The Medium is the Manipulation, Part 3: How Politicians Use Social Media to Spin Falsehoods

Technology Policy Brief #103 | By: Steve Piazza | December 17, 2023

Photo taken from: stimson.org

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This series looks to explore the extent to which campaign ads and speeches as well as policy setting of political candidates employ deliberate strategies of disinformation and fallacy to not only discredit their political opponents but also add to the continued abusive miseducation of the U.S. populace and thus further increase the national divide. Campaign ads are not in and of themselves policy, but their message reflects a candidate’s or party’s policy of sorts, namely on how far it is willing to go to get what it wants.

Policy Summary

Republicans have long accused social media platforms of exhibiting a bias to the left and thus have taken their fight to court. Over the past 18 months, the party has been defending laws that have been attempting to curb what they claim is a tendency for social media companies to favor their opponents.

Though Democrats feel that social media is ripe with hate speech, they downplay the talk of bias. The party describes Republican litigation as an attack on legislation preventing hate speech that continues to divide the country and erode the already crumbling foundations of democracy.

But this has not stopped either side from investing heavily in social media ads, which allows for them to reap many of the platforms’ intrinsic benefits, particularly the movement of disinformation that leads to confused and misled voters.

Policy Analysis

It isn’t difficult to see why political campaigns are drawn to social media platforms.The rapid messaging allows for candidates to stay in sync with opponents and potential voters. The 200% return on investment doesn’t hurt either.

But perhaps one of the most important attributes is that posts are difficult to identify as formal advertisements. Because they are embedded within videos or threads, there’s often very little to distinguish messaging made by campaigns from those of the average user. Campaigns can be more negative and perhaps take more liberty with the truth than they would on television and radio.

This is huge, when you consider the number of users. The top two social media platforms, YouTube and Facebook each have over 2 billion users, while Instagram and TikTok have 1 1/2 billion and 1 billion respectively.

Such extraordinary numbers explain why so much has been spent on social media political campaigns during the last several election cycles. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent $72 million on Facebook and Instagram in 2016, and then an astonishing $217 million in 2020. In fact, they posted nearly 3.4 million tweets, or 14,000 a day, in October alone that year.

But the number of posts alone does not explain the movement of disinformation. In no small part that is left up to the ability of average users to interact and share what they come across, and often without verifying sources.

It’s also the adverse nature of the ads themselves. As anybody remotely familiar with the way information travels, negative material spreads at the speed of light in comparison to anything not so provocative.

It’s understandable that blatant, harsh criticism of opponents makes for good social incendiary effects. Donald Trump’s use of his own platform, Truth Social, provides plenty of evidence of this. But it’s the less subtle ways social media is being used that make deluding people harder to detect.

For example, Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy begins a Tok Tok message stating “The GOP establishment does NOT approve of this message & it’s pathetic I’m the only candidate with the stones to say it:….” But soon after baiting viewers with simple nuance, he tries to have it both ways by switching to typical Republican criticism of select elements of the Democratic platform.

Social media platforms are also an opportunity for less popular candidates, mainstream or otherwise, to easily promote themselves as more viable than perhaps they are. Marianne Williamson, who is a longshot Democrat, creates a presidential-like presence on TikTok. Even those already elected can increase celebrity status. Take Representative Jeff Jackson, a Democrat from North Carolina, who boasts 1.6 million users on Tik Tok. He’s been called by Roll Call the most popular Congress person on the platform, notwithstanding that he’s stated publicly TikTok should be banned.

And then there are political advertisements that do not look like political advertisements. For example, META’s ad library searches indicate that the Trump Store is extremely popular, making it a convenient way to peddle merchandise that helps spread political viewpoints. Or, some items in the form of simple, matter of fact memes are prolific and gain traction, like the hoax perpetrated on Facebook that President Biden was promising $6400 to anybody over 25 years old. It’s difficult to discern who or what was behind the disinformation, but it is one more example of how voters are easily deceived.

To their credit, social media companies have developed policies to address political advertising in an attempt to combat disinformation. These include the use of watermarks (Microsoft) and disclaimers (META).

To their discredit, language in guidelines and esoteric identifiers are not enough to enlighten unsuspecting users. These actions haven’t been as effective as they ought be, and amount to continued abuse of each platform’s own membership.

Lets’ just hope we don’t find ourselves endlessly chasing our tails and losing precious time attempting to expose the relentless falsehoods in political statements while reality tiptoes by and presents dire consequences for all people.

Engagement Resources:

• To get a sense of how popular political messaging is on social media, you can check out select data on individual platforms. Click here for an example of a Meta filtered search.
• Detecting ads is one thing, verifying the validity of what’s being said is another. Here is a list of fact checking projects, like the popular University of Texas at Arlington’s Claim Buster, compiled by the Credibility Coalition: https://credibilitycoalition.org/credcatalog/project/claim-buster/