One of the most pressing challenges for candidates and campaigns today is how to win in a world where disinformation is so pervasive. Why is the information environment in this election year so hard to parse? Our guest this week has written about the keys to winning campaigns for more than a decade. Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and author of numerous books including his latest, “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.” He joins WITHpod to discuss the often insidious nature of disinformation, work to curtail its spread, how we can make sense of a world awash in lies and more.
This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Sasha Issenberg: I think that the most effective tactics to dealing with this disinformation things are the ones that really step back and sort of think about this as a kind of traditional political communications problem, even if it’s triggered by this sort of peculiar digital dynamics that sort of set it in motion.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, I saw a piece of information in an April NBC News poll that has been sticking with me ever since I read it. And it was a very smart bit of polling by our pollsters at NBC. They basically broke the race down by where respondents got their news. So in the battery of questions, you ask people what their preference is, who they plan on voting for.
You also ask where you get your news. And then you look at, okay, of the people who said they relied on newspapers, you know, how are the two candidates doing? And among voters who relied on newspapers, Biden led by 49 points. Among voters who said they rely on national news networks, he led by 20 points. In the category of digital websites, which I think is, you know, people think about like Politico.com, right, Biden led by 10 points.
Among voters who rely on social media, Trump led by four. Among voters who rely on cable news, Trump led by eight. I think that’s largely a Fox effect. And then this was the one, the two that really got me. Voters who get their news from YouTube and Google, Trump leads by 16 points and voters who don’t follow political news at all favor Trump by 26 points.
Now, I don’t want to establish a causal mechanism here because I don’t think you can base on this data that because people get their information from YouTube and Google, therefore, they are more inclined to support Donald Trump. I think actually there’s some self-selection going on. The kinds of people inclined to support Donald Trump are also the people inclined to get their news from places.
But it also strikes me that the information environment in this campaign is both extremely difficult to parse, urgently important and pretty messed up. And that information environment in the context of campaigns is the subject of a great new book called “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.” It’s by the journalist and author Sasha Issenberg, who’s written a bunch of books and whose work I’ve been following for a very long time. And it’s great to have Sasha on the program.
Sasha Issenberg: Thank you, Chris. I love that term digital websites.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: Because the people who read the analog websites, you should see the split there.
Chris Hayes: Those cross tags. So, I want to start to sketch a trajectory before we get to this book to say “Victory Lab,” which is a book you wrote about sort of the science and technique of campaigns. I think it came out after Obama won, right? Am I right about that?
Sasha Issenberg: It came out in the fall of 2012. So about two months before he was reelected.
Chris Hayes: Right. So but in the sort of wake of that first amazing victory, 2008, and it was about what people at the forefront of trying to figure out in an empirically rigorous way, like what works in campaigns. And what was sort of the main takeaways of that because I want to sort of create a before and after, because that that to me is sort of the whole story here.
So maybe you’ll talk a little bit about some of the big takeaways of that “Victory Lab” book and how people understood some of the kind of cutting edge of campaign efficacy back, you know, ‘08, ‘09, ‘10, ‘11.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. So it was largely about the scientific revolution that had taken place in campaigns over the first decade of the century. And there are these two major strands of innovation that I wrote about. One was all the new data that was becoming available to campaigns about individual level voters that allowed them to profile the electorate at an individual level instead of in the sort of broad categories of demographics or geography or political identity.
And then the use of field experiments, these basically like drug trials, randomized experiments that for the first time allowed campaigns to empirically test the relative effectiveness of, you know, is a door knock better than a phone call at delivering a GOTV message, for example. And together, those two strands, which really totally transformed the way that people, particularly doing voter contact, thought about not just what they did because it was most efficient, but what was actually knowable and by extension, what in the you know, the world of campaigns is remains unknowable.
And the way that these were being applied during that period was largely in a way that I think contributed to an optimistic story we were telling about technology and innovation in campaigns. So the book dealt very little with the internet, in large part because of the way data is structured in campaigns. It was far easier to test things that were offline like a phone call or a door knock or direct mail.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: But it was in that period we were also starting to talk about how social media and web tools were allowing campaigns like Obama’s to allow volunteers and supporters to be engaged in the process in a whole new set of ways.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, I’m going to oversimplify here, but I think the oversimplification is useful for telling a story, which is, I think, the general feeling post ‘08 and then Obama’s reelection 2012 was there sort of a set of principles, I would say, are the following. One, the internet was good for civic participation in democracy and that Democrats in particular had a comparative advantage in marshalling it for the purposes of organization, that it had produced the progressive net roots that had been the signature part of Howard Dean’s insurgent primary campaign. And then the Obama campaign had taken it to new heights.
And it was this tool both for civic participation and people to cooperate over time and space and a sort of progressive vision, the sort of utopian. This is great. You saw this globally with the Arab Spring and the idea that it could overthrow dictatorial regimes and that again, that Democrats in a sort of strictly partisan sense, the Democratic campaigns had an edge in cultivating and understanding this stuff.
And then 2016 happens. And if you have like the Hegelian sense, you have thesis of digital great, you have antithesis of like digital bad, because then it’s, oh my God, there’s all sorts of crazy lies and calumny and distortions and maybe foreign interference that are happening that lead, you know, that help or contribute to the election of Donald Trump. So let’s talk about that sort of where your book starts, right, is the shock of 2016. And let’s talk about how people that work in this space reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, particularly how different the information environment was then maybe what they thought it was or anticipated.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. So the book starts basically in this cadre of political professionals, mostly on the left in Washington, attached to, you know, the Democratic Party organizations, labor unions, stuff like that. And everybody obviously is bewildered by Trump’s victory and people’s search for explanation leads them into all sorts of places, states that Hillary Clinton didn’t visit demographic groups that sort of swung in one direction, strategic mistakes, all that stuff. But one line of inquiry is all these things that sort of happened on the Internet in 2016 that were not fully recognized, understood, contextualized at the time.
And to make sense of that, a lot of these political professionals who had basically been, you know, trained in the late 20th century model of campaigning, which was focused on primarily on broadcast television and to a lesser degree on cable and winning coverage in newspapers and magazines, realized that there was a whole vocabulary that was relevant to understand what happened in 2016 that was often literally just unknown to them, right. So they’re going around asking, you know, what are trolls? What are bot farms? What are like, you know, all these things which are suddenly really important in November, December, January of that year to understanding.
And there’s like nobody in American politics who has a useful frame of reference for this because it has never been thought of as sort of an important part of the American political process. And they all sort of find their way to this woman named Jiore Craig, who’s this 25-year-old who grew up in Illinois, but had never worked on an American political campaign. But she had spent a few years doing digital campaigns all around the world.
And she was the one person who had a useful frame of reference, because a lot of those things, Chris, that you discuss us being shocked by in 2016 for an influence, the kind of persistence of conspiracy theory and rumors, a vector for the spread of information or shaping political opinions, the sort of rise of partisan or ideologically motivated media. Those are all things that were a shock to us in 2016. Some parts of that have been really prevalent in our politics in the 19th century, but it basically disappeared through most of the 20th century.
But all over the world, they’re taken for granted. You can go to huge parts of the world where people just assume conspiracy theories are going to shape how people make election choices or foreign interference by business or governments is just taken, you know, as routine, where we’re really anomalous and among our peer countries and that most of our media has not until recently been defined by a sort of, you know, partisan or ideological bent.
And so this woman, Jiore Craig, ends up helping the biggest players in Democratic politics up to the Biden campaign in 2020 and the Democratic National Committee. Think about how to bring a sense of proportion to understanding the sort of online disinformation that all of a sudden becomes one of the overweening obsessions of people in political communication, even though nobody really has the right frame of reference to think about it.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about the term disinformation, which I think is a slippery one. You know, again, I’ve just wrote a book about attention and the attention age that we live in and sort of attention is the most important resource of the 21st century. And, you know, one of the things that I’m always battling with in the writing of that book is to sort of historicize things and there’s always this impulse to be like ahistorical, never before has X.
And it’s like, you know, go back to the Salem witch trials. They didn’t need WhatsApp. They didn’t need social media. It turns out that people are perfectly capable of, in a panicked and frenetic way, believing deeply untrue things through good old analog, you know, non-technological means.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So it’s always important, I think, to just keep rooting yourself in the fact that large amounts of people in a kinds of frenzied fashion rushing towards false belief is not a new feature of the digital age. So, I guess the question is, when we talk about disinformation, what is that word describing? What are the conceptual boundaries of it that make it something that we can deal with other than the broader thing of sometimes people believes false things, sometimes people say false things?
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah, I mean, and so I should say, like, you know, there are academic researchers who have clearly defined ideas about what qualifies as disinformation and, you know, that term distinguished from misinformation has something to do with the intent behind it. But for political communiqué and, you know, in some cases with the platforms, the truth or falsity of something matters as to whether it violates, you know, content moderation policy.
But for political communicators, people lump together a lot of stuff as disinformation. I think you’re right. I think the fundamental shift here from the perspective of political communicators is from a sort of centralized media environment to a decentralized media environment. And yes, people have always lied. There’s always been, you know, rumor, conspiracy theory. The ability for it to gain scale and scope quickly without any money or preexisting organization or networking behind it because of the kind of frictionless qualities of social media is, I think, an important qualitative difference.
And what it is, you know, the flip side of the story, the happy story you were telling, you know, the sort of stretch of the Obama campaigns and the Arab Spring, I mean, that was fundamentally about the barriers to entry for political engagement being lowered, right? In the 20th century, if you, you know, did not have a political machine or access to a political machine or to a mass media platform, or maybe if you’re, you know, Dwight Eisenhower and have some like external or Charles Lindbergh, some external celebrity, it was very hard to reach a lot of people very quickly with a political message like, you know, and it took either a long period of sort of movement building or, you know, building of infrastructure to do it.
And once you do that, you often were regulated. You became regulated by the Federal Election Commission, by the FCC, by the IRS. There’s a certain amount of public accountability and disclosure about where your money was coming from and how you were spending it that sort of legitimated you as a political actor. And you had to have a sort of profile that allowed you to be held accountable in the public sphere. And people have always lied in politics, not just in witchcraft. Like it’s been a, you know, sort of a staple of political life going back, you know —
Chris Hayes: The dawn of politics.
Sasha Issenberg: Centuries, millennia. Right. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The Roman Empire. I mean, yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: So let’s not pretend that that’s new either. But usually the person who was lying about you, if they were reaching enough people that it was worrisome, was usually somebody on whom you could hold accountable in front of that constituency for being a liar. And that’s why the ads we grew up with on TV were always like, you know, so-and-so says I’m going to cut Social Security, but they’re lying to you.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And the fundamental dynamic here is it really became clear to me wasn’t, I think you’re right, it’s not really about disinformation. It’s not about truth or falsity. It’s about what happens when your opposition is not your opponent. It’s not another candidate. It’s not another political figure. It’s not a party organization, but it’s an anonymous person online. It’s a foreign intelligence service. It’s somebody who’s just trying to make a buck and doesn’t care about an election outcome. How do you communicate there?
Chris Hayes: I want to give a personal example of this, because I think it’s illuminating of disinformation I encountered yesterday. And I think disinformation as opposed to misinformation, I think the distinction is sort of bad faith, good faith, right? Misinformation is you might pass along something that says, you know, someone might post foreign aid makes up 50 percent of the U.S. budget. And they’re just posting it because they think it’s true, but it’s not true, right? And that’s misinformation.
But when you know something’s not true and you post it. So I had someone this is not in a political context, but in a commercial context, but the point still stands. Someone I care about a lot, a woman in her 60s, is very close to my family, texted me yesterday to show me a screenshot of an image of an ad she’d encountered on social media, which is me and the screenshot of “All In” where the bottom banner had been photoshopped that I was endorsing some vitamin supplement.
I was a little surprised, but like, if this is you, then I’ll buy this vitamin supplement. And so this to me, crystallized everything, right? Like I have no idea who did this. Whoever did do it knows that I’m not endorsing that vitamin supplement. It’s a scam. It’s disinformation, quite literally. But also, like, who did it? Where is it out in the ether? Like how are people encountering it? What do I now do about it like this? There is someone out there, you know, lying about me in a pretty important way. They’re saying I’m endorsing a product I’m not endorsing.
And I’m now trying to figure out, like, well, who? How do I go about correcting the record here and making sure people don’t know? And that in some ways is the that’s precisely the kind of the challenge that Jiore Craig and all these folks are dealing with.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. And that’s undercutting the value of all your buy gold endorsements now.
Chris Hayes: Exactly, which I’m charging a lot for. You know, that’s the other thing. They’re getting this for free. You know, I take a cut on my buy gold and my end of world supplements.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. I mean, this is the major sort of challenge, because the sort of playbook that political communicators had, which often said, you know, if your opponent’s lying about you, don’t let a lie go unanswered. There were sort of these heuristics that were tied to pre-digital media. You know, if it’s on the front page of “The Columbus Dispatch,” you need to respond to it, but if it’s like stuck on page 19, don’t give it more attention than it deserves.
None of those sorts of shorthand naturally translate online. And the world that Jiore Craig comes into in American politics in 2017 is one where the people on the left that she’s advising are almost always inclined to want to fight back. Like everybody thinks disinformation is this, you know, threat to democracy. It’s an existential threat. It’s a geopolitical problem. And so everybody’s inclination is there’s a lie about me or the issue I care about online. I need to push back. And it’s often precisely the wrong thing to do.
You know, there’s what people call the Streisand effect, right? You could draw more attention to this vitamin supplement ad —
Chris Hayes: Oh, yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: — than anybody is —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I’m not going to go online and be like, I did not endorse this random vitamin supplement because then I’ve just succeeded in drawing attention to the vitamin supplement.
Sasha Issenberg: I mean, but here we are on a podcast. Look where we are.
Chris Hayes: Well, I’m not naming it, obviously.
Sasha Issenberg: Okay. Yeah. Right. So that’s number one, right, is that you get exposure. Like two, would be specifically the nature of algorithmic social media would be that if you took one of their posts and you quoted it or tried to fact check it or something, you probably would be directly amplifying it by engaging with it. There’s a lot of cognitive science research that suggests that if you went out and said, you know, I don’t endorse any vitamin supplements, you might help to reinforce the idea among people who had been exposed to it that you do.
And then the fourth thing for a political campaign is the kind of opportunity cost, which is you have a limited number of things you want to be talking about every day to communicate with persuadable voters and your donors and whoever else. And if you spend all day responding to a crazy thing that pops up on the internet, you’re going to lose the capacity to control what you talk about.
And so probably, like if you’re a public figure and that that could be a public figure institution, you’re not just a candidate, but you’re a corporation, you’re a university or a TV host, you’re a sports team, people are going to be lying about or misrepresenting you and the ideas you care about every day. And probably 99% of the time it will be counterproductive for you to engage with it because, you know, the audience that you care about, which if you’re a campaign is probably persuadable voters, if you’re a corporation it’s your shareholders or customers. They’re probably not being exposed to it.
But distinguishing what is the 1% of the time that you do need to answer it and how you do that without sort of breathing life into something that you don’t want to see spread is the question. And, you know, everybody’s impulse has been that they need to respond, and often the most important advice that Jiore Craig finds herself giving clients is telling them that the smart thing to do is to do nothing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think there’s also a history here, right? Because to me, the Swift Boat 2004 incident in Democratic politics looms large, which is that there was well, I don’t know if I can call it a lie. There was a sort of, I think, a wildly partisan interpretation of John Kerry’s actions during the war in Vietnam by people that had a tremendous axe to grind with his political position on the Vietnam War subsequent to his service there, who came together to say all sorts of things about his service in Vietnam, which was contradicted by the vast majority of people that served with him.
And they were called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was a partisan hit job I guess is what I’m trying to say. And they didn’t respond for a long time. And I think one of the big lessons in Democratic politics was, oh, you can’t let things like this go unanswered, which was a kind of defining generational shock in Democratic politics for a long time.
Sasha Issenberg: That’s absolutely right. And the Obama campaign, you know, three, four years later, fully internalizes that. And so the moment that Obama is, you know, it started with is a crypto Muslim who went to a madrassa in Indonesia pops up. And obviously that starts to morph into the into the sort of whole birther conspiracy. The idea that is accepted throughout the campaign is that you need to punch back and correct it immediately.
And, you know, Obama ends up giving a TV interview just a few days after some crazy thing posts on a right-wing website saying, like, you know, I didn’t go to a madrassa. And then they really wrestled during that campaign with what to do, you know, with a real first early example of sort of viral digital misinformation, which are these e-mail forwards. And so the campaign would hear from a lot of people. Hey, you know, I got forwarded something from my aunt that, you know, one of those back in the old days where the forwards had like 10 layers of forwards in it saying that, you know, Barack Obama is not Christian, whatever it is, wasn’t born in this country.
It would make their way back to campaign headquarters and the campaign had to try to assess, hey, is this actually getting in front of a lot of people? And even then, the ability of email to spread at scale, I think is, you know, totally dwarfed now by the reach and speed of social media lies. And so that was for a lot of people in Democratic politics, the first time they had to think about kind of virality and in a digital sense.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Tell me a little more about Jiore Craig. She’s a really fascinating figure since she’s the sort of lens through which we see all this in the book. Like where had she worked and what had she seen in that work?
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. So she ends up going to work right out of college. She’d been an intern at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, which is a polling firm in D.C. that through a quirk of its history had developed sort of the largest overseas consulting practice in American politics. Dan Greenberg, one of the firm’s founders, had been Bill Clinton’s pulse (ph), but also Nelson Mandela and Tony Blair’s. So she goes to work there because she was like a model U.N. nerd and wants to do international work. And so right out of college, she gets into Moldova to help a parliamentary leader get on Facebook.
And then she’s sent to Gabon and she’s sent to the Philippines and Panama and the Bahamas. And 2016 rolls around and she is seeing it all from abroad. But like a lot of what is shocking to people in American politics is sort of familiar to her because, you know, she worked in Eastern Europe where it’s taken for granted that Russian entities will try to shape politics. In Gabon, she sorts of encountered these Indian operatives affiliated with Modi’s BJP who were, you know, sort of gaming social media platforms and YouTube numbers to make it look like there was more organic interest in things.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And so, you know, what she was used to advising clients was how not to get distracted by this stuff and how to view it proportionately. And because I think in many of those environments, what they were seeing on social media was just the sort of digital manifestation of things that had existed in their pre-digital politics already. And for us, I think in 2016, there was just this dramatic shock that felt like a rupture from a whole model of 20th century politics that happened all at once.
And so she was used to telling party leaders that she dealt with in these other countries just had a natural sense of proportion that, yeah, somebody’s saying something crazy about me, like they’d be doing that at like the shisha, you know, cafe at the corner or they’d be doing it on a website. But like I’ve grown up in a politics where I know how to, you know, ignore that if it’s if it’s not a distraction. And Americans did not have any of that framework for it. And that was the big difference, I think, for her coming here.
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the big questions here is scale, which this is one of the really difficult things to wrestle with, which is how many people are out there? See, I mean, I have to say, like I have been routinely struck in the last six months by two things. One, how much wild stuff I encounter in my algorithm on TikTok in particular. I mean, like really crazy stuff, both extremist and content or just flatly wrong, like just totally false, but like has two million views.
And two, I think I’ve said this a few times now on the podcast that the number of normies I know in life who are like people who pay a normal amount of attention to politics, which is not political junkies, saying something like pretty wild, whose origins I happen to know because I’m obsessed with this stuff, has really gone up. And my question to you is like, how do people get their arms around what the information environment actually is? Like, how do you know what people are hearing or learning if it’s coming from an algorithm that’s utterly impenetrable?
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah, so some of the platforms are more open to, you know, sort of research scrutiny than others are. And this is one of the reasons that TikTok is particularly vexing. Even if you take away the Chinese ownership issue is that it is, you know, an individual post does not have like a link attached to it. So there’s actually no way to sort of follow it through the network the way that you can often with something on Twitter and Facebook, for example. It just doesn’t have a durable presence and it’s not only seen by followers.
You know, so there is data. It is piecemeal. It is generally becoming worse in its value to people on the outside just because the platforms themselves are sort of tamping down or restricting the more valuable forms of data. The first thing Jiore Craig does when she has a client, whether it’s a campaign or an outside group that’s hiring her, she does what they call landscape analysis and just literally mapping in a given area.
And this could be a geographic area or it could be a sort of social cultural corner of the internet, you know, around a particular issue or theme. What are the big accounts? How are they linked? What are the patterns of transmission between them so that people can begin to anticipate the way that things sort of move through the nodes of this corner of the internet?
Because the big question is, when is something going to make the jump to the bigger audience? You know, in the Swift Boat era, that was we’ll get picked up by Fox News or talk radio, right, or, you know, we’ll go from the crazies to Drudge. And then we’ll go from Drudge to something like, you know, credible.
Chris Hayes: And then to network news and then to the mainstream media, right, which is what happened.
Sasha Issenberg: And now you don’t necessarily need those kinds of mainstream validators. But what is the ways in which it’s going to get from, you know, a 4chan board or Reddit or whatever and that’s a sort of mapping project. And then along with that, she is trying to create an understanding of a baseline. Like information is always flowing through these channels. And one of the things I think we’re often inclined to do is overreact when we see something of interest to us and go, oh, X is trending, not X the platform.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: This thing is trending.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: Or people are saying this thing. And maybe people say that there’s always that level of conversation on that topic. I mean, maybe this might not be any assurance to you, but maybe people are always putting cable news hosts into vitamin supplement ads.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And —
Chris Hayes: Or maybe there’s like 200 figures that have been, you know what I mean?
Sasha Issenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They’re just running some algorithm that like maps different people onto it.
Sasha Issenberg: And so part of what she’s trying to do for the sake of a campaign is figure out is this anomalous, is this a spike in activity around a given topic or is this just sort of, you know, the way things always are? Because what I think we start to see, especially when we think about this in the partisan political context, is that, you know, I think particularly, you know, one of the reasons that MAGA is such a, I think, durable community and so rich for its members, frankly, is that it has turned certain types of posting into this kind of, you know, expressive acts that build community.
And a lot of the crazy stuff that’s being posted on the internet about Joe Biden today, let’s say, is being made by Trump supporters for other Trump supporters. That’s probably not good for society. It’s probably bad for democracy. But if you’re Joe Biden’s campaign, it might not be a strategic problem for you because it might not be getting in front of anybody whose opinions are in play or whom you care about.
And so the most important thing, you know, as people try to take this kind of patchwork data that is available is having that sense of context to understand, yeah, are these the same people who are going to be going on about the JFK assassination every day of the year because that’s what they go on about?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: Or is something new moving on the Internet now that we need to be prepared for?
Chris Hayes: So then how do you find in this era? You know, one of the big innovations that you track in “Victory Lab” is just how much more refined the ability to find voters became, right? Like this was a huge innovation, 16, 15, 20 years ago was, oh, there are voter files. They’ve always had voter files, but now we’ve got voter files. We can cross match it with other data and we can know that like these people in this part of Kenosha, Wisconsin, you know, that have these sorts of profiles or these associations, there are targeted list and we think they’re the people that we need to reach. Is that still the case?
And is there any way to get a message in front of them, right? Because that becomes a sort of key thing, which is where are people getting their information? How ambient is it and how much can you correct that? The Biden campaign spent $65 million dollars and I think it’s mostly been on TV ads. Is that an efficacious use? I don’t know. Like is that still the best way to get messages in front of people?
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah, I mean, so I think there’s, you know, a lot of sophisticated targeting that can be done with television buying, certainly with, you know, the reason they’re still the same investment in mail and phones and door knocks is you really have this full confidence that the person there is the person who’s registered to vote at that address, which once you start getting into anything more technologically advanced, your ability to have that confidence diminishes.
And there was a period where it seemed like the Internet was moving in a direction where there were a lot of abilities to match people’s real-world identities, the identity that’s in the voter file, that all of this political and consumer data is attached to with their presence online. And generally it has gotten harder to do that. Some of that’s the platforms like Facebook have made it harder to target in that way. Some of that is Apple basically killing the cookie business by allowing you on your iPhone, basically inviting you on your iPhone to —
Chris Hayes: Ask app not to track.
Sasha Issenberg: Not, you know, mobile device. You know, you go back eight years. People thought targeting by mobile device IDs, which would allow you to target individual people or people in a physical location, like Apple’s basically destroyed that.
Chris Hayes: Which is good, I think on policy —
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: So like, you know, traditional campaign targeting is really not getting any better. And I think there are a lot of people, though, who were sort of feel as though the obsession with that voter file targeting, right, which is really about leveraging what we know about people’s offline identities has been, if anything, a trap or dealing with the digital age. And that’s because if you only make decisions about campaign tactics because you can judge their efficacy and identify exactly who the real human being is, who is seeing something and determine whether, you know, your micro targeting models think they’re persuadable. Most of what happens online is going to be useless to you because you can’t actually track it that way.
And, you know, I talked about these experiments people are done, like the nature of virality online is actually totally at odds. I mean, these are two medical metaphors that are very different. You know, the nature of virality is it odds with the sort of randomized experiments. And so I think that there’s a generation of campaign professionals who were shaped by obsessing over the voter file and these experiments who probably are totally ill-suited for thinking about —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: — the viral internet because they’re saying we can’t make a decision unless we know. Is this the crusades who’s registered in Brooklyn or the one who’s registered in Nashua, New Hampshire? And —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: — we can’t confidently do anything. And, you know, dealing with this stuff online is about often making, you know, decisions that are slightly better than others, but not that can’t be made with great confidence.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, this gets to a really important point, which is about what I keep calling the information atmosphere, which is like the metaphor invokes something ambient. And that ambience is the key to it all, right? It’s not targeted. Like so this idea that, you know, there’s messages where you say, I’m going to buy this ad for this consumer. And, you know, and obviously Instagram does that, and they say, well, you bought this t-shirt, Chris Hayes, and maybe you like this t-shirt and that is whatever it is.
But it seems to me that political beliefs, ideological formation, partisan affiliations are being shaped by a kind of ambient information atmosphere where there is he sort of weather systems that come through that are viral moments, sort of attentional clusters. And that is doing a lot of the work that it feels to me like a little bit like that’s the most important part is what role you play in shaping that. And you could then say, well, Joe Biden built a factory in your district. It’s like, well, I heard from someone that, you know, Joe Biden didn’t actually build it. Donald Trump built it, right?
You know, whatever you had been told by someone at the barbershop. Like, I just feel like there’s a weird asymmetry between trying the sort of specific traditional political messaging, which is still being run at the Biden campaign and trying to shape the information atmosphere.
Sasha Issenberg: Yes. And, you know, and it’s worth saying, like, all of this is about obviously a relatively tiny share of the American public, right. It’s still 10%, 12% of the electorate that’s persuadable and in seven states. And so even the atmosphere is pretty narrow. And, you know, just so we’re not too a historical, you go back to the early political science election studies from the 1940s and they’re asking people, what have you heard by word of mouth? And, you know, there’s reason to believe that people’s political identities are shaped by what they hear at the Elks Club or something.
But I think that there’s more ability to coordinate that ambient messaging now than there was certainly in the pre-digital era. And I think, you know, I write about the what the Biden campaign did in 2020 to deal with this stuff. And their feeling was that too many people were thinking about this as they described as a supply side problem, that people were trying to track disinformation, thinking about disinformation, which really in their case meant just like negative viral narratives about Biden and Harris.
But as a supply side problem, that looking at individual pieces of content or storylines, this deep fake, that claim and trying to track them and decide on a sort of piecemeal basis to respond to them, something compared to playing whack-a-mole when something new pops up. And they said, we need to think of this as a demand side problem —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: — that the disinformation narratives that are going to be a problem for us electorally with a small share of persuadable voters are the ones that respond to some existing concerns or anxieties that voters have about a particular issue or about Biden. And we need to not chase the particular story or deep fake that’s moving today. We need to have a messaging attempt that is addresses the underlying anxieties that that voter has.
And so, you know, they did this big research project that basically asked persuadable voters, are you familiar with a given storyline and would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden and they mapped it on an axis. Well one axis was the reach. How many people in this audience were familiar with the claim? And then the other axis was the impact, what share changed their vote choice.
And the basic decision was they only had to worry about stuff in the upper right-hand corner and can forget about everything in the in the bottom left corner.
Chris Hayes: Wait, what’s the upper right-hand corner?
Sasha Issenberg: Upper right-hand corner is big reach and big impact.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: You know, so there’s, for example, you know, they —
Chris Hayes: What’s an example? Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: So the Hunter Biden story, big reach. You know, obviously Trump had already been impeached over his role in this by the summer of 2020. A lot of people knew about it. Not many people said it was going to affect their vote choice.
Chris Hayes: That seems right. That would scam with my intuitions. I love when that happens.
Sasha Issenberg: And their focus groups reveal that it was because these persuadable voters didn’t think that Biden was fundamentally motivated by personal gain. So even if some of the facts were familiar to them about the Hunter Biden thing, it just didn’t register with like a real political or something that would make them ambivalent about voting for Biden. But you know, what they called the Sleepy Joe storyline using Trump’s phrase about Biden’s age and, you know, acute mental fitness. That was a problem. It had reach and it had potential impact.
The persuadable voters said it would affect their vote choice. And the focus groups revealed it wasn’t because they were worried actually about Biden’s physical health. They saw him as this fundamentally weak political figure. I think this probably has to do with being defined by big vice president, which is the quintessentially weak office in our Constitution.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And sort of winning that, you know, winning the nomination, never being the main character of that primary campaign in 2020. And these voters, they didn’t really know what Biden believed. They didn’t really know what he wanted to do in office. They were worried that somebody else might sort of be calling the shots in his administration.
Chris Hayes: This is back in 2020.
Sasha Issenberg: This is summer of 2020.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: And so this manifest itself in a receptivity to storylines that suggested that he was old and physically weak. But, you know, the real concern is one of his pollsters described to me, you know, was that he wouldn’t be the author of his presidency.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And so the original communications team advice on dealing with the age thing was let’s set up photo ops where he’s going to ride his bicycle. Let’s have him jog up the steps to his plane. And this research project pushed back and said, like, no, they’re not people are not worried that he won’t get his steps in in the White House. They are worried that he —
Chris Hayes: Is not his own man, that he’s not —
Sasha Issenberg: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: And so the response to it, if you were targeted, you know, they started buying search terms like Biden and senile. And so if you went on Google and you search those terms, they would try to drop a cookie on your Web browser so that eventually when you’re somewhere off on the Web, you know, on YouTube, you might get shown a 15 second video of Biden speaking to camera unedited about his economic policies, like the most banal thing that you can imagine, something that has no apparent connection to his age.
But the testing revealed that that was the thing that assuaged that these concerns was like, no, he knows what he believes and he can say it clearly. And so, you know, I think that the most effective tactics to dealing with this disinformation things are the ones that really step back and sort of think about this as a kind of traditional political communications problem, even if it’s triggered by this sort of peculiar digital dynamics that are set in motion.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s a fascinating story because it is amazing how much in some ways one of the takeaways of your book and one of the things that Craig keeps advising is this sort of meat and potato stuff, like you sort of come back around to just saying, like, you know, speak clearly about issues that matter to people in a way that’s accessible, like which is just kind of public communication 101.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. And I think the big issue is that we’re still sort of in the novelty phase of the digital disinformation era or whatever. And people are too taken by the internet part of it and not enough by the basic communications part of it that, you know, I quote Jiore Craig at one point. She’s trying to give advice to a campaign in 2018. Their candidate has been mentioned on a QAnon board with one post on like 4chan or 8chan that nobody has seen. And there are people in the campaign who say we need to respond. You know, we can’t let this go unanswered.
And I quote her saying, like, because it came from the internet, people’s brains were broken, she says. And it was like, you know, there was such this idea that the normal rules of political communication didn’t apply because maybe the Russians were behind it and they use the internet. And it’s like, no, you just need to bring like a sense of proportion. And the difficulty is that often the internet is not, as you suggest, Chris, structured to give us the type of information that we would need to be proportionate and that we do not instinctively have access to.
We don’t have the kind of metaphor for the internet that works, I think. And so, you know, I think everybody, not just political competitors, we sort of instinctively know, like if a crazy person at the end of the bar is going on and on about something nuts, you’re not going to like run around and tell everybody, you know, you’ve got to hear what this guy said. You definitely wouldn’t say, like, we need to put this on the front page of the newspaper or put it on TV that, oh, my God, there’s this disinformation at the end of the bar. Now, maybe if a guy shows up in every bar, every night in America saying the same thing.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s a little what’s happening.
Sasha Issenberg: I know and I think distinguishing between which one is the issue, right?
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s what it is. I mean, look, right. Any journalist, I say this all the time, like every journalist, and I imagine you’ll nod your head or agree with this. From the first moments you become a journalist, you are introduced to the letter over the transom from the crank. It used to be a letter, might be a phone call or voicemail. Then it turned into e-mail, and the crank is obsessive and they have a very specific, weirdly consistent kind of syntactic cadence across different people, which is weird because you’re like, well, none of you people are in touch with each other, but you all sound the same.
I’ve gotten hundreds of exactly similar structured. And the thing I would say about that is like, yes, you just ignore them, right? But the other thing I would say is that the former President of the United States is exactly that figure. Like it is unbelievable the degree to which his syntax cadence of his posts is precisely, crank speak. I mean —
Sasha Issenberg: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s a randomized all caps, I mean, it is so familiar to me, but in that case, that’s a crank with a really big megaphone, like that’s a crank talking about the election being stolen, who got tens of thousands of people to show up at the Capitol and start the only violent coup attempt in the nation’s history.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. But the thing is, on any given day and, you know, there are 100,000 cranks who are not building a mass movement or taking over a political party. And if you —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: — try to respond to all of them concurrently, you’re going to —
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Sasha Issenberg: — probably, you know, miss the plot.
Chris Hayes: Right. But my point is that there’s something. What I thought was interesting about your book is that Craig’s basic thesis is that, like in some ways, the medium is not the message. That, like in some ways, the kind of meat and potatoes of political communication, her advice is don’t get pulled away and distracted away from them, that things are changing in some ways, but you control what you control and the way that you could control them are basically to do the kinds of like straight to camera. Here’s how I’m going to lower your taxes, right.
And I think that’s true as a prescriptive matter of how to win campaigns. But as a descriptive matter of the nature of the American information environment at this time, I simply don’t think it’s the case that it’s sort of the same as it’s always been. We’re just being exposed to the crank more often. Like, I think the cranks have more power now.
Sasha Issenberg: Oh, I think yes, I think that’s absolutely right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s my only point.
Sasha Issenberg: And none of the countervailing anti-crank institutions that kept cranks from developing large constituencies are as strong as they were and so that’s —
Chris Hayes: I mean, you agree with me, right? Like you’ve had this experience like ‘22 or ‘23.
Sasha Issenberg: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. Like, yeah, no.
Chris Hayes: It’s a universal experience of being a young reporter.
Sasha Issenberg: I’ve seen postmarks from some of the finest correctional institutions in America coming into my newsrooms.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: No, I think this is absolutely the challenge now is that the paths to participating in the political process are much more open to cranks —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: — but also to, you know, extreme groups that can reach people and foreign intelligence services and a whole bunch of people that were basically limited in their ability to communicate in the electoral context.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: And what is your feeling about, I mean, one of Craig’s points, you know, we’re talking about Gabon and sort of, you know, there was a real panic among Democratic operatives about Russian and Russian bots. And I think it was quite overstated. I think the empirical research, it doesn’t reduce in some ways the seriousness of what the Russian state did. And I think the hack and leak operation is in a completely different category than the bots. Like, those are just, to me, totally different things. Like, what do you think about the sort of size? How to think about the proportion and threat of foreign manipulation?
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. So I think this is where one of the difficulties that people like Jiore Craig have advising members of Congress because they’re sort of wearing multiple hats. They’re wearing their geopolitical concern hat. They’re wearing their I’m a candidate running for office hat. And they’re often wearing their I’m a civilian with a family who is getting death threats or, you know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: — whatever is a result of this. And often a couple of those things are leading them to want to take action and do something to, you know, on the national security and personal security front that is not the most tactically sound thing electorally. You know, what really became evident after 2016 and I think still persists to this day is that, you know, otherwise sort of knowledgeable people, I think, fall victim to what I might think of as the kind of magical disinformation fallacy, which is people who are rightfully skeptical of the ability of traditional communication to shift opinions in large numbers.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Sasha Issenberg: They laugh at all these TV ads, how they’re spending tens of millions of dollars on these stupid TV ads. And like, oh, my God, I got all this direct mail. It’s useless. I’m going to throw it out. Who falls for this stuff?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And then it’s like, oh, my God, there was this disinformation thing online. It’s going to throw the election.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Sasha Issenberg: And like we have to recognize that the same political psychology of voters of that, you know, is going to make them as difficult to persuade with TV ads and direct mail as it will be to persuade them with online stuff from nefarious sources. And so, you know, what Jiore Craig ends up having to tell people is, you know, there’s this fascination with what intelligence people call attribution, who’s behind it. And sometimes that actually matters when you’re trying to get the platforms to take down content. If you could prove that it was, you know, sort of posted under false pretenses or as a bot network behind it, it was inauthentic. It was coordinated. That can be helpful.
But from a political communications perspective, what Jiore Craig tells people is it doesn’t matter whether this is Russian or it’s from Utah or it’s from one of your own constituents. Is this getting in front of the voters you care about in a way that could change their opinions?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: And, you know, these conversations get way too muddled, I think, between the sort of national security question and the like electoral efficiency question.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I’ll conclude by saying that the most shocking and horrifying disinformation campaign of my life, which resulted in, I think, hundreds of thousands of dead, was the vaccine disinformation campaign. I mean, maybe there are foreign actors involved, but it did serve as a perfectly fine being driven by domestic actors and people on TV, not even just randoms online. And it was by far the most, in death toll terms, the most catastrophic disinformation campaign I’ve ever witnessed.
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. And I would add one thing to that, which is there’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and how it’s going to, you know, totally transform the nature of this information.
Chris Hayes: Deepfake —
Sasha Issenberg: Yeah. Nobody faked. Nobody used a deep fake simulation of like an Eli Lilly —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. No.
Sasha Issenberg: — randomized control trial to fake people. It was public figures largely telling stories that people wanted to hear. They preyed on some existing doubts that they had about the medical establishment, about pharmaceutical companies.
And I would say QAnon and the post 2020 election denial, similarly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Sasha Issenberg: — low-tech frauds that started with discrete lies that sort of grew into these totalizing conspiracy theories. But they all had these low-tech origins and what they preyed on some like really deep anxieties that certain corners of the American public had. And I think the important lesson to take away from this is to think less about the content and the tools and the source of any individual piece of disinformation on a given day and think more about the audience that will be receptive to it and why they might be.
Chris Hayes: I’m reminded of the Shakespeare quote, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” which we keep coming back to over and over again in these discussions. Sasha, that was great. Thanks so much.
Sasha Issenberg: Really enjoyed it, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Sasha Issenberg. The book is called “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age.” We’d love to hear your feedback on this episode. You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #WITHpod. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on X, Threads, and Bluesky @chrislhayes.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?