and use these tools to help us, and very little to thinking about how do we defend against this.

Speaker 3 And on the Democratic side, there's very little energy put into how do we manipulate Republican voters using misinformation tactics to help our candidates.

Speaker 3 And just a ton of energy put into how do we combat it. Right.

Speaker 3 And so I don't know which side you why don't we take the Republican side first and whether that is a fair summation of your interviews and your research on this.

Speaker 2 I was reporting this mostly through over the course of 2022. And

Speaker 2 I spent most of the time with Democrats or folks on the left, you know, primarily in the U.S.

Speaker 2 I also did, there's a chapter that's set in Brazil before the first round of voting there because I think a lot of the dynamics and challenges are very similar.

Speaker 2 You know, but I didn't set out to write a book about what Democrats are doing to combat disinformation.

Speaker 2 I wanted, and the Victory Lab, as you know, was like, it was about both sides because there was a lot of interesting innovation that was happening.

Speaker 3 Oh, I should have worn my Project Orca sweatshirt for this interview. I totally, oh, that was a total miss by me.
Yeah, the Victory Lab was, it was an attempt to talk at both sides.

Speaker 3 It's just the Obama people were better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but, you know, I wrote about the Bush campaign in 2004, which had been incredibly innovative on a number of fronts.

Speaker 2 And so I kept on asking some of the smartest people I knew in Republican politics who would be sort of, you know, most plugged in.

Speaker 2 Like, hey, you know, I'm writing about this counter disinformation stuff. I've been finding all sorts of, you know, Democratic firms that are specializing in this.
The DNC has a point person.

Speaker 2 The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a point person on this. Like there are a lot of people in Democratic politics by 2022 whose business card said counter disinformation strategist.

Speaker 2 Like, I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything Like, on the right, like, is there nobody who's doing this? And time and time again, people will be like, No, we don't do this.

Speaker 2 And it's because they didn't think of disinformation as an actual category.

Speaker 2 And folks on the right, and this is actually something that I think pretty much unites the kind of Trumpy MAGA folks and the kind of establishment elite professional Republicans who used to be your friends, Tim.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 2 Is that they are sort of united in thinking that disinformation, in quotes, is a concept that Democrats invented in 2017 to explain away losing a presidential election and that they had begun to

Speaker 2 use as a predicate for collaborating with government and academia to pressure tech companies to censor conservatives. And there are instances where like some part of that dynamic has played out.

Speaker 2 It's not entirely baseless as a as a claim, claim, but they become dismissive of the whole idea that this is a different type of political speech.

Speaker 2 And I think that that shapes both the willingness to participate and contribute to it, but also the view that there's no need to develop a particular mindset or expertise for responding to it.

Speaker 2 And that remains the case in Republican politics today.

Speaker 3 It's not baselessly exaggerated, you know, but it's not baseless. I mean, you know, this is just reality.

Speaker 3 Like part of the reason why Elon took over Twitter is that like they were taking down more right-wing speech and claims than they were lefty.

Speaker 3 Now, part of that is because there was more right-wing speech and lies out there, right? And there's more, and there's more active disinformation.

Speaker 3 You know, and I think to me, this is what explains it, is that there's more of an intentional effort to manipulate coming from the right than there is from the left.

Speaker 3 I just think that's an objective fact. In some ways, like, this is where I get my old Republican rat fucker hat on, which is why I'm kind of like, why?

Speaker 3 Like, I mean, maybe instead having a lot of Democrats with business cards that say counter disinformation, there should be Democrats with business cards that say disinformation.

Speaker 3 They probably wouldn't put it on their business card, but right? Why are they doing it more?

Speaker 3 And one character from the book, just full disclosure, is a friend of the pod, Dimitri Melhorn, who works with Reid Hoffman on various projects. This tension is represented in his actions, right?

Speaker 3 So in 2017, they led an effort in Alabama to use some of these tactics to tamp down support for Roy Moore.

Speaker 3 There was some fake news websites targeting conservatives. There was an effort to get conservatives to write in somebody else rather than Roy Moore.

Speaker 3 To me, all of it seemed pretty, I thought that there was a lot of ado about not much, in my one man's opinion.

Speaker 3 But it was using some of these tactics that are very frequently used on the right by foreign governments. And the response to that, maybe rightly, was that like, okay, this was maybe too aggressive.

Speaker 3 This goes against values. And the Democrats are now trying to figure out, you know, spending more,

Speaker 3 much, much, much, much, much more energy and resources on combating it than trying to fight.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So if you go back to 2017 when this special election in Alabama happened, the menu of options available for Democrats who were just beginning to think about this, it was like really long and open.

Speaker 2 And like, Wild West. People were throwing out all sorts of things, one of which was like, well, why don't we, you know, Trump's a big threat.
Why don't we fight fire with fire?

Speaker 2 And why aren't we doing this too?

Speaker 2 So some of Hoffman's money ends up funding these two separate projects in Alabama.

Speaker 2 About a year later, a year after the election, the Washington Post and the New York Times end up doing these, you know, sort of investigative stories about the projects and that identify that Hoffman was a significant funder of both of them.

Speaker 2 And the response was, wow, we're getting hit for being hypocrites. This is a bad news cycle.

Speaker 2 And Hoffman and Melhorn in particular had, they had spoken pretty high-mindedly about Trump as a threat to democracy. And they had set themselves up as sort of defenders of liberal democracy.

Speaker 2 And so when you have tactics that seem at odds with that, then like charges of hypocrisy are reasonable to make.

Speaker 2 And so they were very quickly put out a statement basically that was broad and vague, but basically said, hey,

Speaker 2 we don't support this with our money. And it short-circuited short-circuited

Speaker 2 what had been a very open debate on the left about whether these types of tactics were an appropriate set of tools to be using to fight Trump because

Speaker 2 Hoffman had emerged as one of, if not the biggest, source of new money in Democratic politics.

Speaker 2 Basically, everybody in lefty politics, center-right politics, either was getting his money or wanted some of his money at that point.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Dimitri Melhorn almost single-handedly set a moral code for Democrats that, you know, ended up, you know, being adopted by the big established super PACs, the Democratic Party organizations, because

Speaker 2 he controlled the purse strings, especially around a lot of sort of, you know, innovative tech forward political stuff.

Speaker 2 And so you can find all sorts of Democrats, activists, consultants who will off the record say, like saying the same thing they were in 2017. Why aren't we fighting fire with fire?

Speaker 2 Why are we operating according to like a totally outdated code of how you compete online these days?

Speaker 2 And the best answer is because of what happened in Alabama in 2017 and the fallout from it. That said, I do really

Speaker 2 find it hard to imagine.

Speaker 2 We're now in March of 2024 that if we reconvened in eight months after Election Day, and assuming that Trump is on the precipice of returning to the White House, that some of those self-enforced moral standards might go out the window and that we will have seen like a major effort, maybe by a Democratic super PAC, maybe by people who, you know, not by the Biden campaign itself, but to try to apply some of these tactics to defeat him.

Speaker 3 Just in fairness, a full disclosure, I don't think that the Democrats are fully white hat on all this.

Speaker 3 Like there are some areas, you know, like in the quasi-journalism space, you know, there are some efforts out out there where like democrats have created kind of lefty news and so this is sort of like this gray area like is this disinformation where it's like you know it's like the roanoke gazette or something and it's really kind of democratic operatives running a news site and it's like is this news is it not is it presenting itself as something that isn't so they're doing a little bit of that i mean like the scale of that compared to what's happening from foreign and from the right i think is not much but it's just worth mentioning that it's not like they've totally left the absolutely and i but i do i will say and i think a lot of this is because of being responsive to donors, is a lot of those sites, you dig through them and it's hidden and whatever, but you get to the about us and there is some disclosure.

Speaker 2 They say the truth. Yeah, because

Speaker 2 they say, you know, we're devoted to progressive causes, blah, blah, blah, whatever the sort of boilerplate is.

Speaker 2 And a lot of the vogue in progressive communications now is to think about how to create your own communications network.

Speaker 2 that can make up for the weaknesses of traditional mainstream news organizations that were once sort of used as arbiters of truth and the Democrats relied on to amplify and communicate to large audiences.

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Speaker 3 Okay, we're going to move through just a couple other things for Lucia, Sasha. TikTok, just really briefly, obviously there's a lot of discussion about this.

Speaker 3 On the policy side, we'll be talking about that more. I'm more interested in hearing from you.
It is like even more of a black box than all these other sites, right?

Speaker 3 So, at least with Twitter, you know, or Facebook, like you can get an individualized link for everything, and it's like pretty, like, relatively easy to get.

Speaker 3 TikTok is like, you know, every once in a while, I'll be scrolling through my for you page, and there'll be something that's just totally made up that has 900,000 views.

Speaker 3 You've never heard of the person, you've never seen this, you know. I just think that what is happening on there, how to monitor it is very challenging.
So, how are these guys looking at that?

Speaker 3 Like, how do you monitor this? I mean, at least on the other stuff, it was opaque, but doable. I just don't know if it's even doable to monitor the information that's on TikTok.

Speaker 2 I don't think it conventionally is. And I'll throw into the mix, the other place that people in campaigns are worried about this year are private messaging apps.
Yes.

Speaker 2 WhatsApp is a great example, especially in immigrant communities where it has turned into a kind of weird hybrid of like a broadcast platform and a group text, but sometimes you all have thousands of people tens of thousands of people i was doing a lynn wood story remember that clown who was pushing the election fraud i was doing i was writing about him back in 21 and and his i think it was signal i have to go back and look at it yeah but it had like a hundred thousand followers on it or something like that and it was you have to subscribe to it or you couldn't see it yeah you have to subscribe be approved invite only

Speaker 2 and and so you know one of the things that i write about the democratic congressional campaign committee like one of the things they've started doing when they send a field organizer out, and they're particularly focused on this in like Southern California, where you have large Asian communities that are particularly reliant on these community WhatsApp channels, South Florida, where Latino voters are, is they tell the field organizer, not just like, open up an office, order some pizza, get your volunteers in and train them, but go meet people and just ask to get into all the private Facebook groups, into all the WhatsApp groups, and send reports to Washington on what's moving there every day.

Speaker 2 Because just like TikTok, there is no way for an outsider to peek in. You have to become an insider.

Speaker 3 That's a good act. A lot of times you get people that are like, What should I do? What can I do in my community? Infiltrate the WhatsApp feeds in your community and report up to the campaigns.

Speaker 2 That's something to do. Okay.

Speaker 3 Lastly, on this topic, and I have two other really quick things off the topic of this book: is

Speaker 3 Giori Craig is a character you close the book with, disinformation worker on the Democratic side. It ends pretty pessimistic, frankly, about the state of affairs.

Speaker 3 And so how dark are the Democrats just about whether this is even a solvable thing at this point? Or solvable is maybe too big of a word, but even an addressable is maybe a better word.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Jory Krager, the main character of the book, started doing this in 2017.

Speaker 2 And over the course of the time I spent with her, she grew more and more fatalistic, I think, about whether the stuff she was doing was having a major impact.

Speaker 2 I think she feels like Democrats have gotten better.

Speaker 2 at tracking and making some of the assessments we talked about and making the decisions about how and when to respond but the scope of the problem is getting worse, largely because the platforms are more actively disdainful of the idea that it's their job to deal with this.

Speaker 2 And so.

Speaker 3 And literally in the case of Twitter, I mean, a whole episode on Elon Musk, but it's just worth saying that, like, you know, he is not only is not interested in combating disinformation, he seems actively interested in advancing disinformation.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's right. And like the Jim Jordan hearings in the House, Republican attorneys general are suing tech companies.

Speaker 2 It's all scaring other companies like Facebook, in particular, Meta, who had at least sort of made gestures to caring about this because they were concerned about basically drawing regulatory interest in Washington.

Speaker 2 Now they see far more cost

Speaker 2 in antagonizing Republicans than there is upside and staving off regulation.

Speaker 2 So I could come up with some scenarios where maybe things turn in a different direction in two years or four years because of things that happened at Washington, because of things that happened in Silicon Valley, but I think the near-term outlook is

Speaker 2 this is becoming a harder problem to solve.

Speaker 2 And all the tools that Democrats have developed are giving them some good tactics at sort of mitigation and response, but not to like wrestle the problem in its entirety.

Speaker 3 My advice to Democratic policymakers in DC is to focus more on algorithm regulation and just creating rules around how they can do it.

Speaker 3 Because like doing the whack-a-mole with individual content, it's a bad look. I just want like it's a bad look if a company is just deleting information from one side.

Speaker 3 Even if it's fair, it's still a bad look.

Speaker 3 And like the big problem for me is the algorithms, it's so bad on Twitter now that like if you quote tweet somebody to dunk on them, like then your algorithm just gets fed crazier and crazier shit like by friends of the person that you dunked on.

Speaker 3 Right. And so it helps them expand.
And we talked about this a little bit at the start.

Speaker 3 And then TikTok with the for you page and the more they move to algorithmically delivered information versus follower to follower information.

Speaker 3 To me, it's kind of like, okay, if one follower wants to post false shit to their followers, like that's bad, but maybe unsolvable. Like the algorithm thing feels like the addressable issue.
Okay.

Speaker 3 One fight and then we'll talk about gay marriage. Fight is maybe the wrong word.

Speaker 3 We have a long standing dispute on this, at least on the Republican side, where I'm of the view that they are very good at being shit throwing monkeys and getting bad information out there and like not as good as they say they are at actually

Speaker 3 data targeting. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors.
You know, they'll tell you, oh, we tested this issue and we know that it moves people.

Speaker 3 And it's kind of like, that's a lot harder to determine, you know, than it is to say that you, you know, to do a test that says it. Right.

Speaker 3 And there's one example of this was the Ron DeSantis campaign put huge effort, put huge resources into this. You wrote about it.

Speaker 3 And, you know, they did this thing like, oh, we're going to test one message in Ottumwa, Iowa, and then another message in Sioux City. And we're going to test one message on text.

Speaker 3 And we're going to get the results, and it's going to say, oh, this message is 3% better than the other message. And I read the article with interest, and they clearly took it seriously.

Speaker 3 They spent a lot of money on it.

Speaker 3 But my takeaway after reading the article was every dollar that went to that was totally wasted, like that their big problem was mass communications with their candidate.

Speaker 3 And that like the data analytics side of things, you know, is that there's a lot of people selling bullshit out there. So tell me that I'm wrong about that.

Speaker 2 No, I don't think you're wrong.

Speaker 2 So like I, I don't think we disagree as much as you want for the sake of a fight okay that's too bad look they spent 150 million dollars or something and this is i was writing about the super pack right yeah they spent a monstrous amount of money and

Speaker 2 i think both things are true the fate of his candidacy was shaped by his limitations as a communicator his strategic indecision about how to deal with trump and all of the advanced analytics and experiments and data in the world would not have changed that.

Speaker 2 That said, the testing was focused mostly on efficiency. So it was, you know, where do we deliver a certain message and how do we deliver it? Do we do it with TV? Do we do it with direct mail?

Speaker 2 Do we do digital ads? And there's like, you're spending $150 million and you can learn how to be 10% more efficient in targeting your direct mail and TV. That's not, that's not nothing.

Speaker 3 I don't know. See, to me, all of the potential efficiency gains were offset by the cost of trying to figure out what was more efficient.

Speaker 2 Maybe. I mean, they were spending so much money in that period of 2023 that they had the opportunity to build in and experiments to them to learn from it.

Speaker 2 And I think there is, you know, a lot to be said for that. That's it.

Speaker 2 When I wrote the piece, I hope I laced through my skepticism of what they were finding from it and also their reasons for talking about it, which, you know, you did lace through.

Speaker 3 I guess you have to be a real journalist. Like, to me, I wanted like, this is clown shit.
Like,

Speaker 3 I need a quote in there from somebody that's like, this is crazy. Like, this is crazy.
They keep losing. They've lost 15 points since they started these tests.

Speaker 2 I mean, I actually had a quote from Jeff Rowe.

Speaker 2 This was not a piece in Puck News, but I still quoted Jeff Rowe, who, who said, like, it's CYA why we're doing this because they were fighting with the campaign and they needed to convince donors that they weren't just blowing through.

Speaker 2 $100 million with no results. And so I did want to explain the context of why, and I always try to do this when I'm writing about this stuff is like so much of

Speaker 2 the research I'm writing about is happening in Seeker, and I want to give some indication to a reader why people are motivated to talk about some parts of their innovation agenda at times and not others.

Speaker 3 That's fair.

Speaker 3 Okay, lastly, you did write an 800-page book about gay marriage, and you kind of wrote it at this time where really, hopefully not forever, but maybe at the peak of the strength of the gay rights movement, you know, and I think that there's been clearly some backsliding between the don't say gay, there's been backsliding on gay marriage really, but on the don't say gay bills, things of this nature.

Speaker 3 So, anyway, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on that three years out.

Speaker 3 Do you feel the same way you did about the victory lab that maybe you're in a moment and you didn't expect that things would get like this, you saw it coming?

Speaker 3 I'm curious to have some big gay thoughts from you before we end.

Speaker 2 So, I think I was naive

Speaker 2 in part because,

Speaker 2 and you made this distinction in passing, but let me dwell on it, separating politics of marriage and the legal stature of marriage and a whole bunch of other issues of immediate concern to the LGBT community.

Speaker 2 And this internal debate I read about throughout the book among gay rights activists about how much to focus on marriage versus focusing on hate crimes or employment protection or AIDS funding or a bunch of things.

Speaker 2 And the argument that the people who wanted to focus on marriage made was marriage will lift all boats.

Speaker 2 It focuses on our relationships, on who we are, this sort of central thing, and hate crime is secondary and it's about protection.

Speaker 2 If we can convince a majority of Americans that our relationships are the same and interchangeable as theirs, that that will be a foundation on which all of our other political goals related to anti-discrimination and such will be built.

Speaker 2 And I thought that was a pretty persuasive argument.

Speaker 2 So when I write this book, you know, it came out in 2021 and I was writing it through the Supreme Court decisions, I did think that the progress on marriage would extend to other issues.

Speaker 2 And I saw an anti-gay

Speaker 2 part of the social conservative movement seemingly lose their interest in fighting over gay rights issues.

Speaker 3 Got very weak.

Speaker 2 They got very weak. Some of the organizations, like the National Organization for Marriage, big players, barely exist anymore.
Other religious right groups started focusing on other things.

Speaker 2 In retrospect, I realized a lot of this was Donald Trump, that he in 2016 signaled: hey, I have you know, a lot of groups I want to pick on: immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, women, but like, did not give an indication that, you know, the targeting, even personally, seems less invested, frankly, in like the trans stuff.

Speaker 2 Obviously, there are a lot of people around him who, who are, but I do think that Trump basically suppressed a lot of the anti-LGBT politics in his party over four years.

Speaker 2 And when he left the scene, a lot of that returned to surface. And what had happened quietly, but I cover this at the end of my book, but probably not in enough depth and context, is the way in which

Speaker 2 the anti-gay rights activists realized even before the cases came to the Supreme Court that they were going to lose this.

Speaker 2 And they started redirecting their energy and attention and infrastructure and money towards the anti-trans stuff,

Speaker 2 towards schools.

Speaker 2 Schools. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Billy, retro vintage,

Speaker 3 Six seventies or back.

Speaker 2 Overseas stuff. You see a lot of the people who were fighting gay rights in the U.S.
in the 2000s up to 2010 are now in like Zambia trying to change their laws to keep gay sex criminalized.

Speaker 2 And so what I had not realized is the extent to which the clear defeat for them on marriage did not mark a sort of permanent, you know, giving up on gay rights, but that they had sort of tactically gone to places where public opinion is better for them.

Speaker 2 You know, gay marriage still pulls over 70%.

Speaker 2 Over 50% of Republicans approve it.

Speaker 2 And basically, professional Republicans realize like this is not a smart place to play, but we can find a whole lot of issues around sexual politics and the LGBT community that still are popular, or we can be on the front foot defining the conflict instead of reacting to it.

Speaker 2 And I think that, you know, we're going to see a lot of this around the parents' rights and gender identity issues for years, decades to come.

Speaker 3 That's really smart. I'm glad I asked about that.
Okay, Sasha Eisenberg, The Lie Detectives in Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections. You can read it in an afternoon.
So go get it.

Speaker 3 The Engagement, you can read it in a decade. Go get that as well.
If you care about the fight for gay marriage, I appreciate being on the Bulwark podcast, brother.

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