Dem
51
GOP
49
Back in the old days, a political campaign would raise money, hire a team of ad makers to make ads, buy television and radio time, and then run the ads on television and radio. The candidate pretty much had control over the whole operation. Later, super PACs would do the same thing. The candidate was limited by slander and defamation laws and what the television and radio stations would accept. Most of them would not accept ads that were chock full of out-and-out lies.
The television and radio ads are gradually being replaced by social media postings, and many of those are not even controlled by the candidate. In the case of Donald Trump, an informal army of Internet trolls are making videos that lionize Trump and viciously denigrate his opponents. The group refer to themselves as Trump's Online War Machine. They largely operate anonymously and flood social media with their product. The videos are full of misinformation, digital forgeries, racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about women and LGBTQ+ people, AI-generated content, and deepfakes. No television station would ever accept the spots, but on social media, they flourish.
One video shows Nikki Haley's face pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman kicking Ron DeSantis in the groin. Another shows DeSantis' wife, Casey, as a porn star. Other ones show women associated with DeSantis with red knees, as though they had recently performed a sex act on their knees. There are many more, and many are quite sophisticated and well produced. None of these could have made it past the networks' censors.
War Machine accounts have 30 million followers. Trump is aware of them and has occasionally requested specific content, which the meme team quickly produced. He has also thanked them for their work and publicized their videos. He sometimes plays them at his rallies. It is a way for anonymous people to create and disseminate disgusting and defamatory content that could never be done by a candidate. Best of all, it doesn't cost the candidate a penny.
The group operates in such a way that it appears to be a super PAC, but because it operates in the dark, not a lot is known about its members or financiers. One person who is known is Brenden Dilley, a podcaster who seems to play a central role in the group. He says: "It doesn't have to be true. It just has to go viral." In other words, vicious lies are fine as long as they get spread around widely. He also said: "If you go super PAC or official campaign, you can get paid, but the problem is a lawyer has to watch every single thing you put out, and we don't want that. What we need is people that were going to give huge dollar amounts to the super PACs and the campaigns to just give directly to us." If it looks like a super PAC and walks like a super PAC and quacks like a super PAC, it probably is a super PAC, but enforcement is so meager Dilley thinks he can easily get away with it.
Attacking the videos just makes them more popular. In July, a video full of conspiracy theories about election fraud went viral after Frank Luntz called it "the most alarming political ad I've seen this year." Luntz expects similar ads to become commonplace and said that the creators don't care a whit about the consequences. (V)