June 20 Reuters – The main SuperPAC for U.S. President Joe Biden’s re-election is raising millions of dollars to try to solve a problem vexing Democrats: how to compete with Republican Donald Trump’s social media machine that spews out a wall of viral videos .
This previously unreported initiative, led by the very discreet Future Forward USA Action, highlights the concerns of Democrats and Joe Biden’s donors, who fear that he and his campaign are losing control. war of viral videos against the Republican Party, which relentlessly portrays it as too old and out of touch with reality.
Democrats say they must play catch-up in a battleground where there are few rules or ways to police manipulated or misleading content before it reaches tens of millions of Americans on their smartphones.
The Palo-Alto-based SuperPAC, backed by tech giants such as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman, is raising at least $10 million to better understand the algorithms that help Mr. Trump and its allies to dominate vertical video platforms.
It also plans to collaborate with left-wing influencers to help generate and distribute new content, according to two sources familiar with those plans.
Many popular social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, have adopted short, vertical videos as their primary format. They have given rise to a network of “influencers” who use the platforms to reach millions of Americans with content about what they eat, wear and think.
Future Forward partnered with Democratic groups Way to Win and Hub Project last month at an upscale Washington, D.C. hotel to host 140 influencers during a three-day event called “Trending Up,” according to organizers.
Future Forward’s current efforts focus on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok, according to sources. “Future Forward is here to help solve problems, and TikTok is a problem the group is reasonably trying to solve,” one of the Democratic sources said.
The social media battle could have a huge impact in a race between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump that polls show is extremely close and features two unpopular candidates.
Since February, when Joe Biden’s campaign officially joined the TikTok platform, it has published more than 200 messages and garnered just over 380,000 followers. Trump joined TikTok about two weeks ago, but has already amassed 6.4 million followers.
Social media plays a crucial role in Americans’ news consumption, especially younger ones. According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, half of American adults get their news at least sometimes through social media.
Chauncey McLean, director of Future Forward, did not respond to requests for comment. The group, which plans to spend $250 million on television and digital ads during this campaign, rarely speaks publicly about its activities.
The Republican National Committee, mainstream conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers released videos, some of which were deceptively edited, to address voters’ concerns about Mr. Bidens age.
These videos often isolate a few seconds of Mr. Biden’s public movements to suggest that he is disoriented or lost, while a longer or wider montage shows him engaging with passersby or not doing anything extraordinary. The White House and Democrats call these videos, produced quickly using basic editing tools, cheap fakes.
The RNC believes that the White House’s criticism is “pure panic of deranged Democrats.”
Fake accounts posting information about the US presidential election are proliferating on social media platform X, Reuters reported earlier this year.
Analysts at Israeli tech company Cyabra, which uses a subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning to identify fake accounts, found that 15% of X accounts praising Trump and criticizing Biden are fake. The report also found that 7% of accounts praising Biden and criticizing Trump are fake. (Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw; Writing by Heather Timmons and Michael Perry)
