The election strategies of Big Tech Have a Blind Spot: Influencers

Samuel Woolley worried a great deal in the months before the 2016 election about bots being used to hijack online political discourse. Woolley, the director of propaganda analysis at the Austin Center for Media Interaction at the University of Texas, found it frighteningly easy for someone to swarm the web with false comments and automatic bot network messages. What will stop a candidate or outside party from artificially celebrating or slandering their rival by bombarding social media? Fortunately, websites such as Facebook and Twitter have built techniques to target that kind of activity. So now Woolley says, instead of bots to improve political messaging, "What we've seen is more use of r"

Woololley means influencers by "real users." His research group has been monitoring the ways in which political parties gradually turn to digital developers as part of their campaigns, from candidates to PACs to outside organizations. It's also not about influencers with huge follow-ups. Sure, Brad Pitt did a Joe Biden campaign ad, but Woolley says highly visible endorsements of celebrities outweigh the use of nano-influencers, who have less than 10,000 followers, in promotions. According to a new industry survey, these more modest influencers appear to have stronger ties to their audience and higher interaction, twice as high as larger influencers. And that kind of genuine relation is

According to Ana Goodwin, who recently cowrote a white paper with Woolley, "The campaigning world is years behind the brand world, and influencer marketing is already huge in the brand world, so I would be very surprised if that doesn't pick up in the next few years." (The group also wrote an op-ed for Quiziosity this summer on the subject.)

After the 2016 election, social media firms have changed their political ad policies, after it was found that Russian actors manipulated US voters using paid ads on platforms such as Facebook. Now, some sites such as Twitter and TikTok have absolutely washed their hands clean of paid political content. Earlier this month, Facebook agreed to suspend election-related advertising after polls close on November 3; Google confirmed it would do the same on Tuesday. In the week prior to the election, Facebook also placed a ban on running new political advertising. But the power of the market, a grey zone between ads and organic content, does nothing to remedy those decisions. If we think about it abo abo

In the US, the laws regulating online campaign campaigns are more than a decade old and have plenty of blind spots. Although influencers are now mandated by the Federal Trade Commission to report paid relationships with brands, for instance, the Federal Election Commission has remained largely silent. (The Honest Advertising Act, an effort to reform the legislation for the internet era, has failed in Congress.) As a result, the networks have largely fallen to regulating the crossover between political campaigns and influencer campaigns.

Facebook and Instagram, where much of this action takes place, are asking influencers to use their branded marketing platforms, including those working on political campaigns. Candidates, PACs, and political parties can all be labelled in advertised content; influencers can also suggest that by using the "paid for by" disclosure, a post is an ad, but such advertisements will not appear alongside other political advertisements in Facebook's Ad Library. Even so, the strategy is difficult to follow. When it comes to influencer marketing, because money changes hands off-platform, Facebook can't track who is being paid, how much, and by whom. There is often no way, in other words, to say the difference between a paid post and a p

It can also be difficult to describe a' compensated' relationship. "Brands also do a lot of gifting, mind you, so it can be very broadly defined to be paid," says Elma Beganovich, co-founder of Amra & Elma digital marketing agency. If something is gifted with Dior, some consumers would say 'supplied by Dior.' If a political party compensates influencers not with cash, but with access or campaign swag, Beganovich says that there is no common word to denote a partnership yet. So how do you reveal it, then? What is the proper hashtag to use? That is a really new room.

In view of the lack of transparency, Goodwin at UT Austin says the size of influencer lobbying is difficult to estimate. "If they do not disclose correctly, then tracking them down is almost impossible," she says, "which is what makes it a scary and potentially very powerful tool."

TikTok does not allow political ads, but influencers sharing videos about registering to vote without acknowledging that they were paying were found in a BBC investigation; some influencers have urged viewers to vote out Trump. Last month, The Washington Post announced on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that the pro-Trump organization Turning Point Action had paid teenagers to produce thousands of posts criticizing Democratic politicians and news outlets. Misinformation about subjects such as the coronavirus and vote-by-mail was found in some of the posts.

The difference between an organic political post and one created in collaboration with a campaign can also be difficult to say, particularly in a year where more influencers speak up about politics. Yet some of them are probably associated with political campaigns. When he funded meme pages, Michael Bloomberg grabbed headlines and recruited hundreds of individuals during the presidential primaries to write about his campaign on social media. Joe Biden has taken an arguably more cautious approach since securing the Democratic nomination.

"Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency, was hired by the Biden campaign over the summer to set up livestreamed conversations between Biden and multiple influencers, including Elle Walker (creator of What's Up Moms, "the #1 YouTube parenting network") and Bethany Mota ("style, travel, comedy, fashion, food, positivity, and more"). Company Insider was told by the founder of the agency that none of the influencers were charged to upload the videos. "That's what I think is so authentic and awesome about this campaign and this approach," she said. "We picked people to have a topical conversation who have the right voice or the right audience."

The marketing of influencers is not the most pressing problem in this election cycle, as problems such as the pandemic and disinformation have all made voting itself a challenge. But this use of influencers won't soon go anywhere. If anything, the UT researchers claim, as platforms improve their oversight elsewhere, the format could become even more appealing. One person we interviewed told us about the problems they had with the political advertisement system on Facebook," says Katie Joseff, who works at UT Austin alongside Woolley." "They said they wanted to start using influencers so that the hassle would not have to be dealt with."

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