36 MARCH 2020
Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front
in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends
to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage
from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found
that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more
than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will
be eroded by November. “We can actually
build up and fight with the local newspa-
pers,” Parscale told donors, according to
a recording provided by The Palm Beach
Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox
News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same
700,000 people watching every day.”
Running parallel to this effort, some
conservatives have been experimenting
with a scheme to exploit the credibility of
local journalism. Over the past few years,
hundreds of websites with innocuous-
sounding names like the Arizona Moni-
tor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun
popping up. At first glance, they look like
regular publications, complete with com-
munity notices and coverage of schools.
But look closer and you’ll find that there
are often no mastheads, few if any bylines,
and no addresses for local offices. Many
of them are organs of Republican lobby-
ing groups; others belong to a mysterious
company called Locality Labs, which is
run by a conservative activist in Illinois.
Readers are given no indication that these
sites have political agendas—which is pre-
cisely what makes them valuable.
According to one longtime strategist,
candidates looking to plant a negative story
about an opponent can pay to have their
desired headlines posted on some of these
Potemkin news sites. By working through
a third-party consulting firm—instead
of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their
involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Fed-
eral Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy read-
ers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the
screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fund raising emails.
DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS
Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election
last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlord-
kraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded
a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.
There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty
of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled
Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt
Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots
began spreading the election-rigging claim.
The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands
of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the
hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities
jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making
noise about unspecified voting
“irregularities.” When the race
was called for his opponent,
the governor refused to con-
cede, and asked for a statewide
review of the vote. (No evi-
dence of ballot-shredding was
found, and he finally admitted
defeat nine days later.)
The Election Night disinfor-
mation blitz had all the mark-
ings of a foreign influence oper-
ation. In 2016, Russian trolls
had worked in similar ways
to contaminate U.S. political
discourse— posing as Black
Lives Matter activists in an
attempt to inflame racial divi-
sions, and fanning pro-Trump
conspiracy theories. (They even
used Facebook to organize ral-
lies, including one for Muslim
supporters of Clinton in Wash-
ington, D.C., where they got
someone to hold up a sign
attributing a fictional quote to
the candidate: “I think Sharia
law will be a powerful new
direction of freedom.”)
But when Twitter employees
later reviewed the activity sur-
rounding Kentucky’s election,
they concluded that the bots
were largely based in America— a sign that political operatives
here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.
Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From
Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats
of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded opera-
tives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact,
Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told
me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter
bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group
set up a small network of automated accounts with names like
@BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat
running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.
Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more
sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new
ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-
President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts
to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. InPARSCALE HAS
SAID THE
CAMPAIGN
INTENDS TO
TRAIN “SWARMS
O F SU R R O G ATE S ”
TO UNDERMINE
COVERAGE
FR O M LO CA L
TV STATIONS AND
NEWSPAPERS.