THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020 N B3If this is the moment when entertain-
ment changes forever, it won’t only be be-
cause streaming won. It will also be be-
cause total control is irresistible.
Warner Bros., the Hollywood power-
house whose films include the “Wonder
Woman” and “Harry Potter” series and
“Casablanca,” said on Thursday that all
of its new films in 2021 would come out at
the same time in movie theaters and on
its sibling streaming service, HBO Max,
my colleagues Brooks Barnes and Nicole
Sperling wrote.
Before now, some new movies in the
United States have been available for us
to watch at home on the day they de-
buted in theaters. But never at this scale.
Warner Bros. said that its movies-
plus-streaming approach was a tempo-
rary measure while the pandemic made
some people wary of movie theaters. But
don’t be fooled. It will be almost impossi-
ble to go back to the old ways of doing
things, as Brooks and Nicole wrote.
You and your binges of “The Great
British Baking Show” know why. “This is
about turning HBO Max into a Netflix,”
Brooks told me.
Conventional entertainment compa-
nies like AT&T, which owns Warner
Bros., Walt Disney and basically anyone
who ever made a TV show are trying to
become Netflix, and fast. (The media
writer Peter Kafka of Recode, who has
said another factor of Warner Bros.’ on-
line film releases was the weaknesses of
theater chains, wrote about the urge to
catch up to Netflix several weeks ago.)
But it’s also important to understand
an underappreciated motivation behind
the Netflix envy. This isn’t only about
streaming beating cable television com-
panies and movie theaters. The Netflix
model represents a complete reordering
of entertainment into self-contained em-
pires that control as much as possible
from the first frame of a film shoot to the
last pixel of a movie you watch on your
phone.
The old model of entertainment in-
volves constant handoffs of control. A
company that makes a movie relies on a
cineplex to release it and then turns over
its product again to video rental stores
(remember them?), movie download
services, TV channels and other out-
siders to make sure it gets seen.
This new approach dispenses with a
bunch of that. Instead, Netflix tries to
control almost everything from begin-
ning to end. It’s not there yet, and AT&T
isn’t going that far with HBO Max — yet
— but that’s the direction everyone is
headed.
It’s as if Ford aspired to make every
part that went into its cars, assemble the
vehicles and sell them instead of buying
parts from a bunch of different suppliers
and going through car dealerships.
There has been almost nothing like
this before, and that’s why this reor-
dering of the entertainment industry is
different from the history of big changes
that has made Hollywood predict its owndemise many times before.
To be frank, I don’t know if the self-con-
tained empire model that Netflix in-
spired will last. Even Netflix has to con-
stantly borrow money because it typical-
ly spends more cash each year than it
takes in from our subscriptions. But as
every major company in entertainment
tries to control its own destiny, don’t un-
derestimate how big a deal this is.Google is not a normal
workplaceA well-respected Google researcher,
Timnit Gebru, said she was fired by the
company after criticizing its approach to
minority hiring and the biases built into
artificial intelligence systems, my col-leagues Cade Metz and Daisuke Waka-
bayashi reported.
We’re seeing clashes between technol-
ogy company workers and their employ-
ers spill out into the open more and more,
over issues including workplace safety,
diversity and the ethics of technology.
This is probably not because Google,
Facebook or Amazon have more dis-
agreements between management and
workers than a restaurant chain or an ac-
counting firm. It’s that Big Tech compa-
nies are not ordinary employers. The
outside world pays more attention to
what they do, and we should.
These gigantic companies set trends
for everything from how offices are de-
signed to what workers are paid, and
they should be held to a higher standard.The companies often say they want the
extra attention and deserve it, but I’m
not sure they mean it.
When Dai wrote an article in 2017
about an analysis that found that Google
paid male employees more than women
at most job levels, the company’s head of
human resources at the time told him: “I
do believe Google, because of its size and
perhaps our size or our prominence in
people’s everyday lives, I think we’re in
the spotlight. It feels a little unfair.”
I have not forgotten this quote. I think
this executive was expressing out loud
something that most of her peers believe
but keep to themselves. She was right
that Google is in the spotlight. She was
wrong that it’s unfair.
Google’s parent company has a stock
market value nearly equivalent to the
gross domestic product of Spain. It is
therefore completely fair for it to get the
same attention as a large country.Before we go...■Speaking of a spotlight on Big Tech
workplaces:The federal government
sued Facebook, accusing it of being un-
American by favoring foreign workers
with visas over those from the United
States, my colleagues Cecilia Kang and
Mike Isaac wrote. This lawsuit, they
said, shows that Big Tech companies are
not in the good graces of American poli-
ticians of either major party.■Can small nudges make the internet
nicer? YouTube said it would start pop-
ping up reminders to people before they
post potentially offensive comments on
videos, Axios reported. Many internet
services have tried methods like this to
encourage people to think twice before
they post something they might regret or
share inaccurate information. There’s
mixed evidence on whether it’s working.■We love stores — to return stuff we
bought online: Recode wrote about why
Amazon and other e-commerce sellers
are offering more options for people to
return merchandise in person, often in
physical stores that compete with e-com-
merce merchants.A Revolution in Movie-Watching
Seeing 2021’s Warner Bros. movies at home may change the system forever.
On Tech
By SHIRA OVIDE
BERNICE LIUThis essay was adapted from the On Tech
newsletter, which gets delivered every
weekday. To sign up, go to nytimes.com/
newsletterspandemic and the economic
devastation it has caused, un-
doubtedly played a major role.
But since successful campaigns
breed imitators, it’s worth look-
ing under the hood of the Biden
digital strategy to see what fu-
ture campaigns might learn from
it.
After the election, I spoke with
Mr. Flaherty, along with more
than a dozen other people who
worked on the Biden digital
team. They told me that while
the internet alone didn’t get Mr.
Biden elected, a few key deci-
sions helped his chances.
Lean on influencers and
validators
In the early days of the cam-
paign, Mr. Biden’s team envi-
sioned setting up its own digital
media empire. It posted videos to
his official YouTube channel,
conducted virtual forums and
even set up a podcast hosted by
Mr. Biden, “Here’s the Deal.” But
those efforts were marred by
technical glitches and lukewarm
receptions, and they never came
close to rivaling the reach of Mr.
Trump’s social media machine.
So the campaign pivoted to a
different strategy, which involved
expanding Mr. Biden’s reach by
working with social media influ-
encers and “validators,” people
who were trusted by the kinds of
voters the campaign hoped to
reach.
“We were not the biggest
megaphone compared to Trump,
so we had to help arm any who
were,” said Andrew Bleeker, the
president of Bully Pulpit Interac-
tive, a Democratic strategy firm
that worked with the Biden cam-
paign.
One validator at the top of the
team’s list was Brené Brown, a
research professor and popular
author and podcast host who
speaks and writes about topics
like courage and vulnerability.
Dr. Brown has a devoted follow-
ing among suburban women — a
critical demographic for Mr.
Biden’s campaign — and when
Mr. Biden appeared as a guest on
her podcast to talk about his own
stories of grief and empathy, the
campaign viewed it as a coup.
Also high on the list was the
actor Dwayne Johnson, also
known as the Rock, whose fol-
lowing skews center-right and
male. Mr. Johnson’s endorsement
this fall of Mr. Biden and his
running mate, Senator Kamala
Harris, created a so-called per-
mission structure for his follow-
ers — including some who may
have voted for Mr. Trump in 2016
— to support Mr. Biden, mem-
bers of the campaign staff told
me.
Celebrity endorsements aren’t
a new campaign strategy. But
Mr. Biden’s team also worked
with lesser-known influencers,
including YouTubers like Liza
Koshy, and struck a partnership
with a group of creators known
as TikTok for Biden, which the
campaign paid to promote pro-
Biden content on the teen-domi-
nated video app TikTok.
Perhaps the campaign’s most
unlikely validator was Fox News.
Headlines from the outlet that
reflected well on Mr. Biden were
relatively rare, but the cam-
paign’s tests showed that they
were more persuasive to on-the-
fence voters than headlines from
other outlets. So when they ap-
peared — as they did in October
when Fox News covered an
endorsement that Mr. Biden
received from more than 120
Republican former national
security and military officials —
the campaign paid to promote
them on Facebook and other
platforms.
“The headlines from the
sources that were the most sur-
prising were the ones that had
the most impact,” said Rebecca
Rinkevich, Mr. Biden’s digital
rapid response director. “When
people saw a Fox News headline
endorsing Joe Biden, it made
them stop scrolling and think.”Tune out Twitter, and focus on
‘Facebook moms’
A frequent criticism of Hillary
Clinton’s 2016 campaign was that
it was too focused on appealing
to the elite, high-information
crowd on Twitter, instead of
paying attention to the much
larger group of voters who get
their news and information on
Facebook. In 2020, Mr. Biden’s
digital team was committed to
avoiding a repeat.
“The whole Biden campaign
ethos was ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’ ”
Mr. Flaherty said. “There are
risks of running a campaign that
is too hyper-aware of your own
ideological corner.”
As it focused on Facebook, the
Biden campaign paid extra atten-
tion to “Facebook moms” —
women who spend a lot of time
sharing cute and uplifting con-
tent, and who the campaign
believed could be persuaded to
vote for Mr. Biden with positive
messages about his character. Its
target audience, Mr. Flaherty
said, was women “who would go
out and share a video of troops
coming home, or who would
follow The Dodo,” a website
known for heartwarming animal
videos.
One successful clip aimed at
this group showed Mr. Bidengiving his American flag lapel
pin to a young boy at a campaign
stop. Another video showed Mr.
Biden, who has talked about
overcoming a stutter in his
youth, meeting Brayden Harring-
ton, a 13-year-old boy with one.
Both were viewed millions of
times.
Voters also responded pos-
itively to videos in which Mr.
Biden showed his command of
foreign policy. In January, after a
U.S. drone strike killed the Irani-
an general Qassim Suleimani, the
campaign posted a three-minute
Facebook video of Mr. Biden
explaining the situation. Despite
the snoozy title — “Joe Biden
Discusses Donald Trump’s Re-
cent Actions in the Middle East”
— the video became one of the
campaign’s earliest viral suc-
cesses.
The campaign also experi-
mented with lighter fare, putting
virtual Biden for President lawn
signs in Animal Crossing, the hit
Nintendo game, and setting up a
custom “Build Back Better” map
in Fortnite, the popular battle
royale game, in hopes of reach-
ing younger voters. Some of
these efforts were more gim-
micky than others. But they all
reflected the campaign’s decision
to take a pro-Biden message to
as many corners of the internet
as possible.
“Our goal was really to meet
people where they were,” said
Christian Tom, the head of Mr.
Biden’s digital partnerships
team.Build a Facebook brain trust
One of the campaign’s goals,
Biden staff members told me,
was promoting content that
increased “social trust” — in
other words, avoiding the kind of
energizing, divisive fare that Mr.
Trump has used to great effect.
But Mr. Biden’s digital strategywasn’t all puppies and rainbows.
The campaign also joined ranks
with a number of popular left-
wing Facebook pages, many of
which are known for putting out
aggressive anti-Trump content.
They called this group the
“Rebel Alliance,” a jokey nod to
Mr. Parscale’s “Death Star,” and
it eventually grew to include the
proprietors of pages like Occupy
Democrats, Call to Activism, The
Other 98 Percent and Being
Liberal. On the messaging app
Signal, the page owners formed a
group text that became a kind of
rapid-response brain trust for the
campaign.
“I had the freedom to go for
the jugular,” said Rafael Rivero, a
co-founder of Occupy Democrats
and Ridin’ With Biden, another
big pro-Biden Facebook page.
Mr. Rivero, who was paid by
the Biden campaign as a consult-
ant, told me that in addition to
cross-posting its content on
Occupy Democrats, he often
offered the campaign advice
based on what was performing
well on his pages.
During the Republican Na-
tional Convention, for example,
Mr. Rivero noticed that a meme
posted by Ridin’ With Biden
about Mr. Trump’s comments on
Medicare and Social Security
was going viral. He notified the
rest of the Rebel Alliance group,
and recommended that the cam-
paign borrow the message for
Mr. Biden’s official Twitter ac-
count.
“It was sort of a big, distribut-
ed message test,” Mr. Flaherty
said of the Rebel Alliance. “If it
was popping through Occupy or
any of our other partners, we
knew there was heat there.”
These left-wing pages gave the
campaign a bigger Facebook
audience than it could have
reached on its own. But they also
allowed Mr. Biden to keep mostof his messaging positive, while
still tapping into the anger and
outrage many Democratic voters
felt.Promote ‘small-batch creators,’
not just slick commercials
In its internal tests, the Biden
campaign found that traditional
political ads — professionally
produced, slick-looking 30-sec-
ond spots — were far less effec-
tive than impromptu, behind-the-
scenes footage and ads that
featured regular voters talking
directly into their smartphones
or webcams about why they
were voting for Mr. Biden.
“All our testing showed that
higher production value was not
better,” said Nathaniel Lubin, a
Biden campaign consultant. “The
things that were realer, more
grainy and cheaper to produce
were more credible.”
So the campaign commis-
sioned a series of simple, lo-fi ads
targeted at key groups of voters,
like a series of self-recorded
videos by Biden supporters who
didn’t vote in 2016, talking about
their regrets.
In addition to hiring traditional
Democratic ad firms, the cam-
paign also teamed up with what
it called “small-batch creators”
— lesser-known producers and
digital creators, some of whom
had little experience making
political ads. Among the small-
batch creators it hired: Scotty
Wagner, a former art school
professor from California, who
produced a video about young
people who supported Bernie
Sanders in the Democratic pri-
mary sharing things they didn’t
know about Mr. Biden, and
Jawanza Tucker, a TikTok cre-
ator, who made a video styled
after a TikTok meme about why
he was voting for Mr. Biden.Fight misinformation, but pick
your battles
One of the biggest obstacles the
Biden campaign faced was a
tsunami of misinformation, much
of it amplified by the Trump
campaign and its right-wing
media allies. There were base-
less rumors about Mr. Biden’s
health, unfounded questions
about the citizenship of Ms.
Harris and spurious claims about
the business dealings of Mr.
Biden’s son Hunter.
The campaign formed an in-
house effort to combat these
rumors, known as the “Malarkey
Factory.” But it picked its battles
carefully, using data from voter
testing to guide its responses.
When the Hunter Biden laptop
story emerged, for example,
some Democrats — worried thatit would be 2020’s version of the
Hillary Clinton email story —
suggested that the Biden cam-
paign should forcefully denounce
it. But the campaign’s testing
found that most voters in its key
groups couldn’t follow the com-
plexities of the allegations, and
that it wasn’t changing their
opinion of Mr. Biden.
“We had running surveys so
we could see in real time how
people were responding,” said
Caitlin Mitchell, a digital adviser
for the Biden campaign. “The
two big metrics were: Are you
aware of this? And many people
had heard of it. The secondary
category was: Are you con-
cerned by it? And the clear an-
swer was no.”
The campaign still responded
to the reports, and Mr. Biden
defended his son on the debate
stage. But it stopped short of
mounting a full-throated counter-
messaging campaign.
When it did respond to misin-
formation, the Biden team tried
to address the root of the narra-
tive. After right-wing influencers
posted compilation videos of Mr.
Biden stumbling over his words
and appearing forgetful, the
campaign surveyed voters to try
to figure out whether the attempt
to paint him as mentally unfit
was resonating. It discovered
that the real concern for many
people wasn’t Mr. Biden’s age, or
his health per se, but whether he
was an easily manipulated tool of
the radical left.
The Biden team identified the
voters who were most likely to
see those clips and ran a tar-
geted digital ad campaign show-
ing them videos of Mr. Biden
speaking lucidly at debates and
public events.
Mr. Flaherty, the campaign
digital director, said the cam-
paign’s focus on empathy had
informed how it treated misinfor-
mation: not as a cynical Trump
ploy that was swallowed by
credulous dupes, but as some-
thing that required listening to
voters to understand their con-
cerns and worries before fighting
back. Ultimately, he said, the
campaign’s entire digital strat-
egy — the Malarkey Factory, the
TikTok creators and Facebook
moms, the Fortnite signs and
small-batch creators — was
about trying to reach a kinder,
gentler version of the internet
that it still believed existed.
“It was about how do we throw
the incentives of the internet for
a bit of a loop?” he said. “We
made a decision early that we
were going to be authentically
Joe Biden online, even when
people were saying that was a
trap.”How Team Biden Neutralized the Vaunted Trump ‘Death Star’ Online
Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Brayden Harrington in February in Gilford, N.H.ELIZABETH FRANTZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE