Can Joe Biden beat the internet?
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.
The Biden campaign’s letter demanding that TV networks stop booking President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on their programs signaled a clear break with the past. Rather than address Giuliani’s conspiracy theory that Biden used his power as vice president to help his son financially, the Biden campaign publicly pressured the TV stations to keep Giuliani from appearing at all.
Ten days later, it chastised the New York Times for running an op-ed raising questions about the propriety of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in countries where his father, when he was vice president, was overseeing U.S. foreign policy.
Usually complaints to news organizations would be made behind the scenes, but the Biden campaign elected instead to issue them in public, and to demand that they stop giving a platform to specific figures.
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.
Like a basketball coach who stands inches from an official during the game — yelling, wheedling, cajoling, pleading for calls to go their way — the Biden campaign has set its sights on shaping the narrative in the mainstream press as early as possible.
There are several reasons why it makes sense for the Biden campaign to take this approach.
Trump is a historically truth-challenged president. As of mid-April, he had made 18,000 false or misleading claims during 1,170 days in office, according to the Washington Post. His reelection effort so far has mostly relied on thin and often baseless accusations against Biden, and the Democrat’s campaign wants to keep anything damaging to its candidate from entering the mainstream media.
But the Biden campaign also believes, with good reason, that it’s impossible to play whack-a-mole with everything that pops up online.
And unlike the major social media companies, establishment media still retain an instinct to play a gatekeeper role in vetting information before publishing it, whereas platforms like Facebook have rejected pressure from the Biden campaign and others to get more involved in removing disinformation.
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.
The Biden campaign also has a better shot at influencing the media in part because Biden has historically had a friendly relationship with most of the press — unlike Trump, and unlike Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, Clinton had great difficulty moving on from questions about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and about her use of a private email account and server while she was secretary of state. No illegalities were found, but Clinton apologized for her use of the server and called it a mistake.
Her loss in the 2016 election looms large in the Biden campaign’s imagination. It is intent on learning the lessons from Clinton’s defeat.
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.
One of the key points of emphasis for the Biden campaign is on the language used to describe accusations by Trump or his allies that are sometimes based loosely in fact but then extend out into baseless conspiracy, or that sometimes have no rooting in reality at all.
Biden’s aides are laser-focused on making sure news outlets use words like “debunked” or “untrue” or “baseless” when discussing Trump’s claims rather than using softer and more equivocal language.
Republicans have their own pressure tactics, and they have grown more adept at using the accusation of liberal media bias as a weapon against journalists.
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.
That puts the press in a difficult spot. Part of the president’s political strategy is to demonize the media and to condition his supporters to view them as irredeemably biased, even as Trump spins out conspiracy theories about Biden.
ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl wrote in his recent book, “Front Row at the Trump Show,” that the president “wants to define the media as the opposition party.”
Trump, Karl wrote, “is waging a war on truth.” Peter Wehner, a former senior aide in George W. Bush’s White House and a Republican, has written that Trump’s goal is to “murder the very idea of truth.”
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.
Trump and his reelection campaign are trying to paint Biden as corrupt, much as they did with Clinton in 2016. But the two primary examples that Trump has sought to use have so far failed to deliver.
Biden’s son Hunter has admitted he showed “poor judgment” in accepting a board seat at a Ukraininan energy company with a history of corruption while his father was vice president and leading the Obama administration’s policy in Eastern Europe. Hunter Biden was paid $50,000 a month despite having had no experience in energy or Eastern European policy.
Yet he maintains he did nothing illegal, and there is no evidence he did so.
More important, there is no evidence at all that Joe Biden’s pressure on the Ukrainian government in 2015 and 2016 to fire the government’s top prosecutor was intended to help his son in any way. Biden was publicly carrying out the policy of the U.S. government and its allies and of good-government organizations, and anticorruption activists in Ukraine, among others, have said the prosecutor’s removal made it more likely that Hunter Biden’s energy company would face investigation.
As for Trump’s more recent fixation on Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser, there are legitimate questions about whether the FBI acted properly in its interview of him, which led to his guilty plea for lying to federal agents.
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.
And once again, there’s no evidence that Biden did anything to influence law enforcement’s handling of the matter, despite Trump’s attempts to intimate that he did.
The Ukraine and Flynn matters are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the world of conspiracy theories and personal smears. Trump has ratcheted up his false attacks on mail-in voting, claiming with no evidence that it will lead to widespread fraud, which raises grave questions about why he wants to call the legitimacy of the fall election into question.
He has also repeatedly tweeted grotesque conspiracy theories about a prominent TV host who’s been critical of the Trump presidency. And the president’s son Donald Jr. promoted a post on Instagram earlier this month that associated Biden with pedophilia, a step toward a kind of debased gutter politics that is a new low.
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 the Biden campaign has made a strategic calculation that it can’t fight every rumor and conspiracy theory that pops up online. It wants to monitor the online ecosystem to see what is bubbling up with the most potency and speed. But its priority is to keep bad — or damaging — information from gaining currency in mainstream news.
The Biden strategy is a wager that the mainstream press is still the primary battleground in American communications and culture, at a time when disinformation and thinly sourced rumors are sprouting up all over the web and being increasingly consumed by Americans who don’t trust the establishment media.
But the Biden campaign, the aide told Yahoo News, believes a significant number of Americans are more cautious than they were a few years ago about how and where they get their news, and that non-mainstream sources of information have become less influential. And there are still good reasons to believe this, such as the booming viewership of mainstream evening news shows since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
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.
Tim Miller, who was the top spokesman for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, cautioned against dismissing the dark corners of conspiracy land altogether.
“I think we definitely erred in 2016 in underappreciating what was happening off of the radar of this kind of Beltway Twitter, blue check journalist, political strategists crowd,” Miller said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. “It was hard to kind of tell what was real and what was fake, but it was there.
“And I think that we underappreciated just how much traction Trump was getting with these sort of conspiratorial ideas that seemed ridiculous to the mainstream press, but have found an audience,” he added.
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.
“Increasingly, even on Facebook and on social media, we just have surrounded ourselves with like-minded people. OK, that said, this stuff still seeps across, it really does,” he said.
Miller used the example of a friend in a Southern state who is nonpolitical and is a “gettable” vote for Biden. The friend contacted him to ask if it was true that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had actually ordered the flags on the Capitol lowered to half-mast after Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in January.
The question stemmed from an item that appeared on the Babylon Bee, a popular satirical website that resembles a conservative-leaning version of the Onion. Some people, like Miller’s friend, didn’t realize it was a joke.
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.
“The first 100 people that liked it on Facebook, they’re not gettable,” Miller said of the satirical item and others like it. “But the people they shared that with, there are some people out there that are gettable. And there is, I think, a wrongheaded myth that they’re not swing voters anymore and that it’s all about turnout. That is just not true.”
Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant who was a senior spokesman on the 2016 Clinton campaign, said that “the million-dollar question” is “when is something hitting a saturation level that it requires engagement?”
“I think the best metric is when a conspiracy theory is reaching significant saturation among non-base voters,” he said. “When it has really started to breach into lower-information voters and swing voters, then you can no longer leave it unattended to.”
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.
The internet companies based in Silicon Valley view themselves as free and open platforms, not top-down publishers like traditional media entities. They embody the ethos of the internet, which is to tear down boundaries and gatekeepers, even as an increasing number of Americans depend on companies like Facebook for hard news.
Soon after sending letters to the TV networks and the New York Times last fall, the Biden campaign also sent letters to Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet — the parent company of Google and YouTube — calling on them to take down a Trump campaign ad it said contained false claims. But the social media giants refused.
Since then, however, Twitter has decided not to allow political advertising, and this week for the first time posted a fact-check button underneath tweets with false claims by the president about the dangers of voting by mail.
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.
But Facebook has remained defiant, insisting it will not get into the business of removing content in almost all cases even if it is clearly a lie. “People should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and … what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, said in January.
Just this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reacted to Twitter’s fact check of Trump with disapproval. “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth,” he said on Fox News and again on CNBC.
Despite all this, Trump protested after Twitter’s fact check that the social media companies were discriminating against him and other Republicans, and had White House staff draft an executive order aimed at punishing social media companies. Conservatives inside the White House have fought against the order, administration sources told Yahoo News, citing it as a dangerous anti-free-speech precedent.
Finally, the Biden campaign does not face some of the disadvantages that Clinton did in 2016.
“She started out in 2015 with a historically rocky relationship with the press, which makes it harder to start working the refs on day one. Day one had to be more of charm offensive than it was working the refs,” a former Clinton aide said.
“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.
Now Trump and his campaign “are trying to invent a narrative out of whole cloth instead of building on 25 years of negative narrative that had been built up around her,” the former Clinton aide said. “They’ve not spent 25 years calling [Biden] corrupt.”
Biden, by contrast, is well known to the public and, according to polls, has a largely positive image.
As Biden put it in a recent interview on Yahoo News: “People know who I am. The good news is the bad news. They know me. They know my faults. They know my talents. They know me. So it’s hard to lay on me some of the things that are just totally out of sync with anything in my whole life.”
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.
“What he’s trying to do is get something going on the internet, just try to get it going. Say it enough, like his father says. If you say it enough, people will believe it. It’s sick, it’s sick, it’s sick. But he is his father’s son,” Biden said.
“I don’t want to get down in the mud with these guys. … This is bizarre … this is sick. They never fail to amaze me, how venal and — well, I don’t want to get going. I don’t want to do what they do.”
And regarding Trump’s conspiracy theory involving former President Barack Obama and Biden and the Russia investigation, Biden said that “this is his pattern: diversion, diversion, diversion, diversion, diversion.”
The Biden campaign aide said their “overriding mantra ... is not to get distracted, not to play [Trump’s] game or take our eye off the ball.”
The Biden aide said their goal is to avoid spending time litigating the details of attacks on their candidate, whether it be around Hunter Biden and Ukraine or Michael Flynn and the Russia investigation.
“We have not gone down the rabbit hole with him because ultimately this is a distraction from how badly Trump’s mismanaged the coronavirus, and it’s a distraction from the lives lost and the economic carnage that’s resulted,” the Biden aide said.
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