Deceptive Facebook ads purporting to come from Democrat Kamala Harris’ campaign team and promoting divisive measures that are not in the candidate’s platform, displayed to Republican voters to encourage them to go vote against her: The modus operandi is largely reminiscent of that implemented during the 2016 US campaign by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian disinformation group that attempted to disrupt the presidential election.
But this time, these ads aren’t coming from an office in Saint Petersburg paid for by the Russian secret services. They were bought by a Republican Political Action Committee (PAC), Building America’s Future, funded to the tune of several million dollars by Elon Musk. With over $300,000 spent in one week, this campaign has already invested three times more money than all the IRA’s Facebook ads in 2016. And that’s not counting the SMS messages with similar content sent to Republican voters in key states for the election, with unknown number of recipients and cost.
These misleading targeted ads are just the tip of the iceberg. Another Musk-funded PAC, Future Coalition PAC, has also purchased several hundred thousand dollars worth of particularly cynical ads on Snapchat, Google, Instagram and Facebook. In the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, the group showed two different videos to voters: The first, which targeted neighborhoods and towns with large Muslim populations, presented Harris as a staunch supporter of Israel. Elsewhere in these states, ads conversely insisted that the Democrat was “pandering to Palestine.”
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Echoes of Cambridge Analytica
Musk hardly invented deceptive election ads and aggressive campaigning. In fact, they’ve been a classic feature of American politics for decades. Nor is Musk the first or only billionaire to put his fortune at the service of a party. Wealthy individuals, such as the ultraconservative Koch brothers, have been able to take advantage of the PAC system to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks and candidates over the last 20 years, in a highly opaque manner. At the other end of the political spectrum, progressive billionaires such as Reed Hastings (Netflix), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Dustin Moskovitz (formerly of Facebook) have donated millions of dollars to a PAC funding the Harris campaign. Her campaign has also far outstripped Trump’s in terms of advertising spending.
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