By Amanda Krew
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Journalists from Slate and Politico to the The New York Times gathered at Johns Hopkins University recently to debate the role of digital media in the 2020 election, and most concluded that the current state of media in our elections is not ideal.
Jesse Baldwin-Philippi, associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and Daniel Kreiss, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, led the journalists in the discussions in Mason Hall last Tuesday.
The talk covered “the state of digital campaigning, advertising, and analytics in electoral politics and what role political campaigns, digital consultants, social media platforms, and government regulations should play in safeguarding elections.”
Great concern of both the panelists and audience were efforts by Russia last year to sway election results using social media. The goal, according to experts, was to harm the presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton, boost the candidacy of Republican Donald Trump and increase political dissension in the US. American officials pointed to fabricated articles and the spread of disinformation using fake accounts from people posing as Americans.
“You don’t have to be in an office, you don’t even need to be in the same country to reach these voters,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Science of Winning Campaigns.
Scott Shane of The New York Times said that Russian meddling does not only hurt US elections, but now other countries are following the Russian model.
“I do believe that if [Russian President] Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to be president, she would be today,” Shane said, stressing the disturbing power of foreign entities in US elections.
Unanimously, the journalists agreed that efforts should be made to determine the source of the political posts on social media.
Some social media platforms have started to take responsibility. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced in a television interview recently that he would launch new software to keep Facebook safe during the 2020 election. This software would include protections for elected officials’ accounts, tracks of spending of presidential candidates and labels for state-run pages. Facebook also will update its policy to ward off the spread of disinformation, he said.
Twitter went a step further. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey announced on Oct. 30 that Twitter will prohibit political advertisements.
In the wake of Twitter prohibiting political advertisements, Scola concluded that “we will see more domestic use of these tools.”
The fear that foreign entities are behind political advertising may not be the only fear we should have, the panelists noted. The partisan nature of advertising should raise red flags for media users.
“These content mills aren’t disinformation, but they are partisan,” warned April Glaser, a reporter at Slate, an online magazine of news, politics, technology and culture.
Glaser warned that sites like YouTube that pays content creators should not be sending checks to channels that promote hate speech and disinformation. The responsibility for monitoring and regulating the information posted to sites like YouTube needs to be the responsibility of lawmakers, not the platform itself, she said.
“Do we have Democratic institutions capable of matching these platforms,” Scola asked.
In the discussion, Politico reporter, Nancy Scola asked why Facebook is allowed to use micro targeting to produce specialized advertisements. This use of private information has been a hot topic when it comes to political advertising.
Charlie Vascellaro, a freelance baseball journalist, said the discussion was enlightening, but that the information was jarring.
“I found the entire discussion to be kind of frightening and alarming,” Vascellaro told the Baltimore Watchdog, “with the recognition that both the election process and the way that is covered have run ahead of us.”
While the topic of dishonest advertising does concern many Americans, Glaser said it is important to report what is happening.
“I think it is very important that we decide what we report on and what matters on social media,” she said. “Anybody can be a dog, it’s hard to know who the person is that is reporting. We can’t not cover this. It’s about doing so responsibly and having a broad picture and not treating it like it’s some constant drum beat where it’s not a part of a systemic problem.”
Glaser expressed her and the other panel members’ views on the current state of social media in elections: “I can’t imagine a situation right now where our elections aren’t awful.”