Every president has faced a different set of challenges when it comes to transitioning to the next administration. But President Obama faces an altogether unique one: figuring out what happens to all his tweets, Instagram posts, and other social media accounts. After all, once he’s no longer POTUS, he can no longer be @POTUS.
Today the White House presented its plan for turning over the Obama administration’s myriad social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Accounts like @POTUS on Twitter and the White House’s Facebook page will belong to the next president and his or her staff, but they’ll start fresh. That means all those photos of Bo and Sunny chilling on the White House lawn will be scrubbed to make room for the next First Dog. But because these tweets and posts are technically a matter of public record, they’ll be stored within the National Archives and Records Administration alongside, you know, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
That President Obama is the first president to have such a digital legacy to preserve is a reminder of how much technology has changed in the last eight years. The iPhone debuted just a year before President Obama was elected and just two years after Twitter was invented, making him the first and only @POTUS we’ve ever had. Obama’s 2008 campaign was innovative for its use of social media to communicate with voters. Today in the age of all-night Donald Trump tweet storms, such disintermediated niceties seem positively quaint.
The Obama administration’s entire digital footprint will still live online, but it will shift over to new handles like @POTUS44, which the National Archives will maintain on Twitter.
So what can Americans expect from the next @POTUS? If Hillary Clinton wins, you can anticipate more of the same—meticulously designed graphics and new policy rollouts, likely conceived of and designed by a team of digital operatives. If Donald Trump wins? Who knows? With the new Twitter handle, perhaps he’ll finally delete his account after all.
Conventional wisdom holds that whoever wins the presidential debate has a leg up in the race. But in the digital age, winning the online conversation about the debate matters just as much. Why? YouTube has the numbers to prove it.
Sunday night’s debate attracted 63 million TV viewers, a 20 percent decline from the first. But on YouTube, debate content—including all videos related to the debate—garnered 124 million views, a 40 percent spike compared with the first. And that’s just on YouTube. Another 3.2 million tuned into Twitter’s livestream, and Facebook’s Live broadcast partnership with ABC News now has 7.4 million views.1
Blame it on football season, blame it on the cord cutters, blame it on the gutter-level mudslinging driving some traditional viewers away, or blame it on humans’ technologically enabled short attention spans, but it seems Americans are increasingly interested in watching the debate in bite-sized portions, rather than sitting through the long slog. According to YouTube, viewers tuned into its livestream for an average of 25 minutes. Altogether, though, they watched 2.5 million hours of the livestream. That’s still smaller than the total TV hours watched, but it’s nearly six times more views than YouTube received in 2012.
Of course, it can be a little tougher for campaigns to parse these online numbers to figure out whether likely voters actually tuned in. After all, YouTube’s grand total of 124 million includes viewers from all over the world—with viewership highest in Canada, Mexico, Australia, Great Britain and Vietnam. Maybe some of these are Americans abroad who will vote, but the viewers the campaigns are most interested in are people like Kenneth Bone and his fellow undecideds in places like Missouri.
This is just one of the many ways we’ve seen the traditional power structure of the media—and the campaigns—break down during this election cycle. The narrative around candidates’ debate performances used to be fairly sewn up after their 90 minutes on stage was through. Their surrogates and the media would put the finishing touches on that storyline in the post-debate spin room, and the next day’s newspaper headlines would define the debate. Now, campaigns are grappling with a much longer time frame, and a fragmented one at that, in which people see the debate in 30-second soundbites, memes, gifs, and YouTube videos edited to make it look like Trump and Clinton are singing a duet.
It’s a weird world out there, but campaigns are starting to get the hang of it. On Monday, for instance, the Clinton campaign released a video on Facebook that spliced together Trump’s damning comments about sexually assaulting women on Access Hollywood with footage from the debate in which Trump said he “didn’t say that at all.” Trump’s camp made one, too, mocking Clinton’s answer about Abraham Lincoln.
The Clinton camp took a similar tack after the vice presidential debate. But when it comes to buzzy online videos of this debate, it’ll be hard to beat Trump’s shall we say, surprising pre-debate Facebook Live.
1. Update: 9:26 am ET 10/12/16 This story and headline have been updated to include Twitter and Facebook’s viewership numbers and provide context about TV viewership.
The pundits widely declared Governor Mike Pence the winner of last night’s vice presidential debate. But if Hillary Clinton’s in-house video team has anything to say about it, Pence’s “win” won’t matter. This morning, the team released a new campaign video that splices together clips of Donald Trump quotes with clips of Pence last night denying that Trump ever said any of it.
The two vice presidential candidates had very clear goals during the debate. For Kaine, it was all about getting Pence to answer for his running mate’s more contentious statements on, for instance, punishing women who have abortions or allowing Saudi Arabia to amass nuclear weapons. For Pence, the strategy seemed just as clear: deny, deny, deny.
In the moment, Pence’s strategy worked. He looked natural and unruffled compared with Kaine, who frequently interrupted to interject practiced talking points, his eyes darting about. But what’s important to remember is just how many people aren’t watching these debates in full. Early estimates indicate that last night’s debate attracted about half as many viewers as the debate between Trump and Clinton and fewer viewers than the 2012 vice presidential debate. But while fewer people may have tuned in in real time, now, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the next day highlight reels online and on social media.
Already, Clinton’s “Indefensible” video has gotten more than 1.5 million views on Facebook. Another about Trump and Pence’s anti-abortion stance received more than 1 million. Of course, it’s unclear whether those millions of views include undecided voters—the type of people Clinton still needs to reach—or whether the videos are simply circulating around the existing Clinton supporter echochamber. Still, Kaine managed to elicit enough soundbites from Pence for the video team to build a reel showing the governor repeatedly fibbing about Trump’s record. According to Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon, that’s a job well-done.
Kaine did his job tonight: hold Trump-Pence accountable for outrageous statements/positions, and defend HRC. Being feisty is job of No. 2
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) October 5, 2016
Though Kaine looked stiff on TV, that might not matter as much for the long-tail of Internet video. In some ways, this is the new version of what happened with the very first televised presidential debate back in 1960. Pundits noted that Richard Nixon seemed to have won the debate among people who listened on the radio. But anyone watching on television believed Kennedy won handily. Last night, to the viewers on TV Pence may have come off better for 90 minutes, but he gave the Clinton team the exact responses they needed to play the longer game online. To the extent that winning the vice presidential debate ever matters, it matters less now that campaigns and the public can instantly produce a counter narrative online.
As Trump did in the first debate, Pence replied to specific mentions of Trump quotes with one-liners like “that’s just nonsense.” He dismissed as nonsense the idea that Trump wants to create a deportation force, even though Trump once told Morning Joe, “You are going to have a deportation force, and you are going to do it humanely.” When Kaine pointed out that Trump once said “there has to be some form” of punishment for women who have abortions, Pence responded, “Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.” Pence later clarified, saying, “You know, things don’t always come out exactly the way he means them.”
Whether that’s true hasn’t stopped the Clinton campaign from consistently using Trump’s own words against him. It has created meme generators that overlay Trump insults over people’s photos, launched a fact-checking site called Literally Trump that attracted 2 million visitors in one hour on the first debate night, and they’ve released ads featuring veterans and children doing little else but watching Trump speak on television.
“There’s no better way to express his words than to show you his words,” Allan Piper, who makes Clinton’s rapid response videos recently told WIRED. “If you see him saying it, you can believe it.”
If only that were true for Pence.
The site of the vice presidential debate at Longwood University, on October 4, 2016 in Farmville, Virginia.Win McNamee/Getty Images
It’s hard not to be cynical about the 90 minutes of bland electoral theater Americans just witnessed in the form of the 2016 vice presidential debate. Two professional politicians traded rehearsed talking points while pundits mulled the history-making ramifications of crosstalk and water-drinking. Mike Pence was smooth. Tim Kaine was jumpy and interrupted a lot. Pence probably won. But guess what? Neither of these guys is running for president. So it doesn’t really matter.
Thankfully, Twitter gives everyone the real-time power to eviscerate the pretensions of the ugliest presidential race in modern US history.
this is like watching two dads trying to passive-aggressively assert their position in the starbucks line
— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) October 5, 2016
Forgot what it’s like when two evenly matched, rational and experienced politicians debate on the national stage. It’s boring.
— Ryan Williams (@RyanGOP) October 5, 2016
TV editors are scrambling right now to find highlight moments from this debate.
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) October 5, 2016
Unlike his ticket-mate in the first presidential debate, Pence actually spent time articulating what sounded like traditional GOP policy positions.
This debate bizarrely sounds like a Republican running against a Democrat
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) October 5, 2016
He also spent a lot of time not defending Donald Trump from Kaine’s prodigious attacks on the Republican presidential candidate’s vast catalog of offensive statements and Putin praise.
Mike Pence is pretending Trump isn’t Trump because a) he doesn’t support Trump and b) wants to preserve his own career after this ends.
— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) October 5, 2016
As a few smart observers pointed out, Pence’s dodges may well outlast the brief bragging rights he gains by winning tonight. For Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it doesn’t matter so much whether Kaine won. They just need more material for their ads making Trump look bad.
It sort of works in the debate, but Pence shaking head, saying “no he hasn’t” is going to look bad in ads next to Trump saying those things
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 5, 2016
As for Trump himself, he clearly couldn’t stand the thought of spending a night out of the spotlight. Earlier today, he promised to live-tweet his running mate’s debate, ensuring just as many journalists would be watching his feed for possible gaffes as they would be the debate itself.
I will be live-tweeting the V.P. Debate. Very exciting! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2016
But for once, Trump’s Twitter feed didn’t make news. That’s because he was surrounded by advisors who likely made sure for once Trump didn’t sabotage himself in 140 characters.
Our @JohnKingCNN reports the Trump campaign plans to have his team around him as Trump live tweets tonight’s debate
— Steve Brusk (@stevebruskCNN) October 4, 2016
Instead, Trump engaged in what could only be described as a “live re-tweeting” of the debate, which included such thoughtful gems as:
“@Jnelson52722: @realDonaldTrump @Susiesentinel Kaine looks like an evil crook out of the Batman movies”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2016
In the end, the debate was over. Sadly, the election won’t be for more than a month.
Never been happier to see white dudes leave my screen and I watched every episode of Entourage
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) October 5, 2016
The Republican National Committee may have added a few fortune tellers to its staff. Either that, or the RNC just published all its post-debate spin by accident hours before the debate even began. Yeah, we’re going to go ahead and say it was the second one.
Around 7 pm ET, two hours before Gov. Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Kaine take the stage for the vice presidential debate, the RNC published several pages of content to its website declaring Pence the winner.
“Americans from all across the country tuned in to watch the one and only Vice Presidential debate,” the page reads. “During the debate we helped fact check and monitor the conversation in real time @GOP. The consensus was clear after the dust settled, Mike Pence was the clear winner of the debate.”
But that wasn’t all. Twitter sleuths soon began unearthing more of the RNC’s accidental predictions.
BUT WAIT
There’s more!https://t.co/Q5zGlt3W6Nhttps://t.co/uD2tNVxJe5 pic.twitter.com/ebgqlnpP5T
— jer (@JerMeansWell) October 4, 2016
Obviously, the RNC was never going to declare Kaine the debate’s winner. But it’s never a good look for a political campaign to show so clearly how the spin sausage gets made.
The RNC was quick to take some of the pages down. But even the party’s 404 error gets its anti-Clinton message across. In case you can’t wait until the debate is actually over to get spun, the pages are all archived here.
If you happen to click on a link to clintonkaine.com in the next few weeks, you may notice something peculiar—namely, the part that the bottom that says “Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President.”
No, Trump hasn’t suddenly started supporting Hillary Clinton (though, really, that would just be the latest in a long list of Trump campaign trail contradictions). His team bought the domain for $15,000; now they’ve transformed it into a site all about Clinton’s scandals. It’s like their own personal Drudge Report, complete with underlined, all-caps headlines such as “CLINTON CALLS SANDERS SUPPORTERS BASEMENT DWELLERS.”
The site is the Trump campaign’s answer to what they believe is the liberal mainstream media, says Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale. “It allows us a nice playing field to do some opposition research and let it show,” Parscale says. “We want people to see all the truth, and not the sometimes one-sided truth that we get from the media.”
Of course, the Trump campaign has every reason to want to create its own news cycle right now. The campaign is currently in the middle of perhaps the worst stretch since it began last summer. Today the New York attorney general’s office issued a cease and desist letter to the Trump Foundation, Trump’s purported charitable foundation that The Washington Post found does not appear to have the proper certification to accept donations. This blow comes just after the New York Times‘ blockbuster report on Trump’s 1995 tax returns, which show more than $900 million in losses. All of that almost makes you forget that on Friday, news broke that Trump appeared in a softcore porn video—shortly after the GOP candidate went on a lewdm pre-dawn Twitter rant lambasting former Miss Universe and current Clinton supporter Alicia Machado.
So yeah, we’d say the Trump campaign could use a new storyline. The domain previously belonged to a Clinton supporter named Jeremy Peter Green, who offered the site to the Clinton campaign, USA Today reports. But Clinton’s camp turned him down, unwilling to engage in what could become a “whack-a-mole” situation trying to lock down every possible domain, a campaign spokesperson said. “Who’s to say someone can’t keep buying sites? It’s not really a sound investment.”
But Parscale was more than happy to take it off Green’s hands. “It was worth it for what I wanted to do.”
Parscale believes the domain will increase the Trump campaign’s clicks, because each piece of content appears more neutral than if it came from, say, Trump’s namesake site. “For people who are trying to look for real information on Clinton and Kaine this is going to look more legitimate,” he says. “The average person on Facebook is not going to know that Donald Trump owns that page.”
Sneaky, maybe, but it’s not altogether unusual. Clinton benefits from another trolling tactic via the super PAC Correct the Record, which floods social media with anti-Trump, pro-Clinton stories. In both cases, the candidates benefit from the fragmentation of traditional media and the rise of social media to misdirect and manipulate potential voters. Who says you shouldn’t trust politicians?
Sleep. Remember sleep? The thing you were doing just a few hours ago, before you woke up, and the man who could potentially be the next President of the United States told you to “check out” a sex tape? Sleep was nice, wasn’t it?
Donald Trump, apparently, doesn’t get much sleep. Because, beginning at 5:14 am, the Republican nominee for President picked up his phone and started firing off tweet after tweet about former Miss Universe Contestant Alicia Machado, who Hillary Clinton name-checked during the first presidential debate last week. After Machado gained some weight following her Miss Universe win, she says Trump took to calling her Miss Piggy. Trump has since defended himself on Fox and Friends, saying, “She was the winner, and you know she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem.”
But Trump wasn’t finished digging himself into a hole with female voters just yet. Then came the tweets:
Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an “angel” without checking her past, which is terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016
Using Alicia M in the debate as a paragon of virtue just shows that Crooked Hillary suffers from BAD JUDGEMENT! Hillary was set up by a con.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016
Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016
And here we are. That Trump would unleash a tweetstorm before sunrise shouldn’t surprise anybody at this point. But this one in particular seems to encapsulate two of the biggest issues dogging Trump’s campaign: his attitude toward women and his apparent problems with impulse control. They also showcase his propensity for seeding conspiracy theories, just as he has with regard to Hillary Clinton’s health and President Obama’s citizenship.
During the first debate, Trump brought up his temperament, saying, “I think my strongest asset by far is my temperament. I have a winning temperament.” Clinton’s disagreed, and with good reason. Though both candidates have historically low favorability ratings, recent polls have shown Trump lagging far behind Clinton in terms of who voters believe has the better temperament to be president. And it seems that line of attack worked, considering most methodologically sound post-debate polls (not the flash polls Trump’s team has been celebrating) show that Clinton got a boost from the debate. And according to one NBC News and SurveyMonkey poll, 27 percent of likely women voters said the debate made them think less of Trump.
For Trump to unleash such a temperamental attack against a woman—flaunting a sex tape that does not appear to exist, no less—is an altogether curious strategy, if it’s a strategy at all.
Our advice to Trump: Get some sleep.
Hillary Clinton usually reserves her shout-outs for the local leaders and politicians who join her at campaign rallies across the country.
During last night’s presidential debate, though, it was all about the fact-checkers. “I hope the fact-checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard,” she said at one point. “Please, fact-checkers, get to work,” she said at another.
Clinton was clearly hoping that the fact-checkers—both professional journalists and amateur know-it-alls—would help back her up as she took on Trump. The campaign even turned HillaryClinton.com into a live fact-check machine, called Literally Trump. During the debate, Clinton told viewers to go to the site “to see in real-time what the facts are,” and according to Clinton spokesperson Tyrone Gayle, it seems to have worked.
Nearly two million people visited Clinton’s website within an hour after she mentioned it. That’s 10 times as many visits as the campaign has ever attracted in an hour. By this evening, the Literally Trump factoids had been shared 18,000 times on social media.
The idea for the site was Clinton’s, according to Gayle. “In debate prep, Hillary made it clear that while she would be calling Trump out for his lies, she wanted a place where viewers could be empowered to look it up themselves, not have to wait for reporters or any other delivery mechanism,” Gayle said. “Hillary suggested making Trump’s past statements available on the website for anyone to read for themselves.”
Of course, the Clinton campaign wasn’t the only one scrambling to separate fact from fiction during the debate. Media outlets (including ours) followed the debate along with their researchers, while groups like Politifact flooded Twitter with their real-time assessments.
But the Clinton campaign was seeding the idea that fact-checking mattered even before Clinton took the stage. Earlier in the week, the campaign sent around an 18-page memo, filled with its own Trump fact-checks.
In the spin room following the debate, campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said he believed this strategy succeeded in setting the tone for the matchup. “I think that the discussion about fact-checking prior to tonight actually foreshadowed one of the major dynamics of the debate,” he said. Fallon noted that Trump continued to deny he supported the war in Iraq and insisted that Clinton’s 2008 campaign started the birther movement against President Obama, two facts that have been frequently debunked during the mad fact-checking rush of 2016.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that there were many Trump supporters, or even conservatives, getting their facts from Clinton’s website. Trump supporters, after all, were doing their own fact-checking in their own online echochambers.
Fallon acknowledged these communities are tough to penetrate. “I think that with the multiplier effect of so many different outlets and online social platforms that it’s possible in 2016 to really create your own reality and only listen to and get facts from certain outlets that conform to your worldview,” he said.
Chris Christie and others in conservative circles have already claimed that the media’s fact-checkers “have an agenda.” Just imagine what they think about Clinton’s.
Donald Trump addresses the media about Barack Obama’s release of his original birth certificate earlier that morning, on April 27, 2011 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images
Donald Trump tried to magically mask his years of paranoid speculation about the whereabouts and authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate today with a 23-word statement at his new hotel in Washington D.C. In it, he erroneously blamed the so-called “birther movement” on Hillary Clinton, and falsely claimed that he was the one who put those rumors to rest.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” he said. “I finished it. President Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
No mention of the fact that after President Obama produced his birth certificate, Trump demanded to see his college records for verification. No mention of the fact that he insinuated that the State Health Director who verified the birth certificate was whacked to keep him quiet. And no mention of an apology for his role in spreading the birther suspicions, which were pretty darned racist and harmful.
No matter. After Trump finished, the MSNBC chyron read “Trump: Obama Was Born in the U.S., Period.” The New York Times’ headline said the same. So did the A.P.‘s.
Come again?
As we’ve noted before, Trump has a habit of running his campaign like a Twitter feed, issuing constant updates, each one more absurd than the last, to push his most recent scandal farther down the feed. Who has time to talk about the Trump Foundation scandal when it’s Birther Day on CNN? But this tactic only works when the media takes Trump’s every utterance at face value.
Did he finally admit President Obama was born in the US? Sure. But did he also lie and fail to apologize for starting that rumor while doing it? You betcha!
A few outlets, to be fair, got it right.
Donald Trump Finally Admitted Obama Was Born In The US — And Lied Twice While Doing So https://t.co/WmtZXt7265 pic.twitter.com/oibv8sciru
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) September 16, 2016
Trump fanned a conspiracy about Obama’s birthplace for years. Now he pretends Clinton started it. https://t.co/4CcjNA9D8m
— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 16, 2016
Breaking: Trump admits Obama born in U.S. but falsely blames Clinton for starting rumors https://t.co/DqQ4mhqqwt
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 16, 2016
People on Twitter also had some suggestions for more accurate headlines.
if headlines described reality:
Unapologetic Trump Falsely Blames His Longstanding Campaign of Race-baiting Lies on Clinton, Cons Media
— Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) September 16, 2016
Headline: Trump levels false charges against Clinton after dropping false charge against Obama.
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) September 16, 2016
The headline shouldn’t be “Trump Confirms Obama Born in US,” the headline should be “Trump Admits to 5+ Years of Race Baiting”
— colbyhall (@colbyhall) September 16, 2016
For our part, we’d go with something more along the lines of: Trump Rickrolls the Media With Hotel Press Junket Followed By More Birther Bullshit. But that’s just us.
Before he became CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, and before he took over the alt-right media outlet Breitbart.com, Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet.
Today, an article in Mother Jones reminded us that back in 2008 we here at WIRED wrote about it. The story focuses on the World of Warcraft marketplace called Internet Gaming Entertainment, where players could pay real money for virtual goods, like gold, in the game. The company was founded by former child star Brock Pierce, and Bannon was an investor. Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plow $60 million into a company that sold imaginary goods in an imaginary world.
Surely there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Here’s a bit of the original article:
Goldman Sachs started making visits, inspecting the Asian operations and talking with Bannon and others about terms. Finally, on February 7, 2006, the deal was inked: Goldman Sachs, together with a consortium of private funds, made a reported $60 million investment in the company. Part of the money was used to buy Pierce, Salyer, and IGE’s general counsel, Randy Maslow, out of some of their stock in the company. Pierce walked away with $20 million and still retained the controlling share of a company that was doing more than a quarter of a billion dollars in sales a year.
In 2007, following a major lawsuit by one World of Warcraft player, who accused IGE of “substantially impairing” players’ enjoyment of the game, the company took a nosedive. It rebranded to Affinity Media, and Bannon took over as CEO. He stayed in that role until 2012, when he joined Breitbart, which, coincidentally, also peddles imaginary stuff on the Internet.
You should go read the whole story.
Mere hours ago, Donald Trump demoted his Russophile campaign manager Paul Manafort and replaced him with the head of news at Trump-ophile website Breitbart. And the move already appears to be paying off. Check out this top-shelf #content coming out of Trump’s shop:
When asked about being down in the race, Trump adviser replies, “Says who?”https://t.co/HO9wqbdDWR https://t.co/C2UzSDdUo4
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) August 17, 2016
Okay, okay, so maybe no one handed Trump advisor Michael Cohen a script (though it wouldn’t have taken long to write) before his interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar. But if Cohen’s gruff defiance of his mainstream media interlocutor’s recitation of numerical fact is any indication, the new day promised by the Trump campaign’s staff shakeup very much resembles the good old days of winning so big, which brought the GOP nominee this far.
(We should also note that if Michael Cohen’s name sounds familiar it may be because he’s the Trump campaign staffer who once said, “And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”)
Speaking of retro, we’ve got our own little contribution to keep the meme rolling, the clicks coming, and the ratings high. After all, who needs to get out the vote when you can go viral?
WIRED
And if our contribution to the meme-ifying of what is already a viral moment doesn’t do it for you, the Internet offers you these alternatives:
pic.twitter.com/X35DOmrnrs
— darth™ (@darth) August 17, 2016
Poles. All of them. pic.twitter.com/z42bFNfxuX
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) August 17, 2016
RYAN: That Michael Cohen interview did was a disaster.
TRUMP: Says who?
RYAN:
TRUMP:
RYAN:
TRUMP: Just kidding. Yeah, it was so friggin’ bad
— Owen Ellickson (@onlxn) August 17, 2016
pic.twitter.com/5C9qaiAXmh
— Nathan Yau (@flowingdata) August 17, 2016
what “All of them” looks like: pic.twitter.com/sx8VyivJnS
— Taniel (@Taniel) August 17, 2016
Roses are red
My intentions are true
You’re behind in the polls
*long pause*
Says who
— Hayley Hudson (@hayhud) August 18, 2016
The answer to “Says who?” is actually “Calvin Klein” pic.twitter.com/jF9Ts5fx6P
— Jordan Cohen (@jorcohen) August 18, 2016
Stephen Bannon in 2013Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP
Donald Trump’s bid for the White House has always been a media circus. Now, it’s being run by one of the ringleaders.
The Trump campaign announced today that it has hired Breitbart News Network executive chairman Steve Bannon as campaign CEO. Paul Manafort, who has been running the show since the ouster of former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, will stay on as campaign chairman and chief strategist, but it seems without question that his power will be seriously diluted.
That the head of Breitbart would eventually just up and join the Trump campaign may have seemed a foregone conclusion to anyone who’s been watching the conservative media outlet this election cycle. Breitbart has been openly pro-Trump, even as other conservative outlets like The National Review and Red State have come out against him.
When Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields accused then-campaign manager Lewandowski of battery, a charge that was eventually dropped, Breitbart’s staff sided with the Trump campaign, telling reporters to stop speaking out about the story.
Breitbart has always been on a covert quest to see Trump elected. Now, that quest is out in the open. Bannon’s hire highlights a troubling trend: the blurring of the lines between media as campaign observer and campaign operative. With Bannon leading Trump’s presidential bid, the lines are now erased. And Bannon isn’t even the only media mogul helping: ousted Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes is reportedly advising Trump in the run up to the first debate, despite allegations against him of sexual misconduct at Fox.
All of this would be unthinkable in any other election year. But with Trump’s unpredictable candidacy, anything goes.
We’ve said before that the Internet killed objectivity, but it’s just as true to say that election 2016 did, as mainstream media outlets struggle to cover a candidate who says and does things no mainstream candidate would. Meanwhile, outlets like Breitbart see a candidate who’s giving voice to the very conspiracy theories and fears that have long lingered in its social media networks and comment sections. And now, giving them a seat at the political table. This has exacerbated the echo chamber effect that already makes it nearly impossible for people of different ideologies and beliefs to hear each other.
In choosing Bannon to lead his campaign, Trump is leaning into the divisive message that’s buoyed his candidacy since last year, rather than trying to bridge the gap with disaffected Republicans, who have urged him repeatedly to pivot toward a steadier strategy. (In fact, Breitbart is one of the biggest critics of the current GOP leadership, including Speaker Paul Ryan, who’s had a rocky relationship with Trump so far.)
It’s also a familiar move for Trump: when the going gets tough, whoever’s leading the campaign gets the boot. It happened to Lewandowski just two months ago when Trump’s dominance in the polls began to flag and early fundraising numbers turned out to be dismal.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort listens to Ivanka Trump speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016.Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Now, as Clinton continues to trounce Trump in battleground polls, Trump seems to be sidelining Manafort as well. The move also comes amid debate over Russia’s role in Trump’s rise and Manafort’s ties to Russia. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, while Manafort was working for pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovych, he was supposed to be paid $12.7 million in unofficial payments.
Meanwhile, the fact that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russian operatives has led many to wonder whether the Russians did it explicitly to prop up Trump’s campaign. Then there was Trump’s off the cuff comment during the Democratic Convention, in which he said of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Bannon isn’t the only one who will be tasked with getting this chaotic campaign across the finish line. Trump has also promoted KellyAnne Conway, a Republican pollster, to the position of campaign manager. That, too, is a fitting jump, given Trump’s obsession with the polls during primary season. And yet, with just just 82 days until Election Day, turning around Trump’s favorability numbers this late in the season would be unprecedented even for the most sophisticated pollster.
In a statement, Trump described Bannon and Conway as “some of the best talents in politics.” WIRED reached out to the Trump campaign for comment but hadn’t heard back by publication time.
“I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election,” he said. In other words, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
For many Americans, the path to casting a vote is way rockier than it should be. Between (racist) new voter ID laws and government websites that haven’t been updated since the late Cretaceous, it hard to know how to register, where and when to vote, and what you need to bring. Heck, the rules were so confusing in New York during the primaries that even Ivanka Trump was unable to vote for her dad. That’s where Google’s newest search tool, which debuts this morning, comes in.
Next time you punch “how to vote” or “how to register” into Google’s search bar, all the tricky logistical details of your state’s specific electoral rigamarole will be spelled out in plain English. “The voting process is complicated and overwhelming,” says Emily Moxley, the project’s team lead and product manager. “Different websites have bits and pieces of the information people need, and it’s hard to tell if the information you’re looking at is up to date. So we collected everything into one location, in terminology that’s easy to grok.”
Google collected all that data with the help of law firm Perkins Coie and what Moxley calls “a fair amount of manual, painstaking work.” The Google team’s slogging is likely to be worth it though, because this is clearly information that people want. The Google-generated map below shows a real surge in voter registration interest since 2012, especially in the swing states and the Northeast, where it’s up over 100 percent at least.
The data doesn’t show why certain states are more energized than others (though we suspect that Senator Sanders may have had something to do with the 358 percent interest spike in Vermont), but it clearly shows that people want to participate. Nation-wide, interest in voter registration peaked at +190 percent within an hour of Hillary Clinton’s keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.
However you feel about the candidates and this most ridiculous season of political theater, more people than ever are political engaged online, and this new suite of voter-friendly tools may help them take that fervor out to where it really counts: the voting booth.
It’s just the beginning of the week, and already a major presidential candidate and his staunchest ally in Silicon Valley have shown they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the First Amendment works.
Yesterday, Donald Trump responded to a critical New York Times piece depicting the self-sabotage of his campaign:
It is not “freedom of the press” when newspapers and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016
Today, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel said in an op-ed in the Times that he was proud of the court battle he funded against Gawker, a privacy lawsuit that pushed the site into bankruptcy. Gawker, he said, published “thinly sourced, nasty articles that attacked and mocked people” to make money.
What seems to be beyond both Trump’s and Thiel’s grasp is that the First Amendment does not protect someone from protest or criticism. Of course, the whole point of protecting a free press is to ensure the right to protest and criticize publicly.
In the op-ed, Thiel said he had suffered at the hands of Gawker when a 2007 post on the site’s Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag “made choices for him” on how and when he came out to the public as a gay man. Thiel said journalists shouldn’t fear his campaign against Gawker, which included funding the Hulk Hogan sex tape privacy lawsuit that led to the site’s bankruptcy and several others. “It’s not for me to draw the line,” Thiel writes, “but journalists should condemn those who willfully cross it.” Yet drawing the line is exactly what Thiel has done, and he’s going to spend his fortune to make sure others don’t cross it, even if that means he financially destroys journalists and publications.
Ironically, even as Thiel sought to frame his issues with Gawker as concern over the broader question of privacy on the Internet, much of his fortune comes from investing in companies whose own practices raise serious privacy questions themselves. Thiel says Gawker was “willing to exploit the Internet without moral limits,” but gossip and tabloid journalism are hardly a new invention of online publishing. There’s nothing uniquely “Internet-like” about people’s desire to click on a headline to satisfy their curiosity. Meanwhile, Facebook—on whose board Thiel sits—is developing a new kind of monopoly over our personal data and preferences, turning astronomical profits in the process. Facebook’s power over users’ attention spans has itself means the company has powerful influence over the future of journalism, pushing publishers to create content that Facebook users will like and share. It’s not resource-strapped media companies that have the leverage here—as the Gawker bankruptcy shows, it’s media companies that are just struggling to survive.
Yes, several incidents have shown how malicious actors can use the Internet to violate people’s privacy in unacceptable ways: the nude celebrity photo scandal, the Sony and DNC hacks, vigilante doxxers online, to name a few. But that’s not what’s on the mind of the likes of Thiel and Trump.
Instead, Trump banned news organizations from BuzzFeed and Politico to The Des Moines Register and The Washington Post from covering his campaign events. On Twitter, he rarely mentions The New York Times without describing it as “failing.” Reporters who write stories that cast him in a critical light are “dishonest” and “disgusting.” And his antagonism has only grown as his poll numbers have dropped, leading him to blame the media as co-conspirators in what he calls a “rigged” election. In Trump’s world as in Thiel’s, it seems, a press that isn’t subservient to the powerful doesn’t deserve to be free.
Donald Trump yells into the crowd at the conclusion of a campaign rally in Hickory, North Carolina on March 14, 2016.Sean Rayford/Getty Images
And so it begins.
For the last year and some change, Donald Trump has been complaining that the presidential nominating process is rigged. Now that he’s secured the nomination, though, he’s moved on to a new target, claiming last week that the election itself will be rigged. “I’m afraid the election’s going to be rigged. I have to be honest,” he recently told a crowd in Ohio.
That may seem like just another dubious claim from a candidate who’s prone to dubious claims, except for the fact that, well, Trump’s base is buying it. According to a new poll of North Carolina voters by the firm Public Policy Polling, a whopping 69 percent of Trump voters think that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it will be because the election was rigged. Compare that with the just 16 percent who say it would be because she got more votes.
The poll surveyed 830 likely Trump voters in the state from August 5 to 7, mostly over the phone, but approximately 20 percent via an Internet panel, and has a margin of error of 3.4 percent. If these North Carolina voters are emblematic of the rest of the country, this could present a new and dangerous frontier for American electoral politics. The fact is, the reason our country can boast about its peaceful transfers of power is primarily because its citizens have long trusted that the will of the people decides who should get that power. At times, the influence of the people’s will has been called into question, as it was during the 2000 election when Vice President Al Gore lost, despite winning the popular vote.
But even after a painful Supreme Court case that ultimately decided the presidency, Gore tried to quell suspicions that the process was rigged. In his concession speech, he told the American people, “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.”
In planting the seed in voters’ minds that the election will be rigged, Trump does not seem poised to make a similar concession if he loses. And he very well may lose. Clinton is leading by a big margin in post-convention polls. She is even <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/09/us/elec