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The Russian attempt to influence the 2016 American presidential election, using what intelligence agencies call “active measures,” has dominated U.S. headlines.There is, however, a second front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of American citizens, and it’s received almost no attention in mainstream U.S. media outlets since the election. As someone who studies the growth of global public relations, I’ve researched the roles PR firms play in shaping public perceptions of international affairs. For years, Russia has been involved in public relations campaigns that have been developed and deployed by prominent, U.S.-based, global PR firms – campaigns intended to influence American public opinion and policy in ways that advance Russia’s strategic interests....
Earlier this year, Hack PR had a problem. The unorthodox public relations firm had snapped up a new client, a deep-pocketed entrepreneur with political ambitions. Unfortunately, nobody really knew who he was, and the campaign it launched for him failed to convert into any real coverage save for a couple of pieces in the Huffington Post and The Washington Times. They needed another idea. So, in their words, they hustled.There’s an old Internet joke that says politicians should wear the logos of their donors, much like Nascar drivers wear the logos of their sponsors. Taking inspiration from that, Hack PR pitched the idea to its client that it try and make it law through a California ballot initiative. But unfortunately, this didn’t pan out either. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The firm took the provocative step of printing a full-sized cutout of everyone in the California Legislature, adorned with the logos of Chevron and AT&T, and other prolific donors. These were left at the steps of the Sacramento State Capital building for all to see. But as before, nada. Then....
What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come? That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.) “The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...
Speaking in early December at a ceremony to honor Harry Reid’s retirement from the US Senate, Hillary Clinton took aim at a target that would have been totally unfamiliar to audiences as recently as the summer of 2016: fake news. She spoke of “an epidemic” of the stuff that has “flooded social media” over the past year and “can have real-world consequences.” This was reported largely as commentary on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which had recently led to an alarming armed standoff at DC’s Comet Ping Pong restaurant. But it was also pretty clearly an allusion to her own recently failed presidential campaign, especially because she spoke favorably of the idea of bipartisan legislation to curb foreign propaganda news, arguing that “it is imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.”...
The President-elect's supporters are threatening to boycott Pepsi (PEP) over fabricated statements circulating on social media. Twitter users, many citing debunked news articles, claim PepsiCo (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi told Trump fans to "take their business elsewhere. "Sites designed to trick people, including Truthfeed and Gateway Pundit, published the fake quote while encouraging readers to stop buying Pepsi's products. Gateway Pundit also incorrectly claimed PepsiCo's stock plunged 5% because of the comment that Nooyi never actually made. Nooyi never told Trump's supporters that Pepsi doesn't want their business and she even congratulated the president-elect on his victory. But she condemned the ugly rhetoric of the campaign....
When the US presidential election was called, even Republican strategist Mike Murphy declared data dead. Others have said it’s the end of polling. To those who felt a Hillary Clinton victory was all but certain, Donald Trump’s success at the polls might undermine faith in big data. But this sentiment misunderstands statistics. Data is impartial and accurate; when things go wrong, it’s usually when we try to interpret it. How different people assess risk and make decisions often comes down to how we perceive probabilities. Assigning a probability to an uncertain outcome is part art and science. The most scientific way is to use data—in this case, polling numbers. This time, election forecasts based on polling data were spectacularly inaccurate. They predicted an easy Clinton victory, and assumed that women and college-educated voters would turn out for her in large numbers. In fact, according to exit polls, 42% of women voted for Trump, including 45% of white women with college degrees. Forecasts also predicted hardly any minority voters would consider Trump. But they did. Minority groups voted more for Obama than Clinton. A non-trivial number, nearly one third of Hispanics and Asians, voted for Trump. What seems like a failure of polling data, though, is really our inability to approach the data objectively....
For many Americans, elections are spectator sports. Despite the huge numbers who tuned in to this week’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, historical data suggests that on Nov. 8, more than 40% of eligible voters will skip the polling stations and just watch the dramatic results unfold on TV.
To address America’s consistently dismal voter turn out, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) launched a poster campaign intended to wield “the power of design to motivate the American public to register and turn out to vote.” It asked its 10,000 professional and student members to create nonpartisan posters persuading readers to vote, that would be free for anyone to print and distribute....
It suddenly hit me while listening to another Trump tirade. What happened next nearly blew my mind.
Not to give The Donald too much credit for his undisciplined tweeting but suddenly I realized that his entire campaign is built on a foundation of clickbait.
The very same linkbait that drives millions of spam pageviews online daily is also what allowed him to outfox 16 other serious Republican presidential candidates.
And when the presidential campaign debates take place, Hillary won’t have a chance!...
Designed by Alicia Parlapiano and Adam Pearce for the New York Times, this short series of data visualizations tell a very clear story about how Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees For the 2016 Presidential election. The United States is home to 324 million people. Each square here represents 1 million people.103 million of them are children, noncitizens or ineligible felons, and they do not have the right to vote. 88 million eligible adults do not vote at all, even in general elections. An additional 73 million did not vote in the primaries this year, but will most likely vote in the general election. The remaining 60 million people voted in the primaries: about 30 million each for Republicans and Democrats. But half of the primary voters chose other candidates. Just 14 percent of eligible adults — 9 percent of the whole nation — voted for either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton....
Social media is playing a transformative role in this presidential election. Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton are heavily utilizing social media platforms to connect with voters. And it’s working.Millions of people follow Trump and Clinton on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the numbers are growing every day. Via these platforms, people are tuning in to see what the candidates have to say, whether Clinton and Trump’s platforms align with their views. People are invested in the Clinton and Trump brands. After rising to the top of the political social sphere, it’s safe to say Trump and Clinton can teach us a few things about using social media to boost our own personal branding. Here are five social media takeaways from Clinton and Trump’s social media campaigning....
Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention was only 8% specific policy promises. On the other hand, by my word-for-word calculation, 20% of it was criticism of Trump’s opponents, 21% was fearmongering, and the rest was mostly vague generalities and cheerleading. Based on this speech, you really can’t identify what you’ll be getting if this guy gets elected — but you certainly know what to be afraid of it he doesn’t. Let me break it down for you. I used the Washington Post’s version of the planned text of the speech. Then I marked it up in different colors to represent different elements: vague promises, passive promises that something will magically happen, overarching proclamations, criticism of opponents and elites — and the few actual promises. You can see my analysis in the color-coded graphic at the end of this post, and you can see the color-coded text in my Google Document of the speech....
BuzzFeed has pulled out of an advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee over objections to Donald Trump's rhetoric.
The buy was for $1.3 million, a source close to BuzzFeed told POLITICO. The source said that the main consideration was the site’s employees – that BuzzFeed could not countenance “having employees make ads, or working at the company and having our site promoting things, that limit our freedom and make it harder for them to live their lives.”
Asked if the site would rule out any Trump advertising, the source said the specifics would matter: “In general, we have taken the position that we won’t take ads for his presidential campaign.”
Curious about what the head of the technology office for President Obama’s re-election might be able to tell you about how to put together an effective social media campaign? Bryan Whitaker has a proven record for innovation in the fast-moving field of political technology.... Now he is taking on a role of Chief Operating Officer at NGP VAN, the nation’s leading technology provider to Obama for America and thousands of Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. NGP VAN offers clients an integrated platform of the best fundraising, organizing, and digital products. I talked to Whitaker about his view of the past and the future of social technologies, how they impact the success of political campaign, and lessons learned. Whitaker is a man on a mission. “My role is to empower our clients to become more sophisticated, data-driven, efficient and cost-effective in the work that they are doing as it relates to organizing voters or workers into a union, as well as engaging with the members within their own organizations,” says Whitaker. Here are some tips that he offers.
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MADRID — “Nos encanta la verdad.” We love the truth. Political fact-checking has existed in the United States for many years. FactCheck.org was established in 2003, and The Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact were launched in 2007. In recent years, this movement representing a new form of accountability journalism has exploded around the globe. Now, there are 126 fact-checking organizations in 49 countries. Clearly, voters in many countries care about and want to know the truth. About 190 fact-checkers from 54 countries attended the fourth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit, July 5-7, 2017. The International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter Institute hosted the summit. The first meeting of fact-checkers from around the world took place in 2014, with 50 fact-checkers. Now the community has grown so much that we needed a “speed meeting” session for introductions....
Political viewers of all stripes have been inundated with news about President Donald Trump, whose immigration policies and potential ties to Russia have sparked controversy while his tweets routinely set digital chatter ablaze. Socialbakers just wrapped up eight months of research, looking at Twitter consumption around Trump-related subjects in six countries and offering eye-opening insights into just how immersed consumers have become in all things Donald. "Audiences are tuning in more, but polarization means you’re seeing a lot of negative reactions to political statements,” noted Moses Velasco, chief product evangelist at the Prague, Czech Republic-based tech agency. Despite the raw, public discourse, media brands have undoubtedly benefitted: CNN, Fox News and MSNBC saw double-digit TV ratings gains in May, while subscriptions for The Washington Post and The New York Times have jumped considerably. Here, Socialbakers’ statistics spotlight the impact of Trump’s Twitter. (And if you keep scrolling past the infographic, you will see a video with SocialBakers founder Jan Rezab analyzing the data.)...
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue. The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections. “Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....
You may think you are prepared for a post-truth world, in which political appeals to emotion count for more than statements of verifiable fact. But now it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world withoutfacts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit. On live radio Wednesday morning, Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show.” Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept defending that assertion, although not with much clarity of expression. Rehm had pressed her about Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion on Twitter that he, not Hillary Clinton, would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally....
IN CASE YOU didn’t notice, there was a presidential election this week. Just kidding—there was no way you could have failed to notice that, even if you wanted to. By the time President-elect Donald Trump’s victory became imminent Tuesday night, it was already the subject dominating everything, online and off, as the Internet (and everyone else) started reacting to the outcome. Days later, that’s still the case. Here are some of the conversations you might have missed over the past few days.
Donald Trump is more popular than Hillary Clinton on Twitter -- with both humans and machines.University researchers who track political activity on Twitter have found that traffic on pro-Trump hashtags was twice as high as pro-Clinton hashtags during the first presidential debate. But the team of academics, led by Oxford University professor Philip Howard, also found that 33% of pro-Trump traffic was driven by bots and highly automated accounts, compared to 22% for Clinton. Bots are automated social media accounts that interact with other users. Some are able to answer basic questions and serve a customer service function, but they can also be used to spam and harass people....
More than 60% of US cable TV political ad spending is coming from political action committees (PACs) and issues advertisers, according to data from Viamedia on ads served on its platform between January and August 2016. Twice as much political ad spending is coming from PACs and issues advertisers than from down-ballot campaigns, which mostly includes spending by candidates for the US House of Representatives and Senate. And more than six times as much spending is coming from PACs and issues advertisers than from presidential campaigns. TV is still the dominant destination for political ad spend, and research from Nomura Securities indicates that cable TV, which makes up the second-largest share, is estimated to see $1.10 billion this year, or 10.8% of total US political ad spend.Generally, internet users learn most about politics from TV. Indeed, a survey from YuMe revealed that 69% of US internet users find TV news to be the most effective political marketing channel. And while TV may be a significant channel for candidates to advertise on, not everyone is doing so....
Hillary Clinton is devouring briefing book after briefing book about Donald Trump's policy positions, personality and politics. She's watching highlight reels, taking notes and studying his style -- particularly when he's in attack mode. Trump, meanwhile, is doing his thinking out loud -- mulling over policies and strategies in rolling conversations with top campaign aides and a band of informal advisers that includes Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani. Less than four weeks from the first of three presidential debates -- on September 26 at Hofstra University in New York -- the candidates are preparing for an unpredictable, high-stakes night....
The Times reporters Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Adam Nagourney and Alan Rappeport provided real-time analysis of the final night of the Democratic National Convention, featuring Chelsea andHillary Clinton. Check out the highlights.
Below are Donald Trump's remarks accepting the Republican nomination as delivered. Where text is in bolded, it denotes a place where Trump's comment deviated from the original draft that leaked to the press. Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States....
Parts of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention are strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago. How does this happen? Plagiarism at this level is typically the result of sloppiness, not outright theft. If you don’t want this to happen to you, then you need to change how you work. What Melania Trump said sounds awfully familiar. In 2008, here’s what Michelle Obama said, in part (most of the highlights in these passages, which show the similar parts, are from a Wall Street Journal article about the plagiarism). Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children—and all children in this nation—to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them....
Just when you think the Bad Lip Reading videos couldn’t get any funnier, along comes this treatment of the recent Republican presidential primary debate.
In this version, the candidates tackle the issues that really matter, as the scurrilous accusations fly.
And they make some crazy pledges to the voters.
While at least one contender’s nerves seem to get the better of him.
In an innovative tweak to the debate format, the candidates get to make their pitches through the medium of song, just as the Founding Fathers surely intended.…while throwing some funky moves....
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PR or propaganda? Is public relations simply a more insidious form of fake news asks Sue Curry Jansen?