It’s not complicated—Vote for Joe if you want to save America and democracy.
— Pam Resists (@ResisterForever) October 19, 2020
And watch this. It’s wonderful. 💖 https://t.co/VIBTkix0v9
I may be finding this Matt Viser/Washington Post story a little more reassuring than I should, but I'm glad to learn the Biden campaign has a multimillion-dollar "Malarkey Factory" combating disinformation, and very glad to get an explanation of what kinds of disinformation they decide to combat:
“Our theory of the case has been that we need to find and identify the misinformation that is actually moving voters, even if it is a small number of voters, then find who those voters are and see if we can intervene,” said Rob Flaherty, the campaign’s digital director and head of the Malarkey Factory. “There’s misinformation that inflames a base. There’s misinformation that persuades people. And there’s misinformation that suppresses a base.”
While it is increasingly easy to determine where disinformation is coming from, given the proliferation of online tools, the trickier challenge is figuring out whether it’s shaping voting behavior and merits a response.
While it is increasingly easy to determine where disinformation is coming from, given the proliferation of online tools, the trickier challenge is figuring out whether it’s shaping voting behavior and merits a response. “The real dilemma of misinformation, from a campaign perspective, is that in the vast majority of cases, the correct tactical thing to do is nothing,” said Matthew Hindman, an associate professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a study on misinformation during the 2018 midterms. “There is a very real risk that you will take a nothing story that nobody has heard of and raise its prominence and give it oxygen.”
So when the frothy faction started spreading the rumor that Osama bin Laden had never died and Obama and Biden had Navy Seals executed to silence the story, the campaign did nothing. It was too stupid and crazy to affect any voters other than those who were already totally committed to Trump anyway. But when they started finding Latin voters in Florida getting influenced by Trump calling Biden a "socialist", they went into action with spots emphasizing Biden's patriotism and connection to Obama.
That's been one of the three most effective Republican smears against Biden—the other two being the allegations that he's "creepy" and "sleepy". So we're getting lots of video of him being crazy about his wife and leaping steps two at a time up to the plane.
And very little about this thing cooked up by Giuliani as an October Surprise with the Murdoch New York Post on, apparently, young Hunter Biden, because it can really sink itself without assistance from the Malarkey Factory, Hunter is not running for president, it's one of those stories nobody can even understand, it gets buried in the ridiculous fabricated story of how Giuliani obtained the stuff from a blind laptop repairman and it had nothing to do with the Russian agent from Ukraine, Andrii Derkach, who has been helping Giuliani in his public search for Biden "dirt", if the allegations being made against Joe Biden are at all true they aren't allegations of him doing anything particularly wrong, and discussing it just makes it sound as if there's something to discuss. I'm with the New York Times coverage—
Giuliani chose the Post because he trusted them to not do any fact checking. Just the kind of newspaper he likes pic.twitter.com/hyJlwSjfxs
— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 19, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment