Dear Commons Community,
In the first few months of his presidential campaign, Michael R. Bloomberg has been very aggressive on social media. He has spent a good deal of money, more so than any candidate past or present. In doing so, he is proving to be very adept at using the social media in any way he can to get his message across. He is also providing challenges for the major social media outlets as to how he is using them. The New York Times has an article exploring Bloomberg’s use of social media and the challenges he is posing. Here is an excerpt:
“Mr. Bloomberg has hired popular online personalities to create videos and images promoting his candidacy on social media. He is hiring 500 people — at $2,500 a month — to spend 20 to 30 hours a week recruiting their friends and family to write supportive posts. And his campaign has posted on Twitter and Instagram a flattering, digitally altered video of his debate performance last week in Las Vegas.
Through his money and his willingness to experiment, the billionaire former mayor of New York has poked holes in the already slapdash rules for political campaigns on social media. His digitally savvy campaign for the Democratic nomination has shown that if a candidate is willing to push against the boundaries of what social media companies will and won’t allow, the companies won’t be quick to push back.
“The Bloomberg campaign is destroying norms that we will never get back,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies disinformation. The campaign, he said, has “revealed the vulnerabilities that still exist in our social media platforms even after major reforms.”
On Friday, Twitter announced that it was suspending 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts for violating its policies on “platform manipulation and spam.” The accounts were part of a coordinated effort by people paid by the Bloomberg campaign to post tweets in his favor.
Twitter’s rules state, in part, “You can’t artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,” including “coordinating with or compensating others” to tweet a certain message.
In response to Twitter’s move, the Bloomberg campaign issued a statement on Friday evening. “We ask that all of our deputy field organizers identify themselves as working on behalf of the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign on their social media accounts,” it said. The statement added that the tweets shared by its staff and volunteers with their networks went through Outvote, a voter engagement app, and were “not intended to mislead anyone.”
Social media companies have been under pressure since the 2016 presidential election. Over the last year or so, they have publicized a stream of new rules aimed at disinformation and manipulation. Facebook, Google and Twitter have created teams that look for and remove disinformation. They have started working with fact checkers to distinguish and label false content. And they have created policies explaining what they will allow in political advertisements.
Most social media companies have special rules that place elected officials and political candidates in a protected category of speech. Politicians are allowed much more flexibility to say whatever they want online. But the companies have had a hard time defining what is a political statement and what crosses the line into deception.
When Mr. Trump posted an altered video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook and Twitter refused to take the video down. A 30-second video ad on Facebook in October falsely accused former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of blackmailing Ukrainian officials to stop an investigation of his son.
Mr. Bloomberg, a latecomer to the race, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it. As the owner of Bloomberg L.P., he has the money and the resources to vastly outspend his rivals.
Mr. Bloomberg has reassigned his employees and recruited other workers from Silicon Valley with salaries nearly double what other campaigns have offered their staffs. The roughly $400 million he has spent has made him omnipresent in ads across Facebook and Instagram, as well as on more traditional forms of media such as television and radio.
His campaign’s sophisticated understanding of how to generate online buzz has shown how uneven social media’s new political speech rules can be.”
My how campaigning for office has changed in our digital era.
Tony
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