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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this sort of random guy who's playing a critical role in the 2020 election, and you've probably never even heard of him. Lucky for you, McKay Coppins just wrote about Brad Parscale for The Atlantic. Brad Parscale is this 6'8 guy. He's got a shaved head, a triangular beard, and he had basically no political experience before 2015.
--:-- McKay Coppins: He likes to tell the story of his ascent as this kind of rags-to-riches story. You know, he talks about how he grew up a farm boy from Kansas, when in fact he grew up in suburban Topeka and his dad was kind of an affluent attorney. He says that he graduated from an Ivy League school. He was actually Trinity University in San Antonio.
--:-- McKay Coppins: But basically what happened is after college, he went to work for his parents' software company in California. And the company failed. And after that whole episode, he ended up back in San Antonio. He says he was broke and desperate and had $500 to his name.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And I've spent 15 years building a company that I started with just $500. In fact, he had several rental properties that he also owned. But he used it to start this web design business in Texas. And he was kind of, from very early on, like kind of a hustler.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Like he tells stories about how he would go to Borders bookstore and just cold pitch people in the tech aisle of the bookstore trying to get them to hire him to build websites for them. And sort of on the strength of his hustle and his kind of fast-talking abilities, he was able to build this business into something real.
--:-- McKay Coppins: He built websites for, you know, gun shops and plumbers and things like that. And eventually started to attract bigger clients, including in 2011, the Trump Organization. Jared and Ivanka first hired you, right, to help with the Trump Organization.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Ivanka and Eric Trump hired me for the real estate website. And once I got the real estate website, then I started to work my way through the Trump. So how closely connected with the family have you been?
--:-- McKay Coppins: I think at this point, I have a very good relationship with them. But the only reason he got this job was because he offered to do it for kind of an insanely low price. And over the next several years, he designed websites for like a Trump winery, Melania Trump skincare line.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And then in 2015, he was asked to build a very simple web page for a Trump presidential campaign, which everyone at that time figured was sort of a publicity stunt or would never actually get off the ground. But one thing led to another, and he ends up basically running Donald Trump's front-running presidential campaign's digital operation from his personal laptop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, I should say, at the beginning of the Trump campaign, Parscale's kind of most valued contribution early on was designing a merchandise page for the Trump campaign website that sold MAGA hats. And that's kind of as advanced as the Trump campaign got.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what happened was, after Trump became the nominee, they looked around and realized that they were not going to catch up to the Clinton campaign in fundraising. And crucially, they weren't going to be able to compete on TV, which traditionally was how campaigns believed elections were won.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Buying up as much local ad time as you could in the swing state markets and kind of blanketing the airwaves with your message. When the Trump campaign realized that they couldn't compete that way, Brad Parscale sort of stepped in and said, hey, why don't we just go all in on Facebook and Google?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From June to November of 2016, Trump's campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, whereas Clinton's just ran 66,000. And this was seen as incredibly effective. In fact, a Facebook executive later wrote in a memo that leaked to the public that Trump got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was all Brad Parscale's doing. Central to the Trump campaign's digital advertising was the use of micro-targeting, which in effect was taking the electorate, slicing it up into very specific, very small, very distinct niches, and then tailoring digital ads that would appeal to them for various reasons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So one example, if the Trump campaign wanted to run an ad that called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, in past eras, you would have to put that in a campaign commercial and put it on TV, and all kinds of different people are going to see it. Some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What you can do with micro-targeting is you can create that ad and then serve it directly via Facebook to 800 pro-life Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I should say, micro-targeting wasn't invented by Parscale or the Trump campaign. The Obama campaign famously used it in 2012. Hillary Clinton's campaign used it a little bit. But the difference was that the Trump campaign both used it at a much larger scale than past campaigns and also did things with micro that pushed boundaries that other presidential campaigns probably weren't willing to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, toward the end of the 2016 race, in the final weeks of the race, the Trump campaign started serving ads directly to black voters in Florida that said, Hillary Clinton thinks African Americans are super predators. They weren't trying to win Black voters over to Trump. They were basically just trying to depress Black turnout.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, there was a Trump campaign official quoted at the time saying that this was one of three major voter suppression operations underway. By the way, we only know about that specific example because they decided to boast about it on Background to a Reporter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the vast majority of the ads that they ran, we don't know who exactly they were served to, what exactly the content was, and what effect it had on the electorate. So after the election, stories start to appear in the media hailing Parscale as a genius and Trump's secret weapon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he kind of becomes the face of Trump's surprise victory. An insider's take now on how Mr. Trump actually won. The man behind the digital operation now credited with helping find and turn out the voters who made the difference. Brad Parscale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so in 2018, when Trump decided to start staffing up his reelection campaign. Today, we learned who's going to take the helm of his reelection bid. His 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale, was named as campaign manager.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's interesting. I've talked to people who have known him now for many years, and they do say that he started to change after that 2016 election. He goes to rallies and gives speeches to the roaring crowds, throws out MAGA hats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because what do we want? Four more years, right? So how do we say that? Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. So he is kind of becoming a political celebrity in his own right, but his genius is continuing to give all the credit to Trump and maintaining close relationships with the Trump family, in particular Jared Kushner and Ivanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so in 2016, Brad was responsible for 5.9 million Facebook ads, and his campaign was called the best digital ad campaign the world has ever seen from any advertiser on Facebook. What should we expect this time?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The campaign this time is going to be, you know, 10 times more sophisticated and better funded than the last one. Brad Parscale has said that the Trump campaign plans to spend a billion dollars on this year's election, which would make it the most expensive presidential campaign in history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the digital tactics are central to the entire operation. It's how they get their message out. It's how they fundraise. It's how they distract or overwhelm the media narratives that are unhelpful to them. And there's kind of an array of new technological strategies and platforms that are making them even more dependent on this stuff to win the 2020 election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, McKay builds a fake Facebook profile to experience President Trump's 2020 digital strategy for himself. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community. And Built wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month. When you're ready to travel, they say Bilt points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world. You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining Bilt.com slash Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained. Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. McKay, you spent a ton of time for The Atlantic investigating these campaign tactics the Trump administration used in 2016 and is now using again already in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What made you want to write about this? I kept encountering people who seemed to truly believe demonstrably false things about political news or the impeachment proceedings or any number of other issues.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And so I wanted to know what was happening inside this kind of alternative information ecosystem that Trump and his allies have created on the right. So I decided to try to experience it from inside.
--:-- McKay Coppins: So basically, last fall, around the time the impeachment inquiry was launching, I sat down and created a Facebook account that was separate from the normal one that I used. I chose a new name and took a profile picture that kind of obscured my face.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What was the name you chose? Was it Pierre Delecto?
--:-- McKay Coppins: It was a lot more boring than Pierre Delecto. I think it was something like Greg Anderson or something like that. Nice. Very generic. You know, a forgettable white guy name. That was what I was going for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you use your real photo or was it a fake photo?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Actually, no one's asked me about this remarkably. I had a red MAGA hat from the 2016 campaign, and I literally put it on and raised the phone above my head so you could only see the hat and not my face. And that was my profile pic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's probably all you needed. No one would question it as long as you wore that hat, right?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Yeah, my sense was because part of this was I wanted to join a bunch of private Facebook groups for kind of Trump superfans. And I figured I'd have a better chance of getting accepted if I had a red capped profile pic, which seemed to work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you go create like a fake set of interests? Were you liking like, you know, Ted Nugent and I don't know, Jon Voight fan pages?
--:-- McKay Coppins: I basically followed the suggestions that Facebook gave me. So I followed Ann Coulter, Fox Business, a bunch of Trump fan pages with names like in Trump We Trust so that I could as organically as possible create the experience that an average Trump fan who logs on to Facebook and creates an account would have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds almost too easy. And yet you were like seemingly the first person to try and do this for an investigative piece. So where does this fake account take you?
--:-- McKay Coppins: At the time, I kind of thought that it wouldn't really yield that much fruit for my story. I basically figured it would be a good way to kind of keep tabs on the content that the Trump campaign was putting out, the spin they were using.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Because I felt like I had a pretty good sense of what the Trump White House's messaging was around Ukraine and impeachment and all the other issues that they talk about. But what happened instead was actually sort of alarming to me.
--:-- McKay Coppins: I would check this Trumpified Facebook feed several times a day. And there were times literally where I would sit down and watch one of the impeachment hearings in the House live on TV. And I would kind of come to my own conclusions about the testimony that was presented.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And then I would look at my phone later in the day and find, for example, a video that the Trump campaign had sort of slickly put together that took out of context clips from the same hearing that I had watched, but recast it as kind of an exoneration for Trump or a triumph for the president.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And I literally found myself wondering sometimes, like, wait a second, did I misunderstand what happened? Is that what actually happened today? And over time, like day after day, week after week of being exposed to this kind of stream of pro-Trump propaganda, it started to take a toll on me.
--:-- McKay Coppins: You know, I had assumed because I was doing this as a journalistic exercise and because I was inherently skeptical about all of this and because, frankly, I have a pretty high media literacy rate. This is my job that I wouldn't be taken in by kind of these distortions or lies or, you know, disinformation.
--:-- McKay Coppins: But what I found instead was that because I was so suspicious of what I was seeing, I started to become reflexively cynical about every headline that I saw, even if it came from like The Washington Post or The New York Times.
--:-- McKay Coppins: It wasn't so much that I believed the president and his allies were, you know, telling the truth. It was more that it felt like, you know, truth itself about all these issues was harder and harder to locate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What you're talking about here is like the persuasive nature of fake news, right? This is something Steve Bannon has talked about. He wants to flood the zone with shit. Right. So that we can no longer tell what is real and what is fake.
--:-- McKay Coppins: But this is the key. It's not really designed to be persuasive. Like, it's not designed to convince everybody who sees it that it's true. It's just designed to disorient you or confuse you or sow just enough doubt that you're not sure exactly what's true and what's not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the calculation is that most people in those conditions will sort of throw up their hands and say, eh, who knows what's real? I've got my own life to worry about. I've got my job. I've got my kids. You know, I'm just going to disengage and, you know, go watch TV.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this isn't just through micro-targeted Facebook ads, right? The campaign has other strategies?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Yeah, the micro-targeted Facebook campaigns have proved effective, but you also have mass texting, you know, Twitter bots, and basically every platform that you can consume content, President Trump, his campaign, and kind of the vast coalition of allies is there sort of making noise and trying to disorient and distract.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How have the different social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, even the Google products, how have they decided to either let this information flow freely or to police it?
--:-- McKay Coppins: The various platforms have basically taken somewhat different approaches, but I think it's safe to say that all of them are comfortable with a good deal of disinformation on their platforms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, Twitter, for example, announced that they're not going to take political advertising this cycle. Its CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted yesterday, while internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risk to politics where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Facebook has been kind of interesting because after 2016, they were sort of excoriated for allowing fake news and disinformation to spread on their platform so freely. And Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better and he rolled out a bunch of reforms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But last fall he announced that political candidates would continue to be allowed to run false ads on Facebook which I should note makes them different than commercial advertisers If you're a company and you want to place an ad on Facebook, you're subject to fact-checking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're not allowed to make obviously false claims about your product. You'll be punished. Your ad will be pulled from Facebook. Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad, and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad. So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies?
--:-- McKay Coppins: I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no. I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for are saying to judge their character for themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you won't take them down. You may flag that it's wrong, but you won't take it down. Congresswoman, it depends on the context that it shows up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's safe to say, though, that this is a subject of enormous debate inside these platforms. Like, there is not a consensus view on how to approach this issue. And to some extent, I kind of understand where they're coming from.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I don't really like the idea of a bunch of Silicon Valley executives being the final word on what political speech is allowed on their platforms, especially as these platforms become the de facto public squares in American life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I guess the million dollar question, or in this case, definitely the billion dollar question, is what do Democrats do if Trump is going to run this campaign based on extreme falsehoods and be extremely effective in micro-targeting people, in texting people, in flooding the zone with shit to the point where people don't want to even hear about politics and don't even go out to vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do Democrats do? Do they have to play the same game by the same rules?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Well, this is a subject of open debate among Democratic strategists right now. The one thing there is consensus on is the idea that Democrats have to invest much more heavily in their kind of digital architecture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That if they're going to compete, they need to be able to be as well-funded and as technologically sophisticated as the Trump campaign to get their message out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are a number of Democratic strategists who go a lot further and basically say that in order to beat Trump, they're going to have to co-opt some of his tactics. And that means pushing out conspiracy theories and disinformation and trying to suppress turnout among Trump voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's one guy named Dimitri Melhorn, who's a Democratic consultant, sort of infamous for experimenting with digital dirty tricks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, for example, during the Alabama special election in 2017, Melhorn had a group that funded two different false flag operations against the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, for one scheme, there were a bunch of faux Russian Twitter bots sent to follow Moore's account to make it look like Russia was backing him. There was another effort where they created a fake social media campaign called Dry Alabama that was designed to make it look like Moore was being supported by fictional Baptists who wanted to ban alcohol in this state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so these were relatively small scale efforts. It's not clear that they really had much effect in that race. But Melhorn and some people like him basically say, we have to fight fire with fire in order to beat Trump or else we're going to lose this election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And where does that leave our democracy? I think the problems we're encountering right now with disinformation and censorship through noise will extend well beyond this election cycle, regardless of who wins.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we end up in a place where both major parties in the United States believe that the only way to win is to essentially warp our information ecosystem to the point where nobody knows what's true and what's not, then that has profound repercussions for the health of our democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it will be bad for everyone in the long run. We're not the first country where this has happened. There are countries where on any given day, the average person goes through life, reads the Internet, sees the news, has no idea what's true and what's not, has no idea whether any of it is real or if it's all propaganda.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is ultimately a victory for the people in power who do this stuff. They don't need you to believe them. They just need you to be confused and to give up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that if that's where we end up as a country, that's a really dangerous situation. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His piece, The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Re-elect the President, appears in the March issue of the magazine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We reached out to Brad Parscale through his website. Brad didn't write back, but a guy named Tim Murtaugh did. Tim, turns out, is the director of communications for President Trump's re-election campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm just going to read what he said about McKay's Atlantic piece, Word for Word. The story itself is disinformation. They wrote 8,000 words trying to paint a scary picture, but couldn't come up with one specific example to back up their premise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's nothing more than a stream-of-consciousness fever dream from liberals already making excuses for an election loss they see coming eight months away. That's where we left it with Tim.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the record, I've read McKay's piece, and it has examples, as does today's episode. I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is Greg Anderson still on Facebook?
--:-- McKay Coppins: I deleted the account right before the story was published because I was paranoid about the private groups that I had joined. So the answer is no. He is in Facebook heaven now. There's only Facebook hell. Yeah, that's probably right. I think that theologically that makes sense to me.
