Elections and Media

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook. The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

On a Wednesday night in June in Cedar Rapids (IA) it was just like old times for Right Side Broadcasting. Live on YouTube, hosts Steve Lookner and Liz Willis interviewed people sporting “Make America Great Again” hats, who waited eagerly in line to watch President Trump take the stage at a jam-packed, campaign-style rally. Some of the Trump fans doubled as Right Side fans, and asked Lookner and Willis to pose for selfies in their branded polos. After generating $1.1 million in advertising revenue and donations in 2016, Right Side entertained grand expansion plans. Founder Joe Seales told Business Insider last fall that he wanted to add news shows to his company's YouTube channel and build toward 24-hour programming. Instead, Right Side has been forced to cut back amid steep revenue declines. A staff of 12 is down to four. Shows hosted by Mike Cernovich, Wayne Dupree, Margaret Howell and Nicholas J. Fuentes have been canceled. Far from seeing a gusher of donations from energized Trump supporters, Seales said he has been propping up Right Side Broadcasting with money from his own pocket.

Teaming up with Right Side on webcasts before Election Day fueled speculation that former reality TV star Donald Trump might launch a television channel, if the vote didn't go his way. When CNN asked campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon about the prospect of “Trump TV” in October, the former Breitbart News chairman smiled and said, “Trump is an entrepreneur.” According to Seales, Right Side never discussed going into business with Trump in the event of a defeat.

[Commentary] With elections looming in 2018 that look to generate lots of political advertising, broadcasters should be well versed in defending the current state of political fundraising and spending, particularly the newly won right of corporations and other associations to spend unlimited amounts in support of their causes and candidates.

The real information problem—which we at the Hewlett Foundation are actively exploring with potential philanthropic interventions as part of our democracy reform work with the Madison Initiative—is biased news, including misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Research shows that many citizens are psychologically predisposed to want to read biased news that reaffirms their pre-existing beliefs and tribal identities. This creates obvious pernicious incentives for commercial technology platforms that want to keep people on their sites. So, compared with fake news, biased news will be harder to address.

Polarization and hyper-partisanship remain the key concerns at Madison. However, some recent evidence calls into question the correlation between growing ideological polarization and social media, given that the most rapidly polarizing—older—demographics are the least likely users of social media. So while some actors are motivated by ideological partisanship, some are profit motivated, some seek to amplify prejudices via hate speech, and still others appear not particularly ideological, but instead most interested in shifting the balance of power domestically (or in the case of Russia globally, towards a more illiberal democracy).

People connected to the Russian government tried to hack election-related computer systems in 21 states, a Department of Homeland Security official testified June 21. Samuel Liles, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Cyber Division, said vote tallying mechanisms were unaffected, and the hackers appeared to be scanning for vulnerabilities — which Liles likened to walking down the street and looking at homes to see who might be inside. But hackers successfully exploited a “small number” of networks, Liles said, likening the act to making it through a home’s front door.

TV station powerhouse Sinclair Broadcast Group raised a few eyebrows in April when it hired Boris Epshteyn as its chief political analyst. Epshteyn, after all, was a combative TV surrogate for President Trump during the presidential campaign and briefly was a Trump administration press aide, raising an obvious question: How independent would his political analysis be? The answer, judging from Epshteyn’s first few weeks on the job, seems to be not very.

In his initial pieces for Sinclair, the owner of the largest string of TV stations in the nation, Epshteyn has played much the same role he did during the presidential campaign — as a Trump booster and defender. His “Bottom Line With Boris” segments have echoed positions taken by Trump himself, especially the president’s distaste for the news media.

Political campaigns can manipulate elections by spending as little as $400,000 on fake news and propaganda, according to a new report that analyzes the costs of swaying public opinion through the spread of misinformation online. The report from Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm, said it also costs just $55,000 to discredit a journalist and $200,000 to instigate a street protest based on false news, shining a light on how easy it has become for cyber propaganda to produce real-world outcomes.

The Fake News Machine research paper comes at a time of increasing concern across the globe about the hacking of elections and the ways that fake news on social media has manipulated voters. The report delves into the underground marketplaces that can allow campaigns, political parties, private companies and other entities to strategically create and distribute fake content to shift public perceptions.

Russia’s cyberattack on the US electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step -- complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day “red phone.” In October, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia’s role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict. The new details, buttressed by a classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the US’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.

Watergate unfolded in a much simpler time in the media industry. There were three major news networks and PBS; a major paper or three in every city; and a political dynamic in which leaders duked it out by day and dined together at night. They did so on a solid foundation of agreed-upon facts and a sense of right and wrong that was shared if not always followed. The Trump-Russia scandal is breaking during a time of informational chaos, when rival versions of reality are fighting for narrative supremacy.

The causes are legion: The advent of right-wing talk radio and Fox News; the influence of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit; and the mainstreaming of conspiracy sites like InfoWars, which had almost five million visitors in the last month. By allowing partisans to live in their separate informational and misinformational bubbles, and, in some cases, to allow real news to be rendered as false — and false news to be rendered as true — they have all contributed to the calcification of the national divide. Mainstream journalism, a shiny and ascendant conveyor of truth during Watergate, is in a battered state after decades of economic erosion, its own mistakes and the efforts of partisan wrecking crews to discredit its work, the most recent one led by the president himself. All of it gives the Trump White House something Nixon never had: a loyal media armada ready to attack inconvenient truths and the credibility of potentially damning witnesses and news reports while trumpeting the presidential counternarrative, at times with counterfactual versions of events.

After the election of Donald Trump, "House of Cards" creator Beau Willimon had to dramatically shift his view of what the future looked like in his next work fiction. Willimon had been developing and conceiving his next show, "The First" for Hulu, for two years at that point. The series, abut the first human mission to Mars, is set 15-20 years in the future. After November 2016, he said, he knew the world in which his show was set had to be very different that what he had initially imagined.