Democratic leaders fearful of potential Russian interference and burned by recent conservative success on social media have begun a new effort to win the midterm election battle on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party organization in charge
of strategy for House races, introduced internal software this spring to
identify suspected automated Twitter accounts, or bots, that frequently post
about key races and seem similar to the fake accounts that U.S. intelligence
officials and technology firms say were part of Russia’s interference in the
2016 presidential election, party officials said.
The
system also is designed to provide a more aggressive strategy to drive
discussions on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, an area in which Democrats
think they were outmaneuvered in 2016 — with the committee hiring dozens of
social media specialists to fight daily messaging battles online.
The
previously unreported effort has dispatched 43 staff members — called “battle
station organizers” — to the most competitive districts in the nation, where
they are building grass-roots networks to spread pro-Democratic messages as
well as attacks on Republicans in local Facebook and Twitter communities. The
DCCC has flagged nearly 10 accounts as malicious bots to Twitter, which shut
them down, committee staff members said.
“This is
completely different from what we have done in past cycles,” said Dan Sena, the
executive director of the DCCC.
Under
the new model, Democratic organizers paid for by the national party committee
recruit volunteer social media activists like they would people to knock on
doors or work at phone banks. The new staff members work to place potentially
viral content in local Facebook groups like they once tried to influence the
letter to the editor pages of local newspapers.
Republicans,
meanwhile, have a more limited program of providing House candidates with
digital training and support for campaign staff members.
A focus
on social media organizing is quickly becoming the new standard as Democrats
increase the volume of political persuasion efforts on social media, a growing
tool for reaching voters as television viewership declines and smartphone use
increases. Democrats concluded after the 2016 election that Republicans had
outperformed their efforts, both in paid and viral memes driven by candidate
Donald Trump.
“Whether
it’s Russia or whether it is a bot network in Michigan, it’s all the same in
terms of fighting against it,” said David Yanakovich, the digital director for
the successful Senate campaign of Doug Jones (D-Ala.), an effort that tracked
some automated bot activity in the closing days of that race. “You have to take
everything seriously. You can’t let anything go without combating it.”
Director
of National Intelligence Daniel Coats has warned that Russian efforts to
influence U.S. elections continue, despite President Trump’s contradictory
statements about whether Russia has engaged in election interference. Last
week, Facebook shut down a network of 32 false pages and profiles that had been
organizing political events in the United States. At least one of the pages had
links to Russia.
“Russia
has used numerous ways in which they want to influence through media, social
media, through bots, through actors that they hire through proxies,” Coats said
at a White House briefing Aug. 2. “It is pervasive. It is ongoing with the
intent to achieve their intent, and that is drive a wedge and undermine our
democratic values.”
Both
major political parties have taken recent action to buttress their social media
defenses, training campaign employees in basic cybersecurity hygiene, such as
imposing two-factor identification and complex passwords to sign into email
accounts. The Democratic National Committee holds a monthly meeting with officials
from all party organizations involved in the midterm elections to discuss
cybersecurity.
The
National Republican Congressional Committee also has added digital resources
this cycle, although it has taken a more conventional approach to social media
organizing. The committee offers centralized training and support for House
campaigns about best practices and tactics, with staff members assigned
regionally to assist in the effort. The NRCC has not deployed
candidate-specific staff to work on social media, a spokesman said.
The
Democratic congressional plans, by contrast, were developed last year, while
studying the campaigns of Jones in Alabama and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
In both
races, Democrats found that automated Twitter accounts promoted story lines
intended to hurt their candidates in the final weeks of the campaign. They also
found that they could successfully push back by flooding the same networks with
advertising and organized posting from supporters. In most cases, the
counterattack consisted of positive messages about the Democratic candidate.
In
November, a Democratic-leaning bot-tracking firm found that automated accounts
of unknown origin played a role in spreading criticism of a Latino Victory Fund
television ad in the Virginia governor’s race. The spot, which a White House
spokeswoman denounced as “political racism,” depicted a pickup truck with a
Confederate flag and a Republican bumper sticker chasing nonwhite kids through
a suburban neighborhood. Latino Victory stopped airing the ad after an alleged
terrorist killed eight people in New York City with a truck.
The
firm, which was hired by the Virginia Education Association, concluded that 12
of the 15 most active accounts tweeting about the Virginia race in the week of
Nov. 2, 2017, were either “highly automated bot or bot-like accounts” with a
potential follower reach in the hundreds of thousands.
“We
noticed right away that something was done in terms of the amount of traffic we
were getting in terms of comments and replies and hate,” said Jorge Silva, a
spokesman for Latino Victory, of the initial Twitter response to the ad. “It
was really the same message repeated over and over again from different
accounts that did not have pictures.”
In the
Alabama race, Republican candidate Roy Moore at one point gained about 20,000
Twitter followers in one day, including many that had Russian names in their
online biographies. Moore’s campaign alleged that the accounts were “a
political stunt” by Democrats and denied responsibility.
The Jones
campaign responded by building its own networks of volunteers, with a weekly
conference call with 50 to 100 active supporters, designed to push their own
positive messages through Facebook posts and tags on Twitter. The campaign
regularly tried to use its volunteer network to get its favored Twitter tags,
like #kitchentableissues and #rightsideofhistory, trending in the state above
tags favored by supporters of Moore.
“We
would basically push out against the bots in the networks,” said Joe Trippi,
the senior strategist of the Jones campaign. “And we did a lot of paid digital.
I mean a lot.”
Since
then, other campaigns have been building up their social media presence. In
Illinois, the gubernatorial campaign of J.B. Pritzker has commissioned online
panel research to game out the best way of counteracting false or misleading
viral attacks. The study found that the best response to false attacks on a
candidate was to pivot to positive messages, without trying to correct the
record.
“The
other thing we found was that people tend to believe fake news about women at a
much higher rate than men,” said Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s campaign manager.
New
software at the DCCC allows committee staff to run reports on specific
districts, which categorizes the followers of candidates or users of hashtags
based on their likelihood of being an automated account. The reports allow
campaigns to see whether certain story lines are being promoted by suspect
accounts, the most common words used in tweets and which accounts are tweeting
most frequently.
Twitter
allows some automation in its accounts, but has policies that bar spam,
including automated efforts to post multiple updates to “a trending or popular
topic with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic to drive traffic or
attention.”
The DCCC
software does not allow for tracking of Facebook, a platform that political
consultants consider far more important for reaching regular voters, because
much of the activity on that platform is not posted publicly. But the committee
has tasked its local battle station organizers with monitoring the activity in
local Facebook communities and political pages, including new progressive
communities maintained by grass-roots groups like Indivisible.
The job
falls to people like Cale Lockhart, 19, a DCCC organizer in Iowa, who spends
his days direct messaging people on local Facebook groups and creating online
social content to support Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat challenging Rep. Rod Blum
(R-Iowa).
Lockhart
says he communicates weekly with a group of about 50 “influencers” who can
share content in the local networks supporting Finkenauer.
“The
most important thing is that not everyone has a home phone that we can call,”
said Lockhart. “There are a lot of people who are energized who haven’t been
able to get involved.”