Dear MoveOn member,
During each election cycle, MoveOn makes a big bet on a program that we
believe will help win the election—combining people power and cutting-edge
innovation to meet the political moment. And in 2020, our big bet has
turned some members of MoveOn's staff into characters in their very own
spy thriller—because this year we are hoping to invest in an ambitious and
cutting-edge program to combat disinformation and online voter
suppression.
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread in order to
influence public opinion.^1 Remember the Facebook ads in 2016 that spread
the blatant lie that Democrats could vote from home via text message? Or
viral fearmongering lies that millions of noncitizens were voting in the
election? Or ads from the Trump campaign targeting Black voters in
Florida, saying, "Hillary Thinks African Americans Are Super Predators"?^2
Those were disinformation campaigns explicitly designed to suppress
Democratic voter turnout and help Donald Trump win—and they worked.^3
In 2016, Trump ran an unprecedented digital ad campaign that was fueled
largely by disinformation.^4 And that, coupled with disinformation
campaigns from foreign governments like Russia and domestic groups with a
vested interest in Trump's victory, helped lead him to victory.
This time around, those campaigns are even more sophisticated—which is why
MoveOn is investing big in working to stop in their tracks disinformation
campaigns meant to suppress Democratic votes (particularly from young
people and people of color) and propel Trump to a second term.
But here's the problem: These disinformation campaigns are primarily
spread on social media, and corporations like Facebook have a vested
interest in doing nothing to stop them, because these campaigns make
hundreds of millions of dollars for the platform.^5 That's where we come
in.
If we can fully fund our program, our staff of digital sleuths will be
tracking disinformation networks online, following the threads to their
source, exposing their impact, and demanding that social media platforms
like Facebook take them down. But to do it, we will need a steady stream
of funding for the rest of the year.
John, will you join our sleuthing squad and help dismantle the
disinformation networks working to re-elect Trump by chipping
in $5 a month?
[ [link removed] ]Yes, I'll fuel MoveOn's work to stop disinformation and Democratic
voter suppression!
[ [link removed] ]No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
Digital disinformation and voter suppression is A LOT to tackle, which is
why we are taking a multi-pronged approach. Here is just some of what
MoveOn is planning to do:
* Run mobile billboards targeting Facebook and its employees. Starting
after Super Tuesday, these billboards will run between Mark
Zuckerberg's neighborhood in San Francisco and Facebook's Bay Area
offices, demanding that Facebook change its ad policy to stop
profiting from ads from political candidates that openly spread lies
and disinformation.
* Track down and take down right-wing networks that are working to
spread lies, demobilize and intimidate Democratic voters, and make it
harder to vote. MoveOn has hired an investigations team that is
working behind the scenes to track disinformation networks targeting
Democratic voters to demobilize and intimidate them. When we find
those networks, we will mobilize to force Facebook to remove them,
which will also get rid of most of the content they shared and prevent
other voters from being exposed to it.
* Live-monitor disinformation being spread during the primaries and
especially during key political moments, with a plan to do this for
the general election as well. On the day of the Iowa caucuses,
right-wing social media began spreading conspiracy theories about the
Iowa voter rolls, which the Iowa secretary of state said was meant to
"disenfranchise Iowa voters."^6 During each primary contest, our
research team is live-monitoring the spread of disinformation to help
better track the networks behind these lies.
* Run pressure campaigns to demand that Facebook and other social media
companies take action. Facebook's current policy expressly allows
political candidates like Trump to run blatantly false ads, like the
"Super Predators" ad he ran in 2016 to suppress the Black vote. And
Facebook has shifted the responsibility for identifying and stopping
disinformation from other state and nonstate actors to third parties
and individual users. But it cannot continue to skirt its
responsibility for providing a platform for these lies to spread.
Will you help us fully fund this campaign throughout 2020 so we ensure
that Trump is not propelled to another victory through nefarious, racist,
and xenophobic disinformation campaigns? Just chip in $5 a
month.
[ [link removed] ]Yes, I'll chip in monthly.
[ [link removed] ]No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
Here's the reality: A leaked internal document from Facebook quoted an
employee stating that Trump "got elected because he ran the single best
digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser," and the bulk of
that campaign was powered by disinformation.^7
That was in 2016, when Trump was trailing behind the Democrats in
fundraising and was working with a small team of political amateurs. This
year, Trump is outspending nearly all of the Democratic candidates and
running far more Facebook ads than he ran in 2016.^8
And it's not just his campaign; it's the vast network of right-wing
disinformation accounts and sites that help to propel dangerous, violent,
racist fake news and conspiracy theories that turn into real, quantifiable
impact at the voting booth.
That is what we are up against, and the stakes could not be higher.
We must do everything we can to stop Trump from stealing an election like
this. Please, John, will you help us put a stop to
disinformation by chipping in $5 a month?
[ [link removed] ]Yes, I'll fuel MoveOn's work to stop disinformation and Democratic
voter suppression!
[ [link removed] ]No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
Thanks for all you do.
–Jenn, Mohammad, Seth, Kelly, and the rest of the team
Sources:
1. "Disinformation," Merriam-Webster, accessed February 19, 2020
[link removed]
2. "Trump's 'Voter Suppression Operation' Targets Black Voters," The
Atlantic, October 27, 2016
[link removed]
3. "Four things to know about Russia's 2016 misinformation campaign,"
Politifact, April 4, 2017
[link removed]
4. "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,"
The Atlantic, February 10, 2020
[link removed]
5. "Facebook Says It Won’t Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads,"
The New York Times, January 9, 2020
[link removed]
6. "Rightwing groups spread false information about voter rolls hours
before Iowa caucuses," The Guardian, February 3, 2020
[link removed]
7. "Facebook Says It Won’t Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads,"
The New York Times, January 9, 2020
[link removed]
8. "One year inside Trump's monumental Facebook campaign," The Guardian,
January 29, 2020
[link removed]
Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day
by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage,
defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's
pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must
never give up on. And to do it we need your ongoing support, now more than
ever. Will you stand with us?
[ [link removed] ]Yes, I'll chip in $5 a month.
[ [link removed] ]No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
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