Media liberals like James Warren at Poynter.org (the former Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune) aren't happy with how social-media giants may have enabled the election of Donald Trump. He cited an article by Bloomberg News headlined "Facebook and Google Helped Anti-Refugee Campaign in Swing States." The group Secure America Now ran ads "touting a pair of controversial faux-tourism videos, showing France and Germany overrun by Sharia law."
Reporters Benjamin Elgin and Vernon Silver lamented: “Unlike Russian efforts to secretly influence the 2016 election via social media, this American-led campaign was aided by direct collaboration with employees of Facebook and Google.”
Warren called this a "growing political mess" and insisted Congress would want to grill Facebook executives: "Sheryl Sandberg and her pristine reputation, who lobbied in the capital last week on behalf of Facebook, had best hop the corporate jet back to explain this."
In one commercial, “French schoolchildren were being trained to fight for the caliphate, jihadi fighters were celebrated at the Arc de Triomphe, and the Mona Lisa was covered in a burka,” they added.
Along with Facebook employees who worked as “embeds” in the Trump campaign, “Google also assisted political groups on their advertising strategies, helping them hone their copy and figure out how to best target their desired audiences,” said Wendy Moe, professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
“It’s a tricky issue,” she noted, “because once the companies decide they’ll do hands-on work for political groups, it’s hard for them to say we’ll help these groups, but not others.”
Google and Facebook “worked closely with Secure America Now as it spent several million dollars on election-season ads, according to the people who worked on the campaign,” Elgin and Silver indicated.
Warren concluded: "I winced a bit when recently watching Axios' hyperkinetic Mike Allen opine about the problems of the two giants morphing into one of next year's very major political issues. Really? Hmmmm. Now, I wonder. Maybe."
The Bloomberg duo explained that Secure America Now was launched in 2011 to oppose the construction of a community center and mosque in Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center that was destroyed on 9/11. The group’s president is Allen Roth, "a longtime political adviser to Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a supporter of conservative and pro-Israel causes.”
“In the ensuing six years,” Elgin and Silver stated, “the group has been sharply critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi, where U.S. personnel were killed in a 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Libya, as well as its nuclear deal with Iran.”
Having online experts assist groups that want to get their messages out is a clever strategy. We can only wonder what impact this will have in the upcoming 2018 and 2020 elections.
