Author and political journalist Sasha Issenberg discusses the Biden 2020 campaign's proprietary 'Harm Index' research evaluating disinformation and attack lines.
Assertion Supported
Biden's 2020 Campaign Ignored Progressive Boycotts to Advertise on Breitbart
“There'd been this effort on the left for a while to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites. The Biden campaign said, no, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing.”
Assertion Supported
Donald Trump Outsourced Presidential Ground Game to Elon Musk's America PAC
“And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that You know, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk funded super PAC.”
Insight
Fact-Checking Viral Disinformation Often Amplifies It Via Social Media Algorithms
“Maybe you shouldn't respond, and maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? You elevate it, you can end up engagement algorithms can end up, could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it.”
Insight
Unlike Business, Political Ad Mis-Targeting Actually Generates Votes for Competitors
“There are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing, and one of them is that the cost of a, Of mis-targeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you are,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Campaigns Primarily Use AI to Draft Fundraising Emails for Testing
“Where people are using AI the most in this campaign is like, Sort of the same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails, you know, like most fundraising emails, they need to come up with new ones every day to send …”
Insight
TV Political Media Buyers Earn Effortless Commissions Compared to Digital Buyers
“And, you know, digital advertising is more labor intensive for them, but buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you can put ads on and, you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a commiss…”