Welcome to FWIW, ACRONYM’s weekly newsletter breaking down digital strategy + investment in our elections. Each week, we look at how campaigns are – or aren’t – leveraging smart digital strategies to drive narratives and reach voters. For what it’s worth, some of it might surprise you. [Reading on mobile? Click here.]
With just days to go until Inauguration Day, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, for the first time in history, has been impeached twice. Banned from nearly every social network, Donald Trump was hardly able to push out a response, which he did via a 5-minute, very off-brand video a few hours after the vote.
As the long-awaited transition of power is finally upon us, and political ads are mostly banned (again) from sites like Facebook and Google, we’ll give a rundown of this historic week and what we saw happening online.
NO SPENDING NUMBERS THIS WEEK
Like we mentioned, Facebook and Google have banned political advertising on their platforms again for the foreseeable future. While Snapchat still allows groups to do so, their political ad library hasn’t been updated for 2021 just yet.
(ANOTHER) HISTORIC WEEK
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for the second time, this time with the most bipartisan support for an impeachment vote in history. While polling has indicated that a majority of Americans support removing him from office, we’ll have to wait and see what happens with a Senate trial happening after he leaves office. For now, let’s take a look at how this week’s vote in the House played out online.
Interest in Trump’s impeachment this go-around was immediate and intense. Google estimates that search activity for in the past week for “impeach�? nearly equaled the interest it gathered after House Democrats announced they would be pursuing impeachment in the fall of 2019.
Second, let’s look at Facebook, from which at least a third of Americans get their news, according to new data from Pew Research Center. To get an understanding of what was circulating on Americans’ newsfeeds regarding Trump’s disgraceful achievement, we looked at the sources for the top-performing posts mentioning the word “impeach.�? (FWIW, the tweet screenshot featured in the top post from Occupy Democrats has been debunked.)
While we’ll never see Donald Trump appear on these lists, at least for the near future, the members of the mob that have yet to be arrested do not appear to be waving any white flags, despite social media platforms moving to (finally) enforce their policies against them and Parler getting shut down (and hacked).
According to a report from AXIOS, the seditionists appear to be moving en masse to encrypted messaging platforms like Signal and Telegram where their activities will be much more difficult for the federal bureaucracy and watchdog groups to monitor.
More troubling, though, could be their spread on TikTok. A recent poll from YouGov/The Economist found that as many as 58 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have heard a lot or a little about QAnon, the delusional far-right conspiracy theory, and they also found that 26 percent (!!) of Americans in that age group hold favorable opinions of it. While TikTok has taken some action against white supremacist content spreading easily on the platform, their content remains available to radicalize vulnerable users.
COUNTING DOWN THE HOURS 🦅
In just days, our federal government will make an about-face and, hopefully, fully mobilize to tackle the multifold crises America faces. Preparing Americans for the incoming government is normally a critical piece of presidential transitions, one that has been made absurdly more difficult because of the outgoing president’s desperate struggle to hold on to power, and also by the suddenly scrambled digital media environment we mentioned earlier (not to mention the enormous makeshift fortress that’s been erected in downtown DC).
The transition is following the President-Elect’s lead and staying above the fray to focus on the matters at hand, but that tone is difficult to get across when social media so frequently rewards inflammatory content. So, as much as the Biden transition team and Democrats probably want Americans thinking about how their lives will likely soon change for the better because of their legislative efforts, they have to compete with bad-faith actors who are more than happy to make up any baseless line of attack, which Facebook will then in turn amplify. To drive this point home, the top 10 posts mentioning “Biden�? come from the following pages.
If we’re to believe what they reported to the FEC, it’s likely that the Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and Breitbart are selling their audience data to the Republican Party for the committee’s fundraising and advertising purposes. It’s an interesting business model that probably raises a few eyebrows and more evidence of the deep ties between the GOP party and media establishment. Judd Legum broke down more on the Daily Wire’s business model and GOP ties on Twitter in the wake of the POLITICO mini-scandal yesterday.
YOU’RE INVITED
That’s it for this week, but before you go, we wanted to extend an invite to ACRONYM’s 2020 virtual election debrief on January 28th. We’ll be sharing our team’s playbook, our biggest learnings from the cycle, where we think Democrats + progressives should go from here. Don’t miss out - make sure to early RSVP here, and we’ll have more details to share next week.
