As the global coronavirus pandemic moved our already digital world towards a greater dependence on online information sharing and community building, it also exacerbated one of the problems we knew would plague the 2020 Election from Day 1: disinformation. The right wing propaganda machine that fueled Donald Trump’s candidacy also empowered his administration to sow doubt in and flat-out reject truth and norms around the presidency. In 2020, SVF knew we would not win the most votes without winning the [dis]information war.
Disinformation
Defense
SVF donors were part of a major initiative to help build a highly functioning and integrated system to track, investigate, and respond to disinformation. The overall aim was to improve monitoring, intelligence gathering and rapid response from 2016 to 2020 in order to thwart malign disinformation operations seeking to disrupt progressive coalitions and suppress voter participation.
The approach strategically knit together a series of coordinated collaborations between existing advocacy, policy, communications, tech, digital and investigative and research organizations with demonstrated expertise in this arena to diminish the presence and effect of destructive online actors and content. The “core team,” which included SVF, was drawn from across organizations that had extensive technical expertise and experience in disinformation and organizing against malign actors working to disrupt elections.
SVF played a critical coordinating role in this effort, ensuring that intelligence was shared, training was provided and rapid response advice given through an integrated system feeding over 300 progressive organizations, with a special emphasis on state communications hubs as well as election protection and legal entities working to prevent voter suppression. Advocacy sub-lanes were formed to provide culturally relevant tailored support to Black, Jewish, Muslim/Arab-American and Latinx communities. Additionally, SVF formed and provided the bulk of resources to a Women’s Disinformation Defense Project (WDDP) with UltraViolet when monitoring showed a massive disinformation campaign underway meant to undermine a woman vice presidential candidate. The WDDP leveraged the project’s intelligence gathering and technical advice to help over 15 gender and racial justice organizations defuse the impact of attacks on women leaders and pushback on Facebook for their role in allowing gendered disinformation to grow largely uninterrupted.
The monitoring system established early in 2020 showed an increased threat of election violence and extremist mobilization – wrapped tightly around disinformation. In order to respond to these threats, an additional lane of the project was formed to provide intelligence to law enforcement and work with conflict mitigation specialists to connect them to advocacy organizations and other progressive partners to minimize risks.
One of the major concerns throughout the progressive sphere in the lead up to the 2020 election was the threat of foreign, state-sponsored disinformation efforts. While those efforts were certainly at work this election cycle, it was organic, homegrown disinformation efforts that were much stronger than in 2016, and have no signs of doing anything but accelerating to undermine the legitimacy of a Biden administration and the future integrity of election systems. The business model of disinformation for homegrown, organic players emerged from 2020 largely unscathed. Pushing disinformation has very little downside risk and the reward for organized disinformation remains as strong as ever. The need for developing an “immune system” across the progressive movement to detect and respond to disinformation was proven out. Lessons from this election season should incite a continued focus on the need to keep and strengthen a progressive-movement-wide system for detecting, monitoring, and countering disinformation in creative and highly coordinated ways.
Offense
In addition to identifying and tracking disinformation SVF knew there must also be a substantial, proactive communication effort to counter the chaos and fill the void with messages from the progressive end of the spectrum. The state communications hubs were central to our strategy to lead that effort. Across the eight hubs, more than 23,000 ads were created, generating more than a billion impressions. By working together on a strategy that reached voters based on their values, the hubs were able to identify the factors that made ads perform best, monitor for backlash in their target universes, and nimbly adapt their buys to continue to reach as many people as possible with a message that would move them.
Lifting up heroes and leaders during the COVID Crisis
While the communications and research hubs led the effort to win votes for a progressive vision for the country’s future, they also played a key role in defining the realities of 2020 – holding Trump accountable for his disastrous pandemic response and lifting up the true heroes of this year.
During the late spring and early summer of 2020, SVF and the state communications hubs began driving messages designed to strike a contrast between Trump and the real leaders on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis: state and local elected officials, hospital staff, and other essential workers. We knew that strategically, Donald Trump was strongest when he was defining a contrast between himself and his opponent. Our strategy was to take away Trump’s power to take credit for rising to the moment and give the real credit to the men and women confronting this disease with little help from the White House.
We used stories of real heroes like nurses, doctors, educators, caregivers, foodbanks, and first responders that demonstrated a community response, as well as mayors and other local government leaders who used data, relied on experts, and managed the crisis. We lifted up leaders in governors’ offices in key battleground states like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania who showed real leadership on Covid-19 compared to Donald Trump. Their examples of competence drew a stark contrast with the president’s worst tendencies.
Designing ad Campaigns to Counteract Disinformation
As an antidote to the sustained attacks on the election system first identified by the disinformation project starting in the late spring, SVF advised advocacy groups to dramatically increase their voter education efforts over the summer to bolster trust in the voting process and personnel. In September, with additional support from the Trusted Election Fund, SVF established a rapid response team to counter harmful narratives which threatened the integrity of the election.
Using a range of communication tools and tactics backed by research, a central team of communicators, voter educators and disinformation experts worked around the clock monitoring a complex information and media environment and delivering high quality creative assets to push back on right-wing disinformation, protect the rights of voters and create a culture of participation.
Branded and unbranded digital and social ads were served through a network of partners who amplified the messages widely – adding further credibility to the messenger and the message – and disseminated through their channels from a diverse set of sources, which included Common Cause, NARAL, Public Campaign, Voto Latino, American Bridge, Protect Our Elections, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and Higher Heights, among others.
This rigorous effort played an important part in reframing the public conversation on critical issues of election integrity, voter participation and disinformation and drove sustained communications that upheld the values and conditions necessary for a credible election.