37Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated
harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter
feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove
successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s
almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-
world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.
Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a
60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be
right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots
could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They
can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound
people out of the public square.
According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of
all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week
period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem
designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where
they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide,
radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.
Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto
O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020
is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a
viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa,
Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another
masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invec-
tive at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when
Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred
up anger toward Hillary Clinton.
Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts target-
ing O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could
make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and
not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he
told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which
has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website
resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the inter-
net. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record
likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary— opposition to
same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video
clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly
became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web.
It was designed by a Trump consultant.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE
As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strat-
egists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can
they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?
On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a con-
sultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital
subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehl-
horn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the
Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux
Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make
it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake
social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to
link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol.
(Mehlhorn has claimed that he was unaware of these efforts and
does not support the use of misinformation.)
When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of
the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats
had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If
you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your
back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to
do whatever it takes.”
Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for
Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s
just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking
voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-
with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they
mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has
already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the
Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about
Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about
digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”
One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-
savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former
Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action commit-
tee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online.
At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on
Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates
combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but
she also had more creative—and controversial— measures in mind.
For example, she established a media organization with a staff
of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that
can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without
any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though
she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enter-
prise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.
When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her
willing ness to push boundaries that might make some Demo-
crats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator”
ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game”
because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term
in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that
a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled
out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to
vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later
said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that
was “in the bounds of the law.”
“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,”
McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day,
unabashedly ... I think Trump is so desperate to win this election
that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”
This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state offi-
cials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally
disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally
manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a per-
son appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed
pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of
the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused
to adopt the pledge.