The online Afghanistan frenzy
The humanitarian crisis has drowned out all other topics - but online, political groups have been slow to take advantage
This week’s issue is sponsored by our friends at Authentic.
The crisis unfolding in Afghanistan, for good reason, has completely dominated cable TV, online news, and Twitter over the past week. The scenes coming out of the country last weekend were as heart-wrenching as they were unexpected, and deserved much of the round-the-clock media attention that they received. That said, is this national security and humanitarian crisis a political one? How are political actors capitalizing on the news cycle online? We’ll break it down in this week’s FWIW, but first…
By the numbers
Here are the top political ad spenders on Facebook and Instagram last week:
Last week, a liberal Facebook page called “Story of Us” spent over $100,000 last week boosting some 🔥 memes and news stories favorable to the Biden administration and attacking Republicans. As far as we can tell, the majority of the ads target voters in Florida and North Carolina and focus on immigration reform, child tax credits, and Republican partisanship. The group also spent heavily on similar ads via a Pennsylvania-branded page too.
...and we saw that Donald Trump’s campaign-turned-PAC, Save America, spent over $10,000 on Facebook ads last week to promote his upcoming rally in Cullman, Alabama. The former President is able to collect email addresses and cell phone numbers from the recipients of these ads and continue to build his list to his benefit if he chooses to run again in 2024.
That’s despite Facebook’s PR team continuing to assert that he’s banned from their platform. In fact, the former President has created *even more Facebook pages* since his ban from the platform - Trump Alerts was created on June 15th and has spent $3,301 on ads. In total, Donald Trump has spent around $65,000 on Facebook ads in the past 90 days.
… and here’s political ad spending on Google + YouTube last week:
The California recall continues to heat up online, with both Gavin Newsom’s anti-recall campaign and Larry Elder breaking into the top Google political advertisers nationwide last week. Ballots are already in the hands of voters, and if the polls are to be trusted, it’s actually a tight race.
Inside the online Afghanistan frenzy
Afghanistan, for good reason, has completely dominated cable TV, online news, and Twitter over the past week. The scenes coming out of the country last weekend were as heart-wrenching as they were unexpected, and deserved much of the round-the-clock media attention that they received. That said, this week’s events have stirred up a frenzy of political hot takes, memes, and coverage online that’s worth noting.
Republican politicians and right-wing media have used the opportunity to question President Biden’s mental faculties and actually called for his removal from office. Meanwhile, progressive organizations and refugee groups are fundraising and circulating petitions to protect our Afghan Allies. Mainstream media types have questioned whether this will be the Biden administration’s political downfall, repeating the same trite comparisons to the fall of Saigon. In fact, Google Search interest for “Saigon” is through the roof.
Even though this is very clearly a national security and humanitarian crisis, is it a political one? Conventional wisdom dictates that foreign policy is not high up on voters’ list of priorities, but with an issue as long and complicated as Afghanistan, no one really knows. Several polls have been released this week, with varying results. Data for Progress shows that voters still favor Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, while YouGov polling was kind of a wash...and some outlets noted that Biden’s approval ratings have slumped.
Surprisingly, Republicans have *not* been quick to seize the moment and run large-scale advertising taking advantage of the crisis. Of course, opportunists have tweeted out criticisms of Biden or fired off a press release, but there are no five or six-figure ad campaigns calling Biden a weak leader, and few online ads mention Afghanistan at all. This is either (A.) political malpractice on the part of the GOP, (B.) a recognition that their own voters don’t care about what’s happening in Kabul.
The digital ads that are running are limited in scope, and are mostly small message tests for fundraising ads. We’ve seen a few from the NRSC, Kevin McCarthy, and Elise Stefanik, and that’s about it.
The RNC and Trump-affiliated groups like America First Policy Institute did cut some videos attacking Biden, but have yet to put any real money behind distributing them.
Not being able to help himself, former President Tr*mp shot out an email yesterday morning featuring a video of his own that “the Liberal media doesn’t want you to see.” The video is an amateur iMovie highlight reel of last weekend’s events, accompanied by the message: “Joe Biden wants us to pretend this isn’t Saigon. He’s right. It’s worse.”
One reason why Republicans may be reluctant to launch full-scale attacks on Biden on the issue is that the right-wing (and even mainstream!) media is doing it for them. The likes of Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson are having a complete field day, and right-wing media posts have unsurprisingly driven much of the Facebook engagement this week. That said, the top-performing Facebook post mentioning ‘Afghanistan’ over the past week was actually this one from President Biden defending the withdrawal - getting over 300,000 interactions.
At the end of the day, no one knows with certainty how the politics of our Afghanistan pull-out will play. The Biden administration is rightly focused on the job at hand, and Republicans don’t really want to be seen as gleefully cheering against America. After a week of media frenzy, things seem to be slowly coming back under control, and we now have time to reflect on who’s truly responsible for this week’s events:
That’s it for FWIW this week! Thanks for reading, and we hope you’ll share this email on the socials or forward it to a few of your colleagues!
