Misinformation: a series part 1.5
The mechanics of misinformation in the 2016 presidential election and the rise of the orange scourge
November 8th, 2016 will forever be one of the most historic days recorded in American history. It was the day a reality TV host won the presidency in one of the biggest upsets in election history. Almost every poll up until Election Day from "Raceto270" to "RealClearPolitics" had Clinton up 4 or 5 points. In fact one poll conducted by Monmouth University in New Jersey had Clinton up 6 points over Trump the day before the ballots where to be cast. In their article covering the poll they found just 28%(of registered voters) think Trump will win." (Bracketed portion added)1 By all accounts Clinton was to be the president elect, she had lead for a majority of the race and held a 12 point lead just a month before and although the gap closed between then and election day she polled ahead consistently. So how could this happen? How could the former host of Celebrity Apprentice beat a seasoned career politician? The answer...RUSSIA!! At least as far as the mainstream media was concerned.
As covered in the first part of this series(hyperlink to misinformation 1.0) Russia ran an influence campaign during the 2016 presidential race and one of the campaigns clear objectives was to "...denigrate secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency."2 So there it was clear as day, Russia did this with their onslaught of "misinformation" and the irate orange man screaming "fake news" to them from behind his podium had something to do with it. Thus the story of "Russiagate" was born, but before we dive into Russiagate let's take some time to review the mechanics of how we got here and how this pertains to misinformation and particularly who benefited from it.
As early as the beginning of 2015 the presidential campaign started to get under way, former and current senators and governors started forming PAC's (political action committees) for funding and announcing their candidacies. Everything was pretty run of the mill at the beginning until mid-June 2015 when from Trump tower in New York during a frenzy of broken sentences sporadically bouncing in topic from China & trade to Obamacare and ISIS "The Donald" announced his intentions to run for office. He vowed to bring American manufacturing jobs back "I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I'll tell you that.”3 He vowed to make American military the strongest it's ever been, he vowed to abolish Obamacare "We have to repeal Obamacare, and it can be --and-- and it can be replaced with something much better for everybody." But most important of all he vowed "To make America great again." In between his spurts of nationalist rhetoric the audience interrupted him with applause and chants of "We need Trump" or simply "Trump, Trump, Trump". The ambiance of the announcement would follow him throughout his presidential campaign rallies and events.
After the announcement Trump surged in the polls but his campaign was never taken seriously especially by the established press. Roughly a month after Trump became a candidate and shortly after he made controversial statements about fellow Republican John McCain The New York Times published an article trying to explain away Trump’s bump in the polls as a natural occurrence of the media coverage around his fresh candidacy. "Announcements of that type always yield a wave of media coverage, just as they did for candidates like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. So far this year, media attention from announcements has helped the best-known candidates by an average of six percentage points, with the effect degrading steadily afterward."4 The article displayed the tone and general attitude the media had towards the freshly founded Trump campaign.
"Journalists and campaigns have, understandably, been reluctant to treat him as a serious candidate. The Huffington Post, for instance, decided it would cover him in the entertainment section."
They also predicted the Trump campaign would soon fizzle out because media coverage would shift away from The Donald and predicted the Republican party would likely turn on him because of his statements about McCain among other issues that conflicted with the parties ideology. "After today, Republican commentators and campaigns will have far fewer reservations about attacking Mr. Trump. They will be dismissive of his candidacy, and they will probably diversify their attacks, expanding the onslaught to include his record of donating to Democrats and his continuing support for universal health care. Nearly all of the campaigns have incentives to pile on, and Mr. Trump — without a deep base of support and with few party allies — will struggle to hold on."
However as the primary season of the election dredged on, Trumps campaign became harder and harder to dismiss. Trump placed second in the Iowa caucus, the first major primary of the campaign.5 Trump than went on to win several states including New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. On "Super Tuesday" the day of the election where the most U.S states hold primaries Trump won seven of the eleven states that cast ballots. He then widened his lead by winning several states in the Northeast and major ones in the South like Florida.6
Once Trump took these victories his opponents had become "mathematically" eliminated from the race with the final blow being his win in the Indiana primary which solidified him as the presumptive nominee for the general election. All the while the media wildly flailed in disbelief. In March of 2016 before the Indiana primary that established Trump as the presumptive nominee Politico put out an article that echoed many of the same themes the New York Times piece did in 2015. Politico again attempted to dismiss the Trump campaign by emphasizing the fact that the combined amount of votes for Trump’s opponents was higher than the votes for Trump also it played on the fact that Trump had not yet hit the magic number of 1237 delegates needed to be the nominee. By not having the required number of delegates by the convention day in mid-July there would still be a chance that Trump would not be the nominee for the general election. Politico also beat the mainstream media drum of painting Trump as a megalomaniac full of hate. The NY Times article included Trumps quote from his announcement claiming Mexico was bringing in "rapists" and Politico outright called him a "..Bigoted demagogue"7 and if handed the presidency he would "...not only undermine any claim to American exceptionalism—our constitutional commitment to human values and the rule of law—but also possibly draw the country into a series of high-level confrontations with nations around the world." Nonetheless even with the media screaming and hollering "The Donald" secured the Republican nomination and the real race was on.
In mid-summer along with the announcements of each parties candidates for president another major story broke. The story of the DNC's(Democratic National Committee) email server being hacked and thousands of emails showing the corrupt inner workings of the Democratic party leaked to the public, surfaced just days before the Democratic party’s national convention. This story is what brought Russia and their influence into the public eye since it was established early that the hacking of the DNC likely originated from the motherland.
"The emails are believed to have been released by Russian operatives after the DNC was hacked earlier this year."
At the time the Whitehouse would not officially comment on the origin of the hacking but as early as August 2016 CNN was reporting that the hackers where likely of Russian origin. "The emails are believed to have been released by Russian operatives after the DNC was hacked earlier this year."8 Stated a CNN article in early August. Thus Russia and consequently "misinformation" now entered the campaign along with the two presidential candidates.
Russia attempted to influence the campaign in three major ways the first one being the leaking of the emails they obtained from the DNC and the other two being the pushing of mostly anti-Clinton news on their state sponsored network RT that broadcasted through cable and satellite but was mostly viewed on YouTube in the U.S and the third by pushing the same type of content and "misinformation" on social media. In a 2018 interview with CBS, Margarita Simonyan the editor in chief of RT had this to say "I wanted to win somebody who would be nicer to Russia."9 And that somebody was clearly not Clinton. RT ran a segment in 2016 that according to CBS went "..out of its way to delegitimize Hillary Clinton." In that segment which apparently reached over 10 million views RT stated that "in 2015, 96 percent of Clinton's charity - went to themselves!" Which the CBS article quickly dismisses as inaccurate.
The same type of content was pushed on social media. A study commissioned by the Knight foundation and produced by members of The George Washington University in collaboration with the network analysis firm Graphika analyzed 10 million tweets and found 6.6 million of them linked to "fake news or conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election."10 They also found 2700 IRA(Internet Research Agency) accounts, the agency of "professional trolls" in St. Petersburg linked to the Russian government. Some of these IRA accounts where quoted in American media. The study concluded that misinformation was spread on both sides of the political spectrum however was mostly right leaning.
"While a majority of “fake news” came from pro-Republican and pro-Trump accounts in the month before the election, smaller but still substantial amounts of fake news was spread by liberal or Democratic-identified accounts."
Thus by the fateful day of November 8, 2016 all the mechanisms of misinformation where in place. The established press had shown their clear left leaning bias by first trying to dismiss Trumps campaign than further digging their heels in when he won the Republican nomination by painting him as bigot and a threat to democracy throughout the general election. Proven anti-Hillary Russian influence had been broadcast throughout the election. Social media the form of media that was beginning to overtake the established mainstream version in popularity as a news source was being weaponized by the Russians and other conspiracy minded people and organizations to spread "fake news".
But who stood to benefit from all of this? The answer the evil orange scourge that was Donald Trump and the faction of the right wing he represented. So with him now in the oval office what was the task at hand? Prove that he (Trump) had something to do with the Russian influence campaign that benefited him and stop the flow of "misinformation" to ensure this type of thing never happened again.
Footnotes:
Monmouth University, "Clinton leads by 6 points.", Monmouth University, November 7th 2016, https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthPoll_US_110716/
National Intelligence Council, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections", January 6th 2017, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
Donald Trump, "Transcript: Donald Trump announces his presidential candidacy" CBS News, June 16 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-donald-trump-announces-his-presidential-candidacy/
Nate Cohn, "The Trump Campaigns Turning Point", The New York Times, July 18 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/upshot/the-trump-campaigns-turning-point.html
"Iowa Caucus Results", The New York Times, September 29th 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/primaries/iowa
"2016 Republican Party presidential primaries", Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries
Mackey Edwards, "Donald Trump’s Giant Convention Con", Politico, March 26 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-republican-convention-213770/
Jeff Zeleny & Tal Kopen, "DNC CEO resigns in wake of email controversy", CNN, August 2nd 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/dnc-ceo-resigns-in-wake-of-email-scandal/index.html
Lesley Stahl, "RT's editor-in-cheif on election meddling, being labeled Russian propaganda.", CBS, January 7th 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rt-editor-in-chief-on-election-meddling-russian-propaganda-label
Knight Foundation, "Seven ways misinformation spread during the 2016 election", Knight Foundation, October 4th 2018, https://knightfoundation.org/articles/seven-ways-misinformation-spread-during-the-2016-election/