Digital deception on the rise
Last-minute anonymous groups have come out of the woodwork to persuade voters online
FWIW, this week’s newsletter is sponsored by Civic Shout
We’re only ~5 days out from one of the most important elections of our lives. Have you voted or made a plan to vote yet? Anyway, here’s a roundup of what we’re seeing in the political digital space as the campaign comes to a close:
Last-minute digital deception on the rise
Campaigns and outside groups typically spend more money on digital advertising during the campaign’s final week than any other point in the election cycle. Last week alone, U.S. political advertisers spent over $150 million just on Google and Meta’s platforms.
Every election cycle, among those final ad efforts, we typically find a few deceptive advertising campaigns aiming to confuse or deceive voters – or, at least, conceal their true intentions. This year is no different: in the past week, we’ve identified a handful of shady advertisers - mostly on the Right - trying to influence voters while hiding their real partisan motives.
Earlier this week, we wrote about the Progressive Century Project, a fake anti-Israel group with conservative ties. The last-minute, anonymous Super PAC is telling young liberal voters in Arizona to support the Green Party candidate for US Senate over the Democrat, and in Wisconsin, is running attack ads against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
There’s also been tons of reporting on the Future Coalition PAC, a conservative group with ties to Elon Musk that is playing both sides of the Israel-Gaza issue, telling Jewish voters Harris is pro-Palestine while also telling Arab voters she is pro-Israel. We first noted that group’s ads on October 11th.
Then there’s the case of Progress 2028, another conservative-backed pop-up advertiser that is made to look like a progressive answer to Project 2025. The PAC’s ads falsely claim that Harris supports “mandatory” gun buybacks and banning fracking. Despite those claims being provably false, Meta has allowed them to run in violation of its fact-checking policies.
These types of last-ditch efforts to persuade voters with anonymous PACs are also happening on the Left. This week, the New York Times wrote about Civic Truth Action, a pop-up PAC that has begun running ads telling conservatives in swing states to vote for third-party presidential candidates. The group is obviously run by Democrats – And we saw Democrats run a similar, albeit more sophisticated and controversial version of this play in the final week of the 2022 midterms.
Setting up a steal?
Meanwhile, regardless of how things shake out next Tuesday, some figures on the Right are already laying the groundwork to dispute the results and spread lies about the integrity of the election. We’ve already seen fake, misleading, or digitally altered videos move across the internet, from ballots being destroyed in PA (they weren't) to voting machines changing Trump ballots to Harris ballots (which there is no real evidence for).
CNN’s Donie Sullivan has a really important look at how MAGA media is spreading this type of content and reinforcing the narrative that there is no possible way Trump can lose:
Especially with a very real possibility that Harris could win by the slimmest of electoral vote margins, these types of efforts to pre-emptively cry foul and create fake controversies are frightening. With platforms like Elon Musk’s X/Twitter now pushing murky and misleading content, we’re worried that next week could be a total disaster for information integrity.
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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $66.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
We are now officially in Meta’s advertising “blackout” period: no new political ads can run through Election Day, but any ads running before last Monday at midnight can continue to reach voters.
RBG PAC, another anonymous super PAC formed in the campaigns’ final weeks, is spending an enormous amount of money reaching swing state voters with ads softening Trump’s anti-abortion stance. The group is spending over $150,000 per day on these Meta ads, which will put them among the top ten highest-spending advertisers in each swing state this week. Here’s more about the group in the New York Times.
The far-right group America First Works is running somewhat gimmicky ads that claim that records show that the viewer hasn’t voted yet. The ads are mostly being run in Pennsylvania.
And finally, for those keeping track, Vice President Harris’s campaign has been running Facebook + Instagram ads under a few different page names. In addition to their page The Daily Scroll, they also now have ads running under brand partnerships with BET, We are Mitù, and Cocoa Butter.
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $85 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Floridians Protecting Freedoms, Inc., a PAC that is supporting the efforts to protect abortion access in Florida, spent a whopping $1,380,000 on Google and YouTube ads last week. The ads feature people who were endangered by Florida's abortion ban, as well as parents terrified for their daughters.
Similarly, Citizens, Not Politicians is running ads telling Ohioans to vote yes on Issue 1 next week, which would allow new maps to be drawn in the state and allegedly end gerrymandering. The ads (and the effort as a whole) seem to be fairly bipartisan.
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $15.2 million on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made her way onto the top political X/Twitter ad spenders for 2024 this week: her newest ads are videos of Big Gretch supporting VP Harris and Gov. Walz and are slated to run through Election Day.
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $19.2 million on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
After largely not spending much (or at all) on Snapchat political ads, it looks like Republicans are looking to the platform in these final weeks. The Trump campaign launched its first Snapchat ads of the cycle last week, and the pro-Trump PAC Duty to America has now spent $188,848 on Snapchat ads in 2024, which largely attack VP Harris on topics like the economy.
Presidential head-to-head
FWIW, here’s how weekly digital ad spending (Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube) compares between the Trump and Harris (formerly Biden) campaigns year-to-date:
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Getting out the vote on TikTok
We are in the final, frenzied days of GOTV as everything ramps up to next Tuesday… so we decided to take a look at how the Trump and Harris campaigns have been using TikTok to get out the vote in this crucial moment.
We have your full debrief and much more in this week’s FYP newsletter 👇
More from around the internet:
Drew Harwell at the Washington Post has an important piece on how Elon Musk’s X may be favoring conservative voices.
Digiday has a new interview out with Christian Tom, White House Director of the Office of Digital Strategy, on how the Biden-Harris admin changed the game when it comes to digital engagement in the White House.
As part of their big finale and closing arguments, the Harris-Walz campaign bought advertising on the Las Vegas sphere.
Brian Stelter at CNN wrote about the rise of social media video clipping.
WIRED built a tool where you can search your zip code and see if your members of Congress have agreed to accept the results of the 2024 election.
People who signed up to work for Elon Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC said they were tricked and threatened (and some even flown out to Michigan and put in the back of a U-Haul). It’s giving human trafficking.
Despite 2024 being a pivotal election year, Howard Polskin at The Righting found that right-wing news websites generally saw their traffic decline YoY from September 2023.
A new pro-Trump docuseries shows behind the scenes footage of how Donald Trump dictates his tweets and Truth Social posts in real time.
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