The Clinton’s Campaign’s Social Media War on Trump

From the start of the presidential campaign season, it was clear that the Hillary Clinton campaign needed to win over certain broad demographic segments in order to claim victory in the general election. One of these groups was millennial voters.

In the primary season, very few millennials were leaning toward Clinton, despite the fact that she had the potential to be the nation’s first female president, a highly progressive credential. Instead, millennials as a group gravitated almost en masse to Clinton’s archival, Bernie Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont.

It was a long, bitter campaign, but in the end, Clinton bested Sanders through rigged primaries and superdelegates, which in a number of cases outweighed the number of normal delegates she did not win in a state, so even if Clinton lost the state, she still could claim victory in terms of the number of delegates from that particular state.

From nearly the start of the race, it was clear that millennials got much of their information about campaigns and platforms from the Internet, and specifically, from social media, especially Facebook. The world’s most popular website is where many millennials spend their days, talking to friends and finding out about the world through posts placed by major media and by minor news outlets — some of which have barely a presence that registers outside of Facebook.

In fact, three groups in particular stand out in this arena that have contributed to the fortunes of both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Those three groups (which have extremely popular Facebook pages and upload between 15 and 30 posts per day to people’s personal timelines) are: The Other 98% (with approximately 3.2 million followers), Occupy Democrats (approximately 4.1 million followers) and U.S. Uncut (about 1.5 million followers).

These three groups, which are ostensibly independent of Facebook, actually have gotten very favorable ad positioning and exposure from the social media giant, in many cases outweighing the presence of major media networks such as CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC. Where did these groups come from, and how did they get their funding?

On its website, The Other 98% claims to “shine a light on economic injustice, undue corporate influence and threats to democracy.” Not mentioned is the fact that The Other 98% gets much of its funding from both billionaire George Soros and a Democratic political action committee called Friends of Democracy.

As one objective website put it, “These funders of the Friends of Democracy are members of the 1 Percent, the richest of the rich. They’re using their money, however, to pretend to speak for the rest of us – the 99 Percent.”

While some of The Other 98%’s messages have some “truthiness” to them, others are pure progressive/liberal lies such as this gem: “Last year (the U.S. women’s soccer team) generated $20 million more than the men’s team and were paid almost four times less.”

As for Occupy Democrats, the organization’s website says, “We The People will rise up to give President Obama and other progressive Democrats a Congress that will work with them to grow the economy, create jobs, promote fairness and fight inequality, and get money OUT of politics!”

With Occupy Democrats, the name of the group leaves little doubt which party they support. But the word “Occupy” is clearly a reference to Occupy Wall Street, even though the group has no connection whatsoever to the populist grassroots movement that occupied Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for two months in 2011.

In fact, Occupy Democrats has worked hard to make no mention of Clinton’s connections to Wall Street firms and billionaires when it does mention her, which it does not often do these days, instead preferring to focus on GOP nominee Donald Trump.

The original Occupy Wall Street had as one of its slogans, “We welcome dissent.” But if you post something truthful that doesn’t agree with Occupy Democrats’ messages in their comments section, they will ban you.

Occupy Democrats also gets its funding from George Soros.

As opposed to The Other 98%, Occupy Democrats’ messages are almost entirely lies. In fact, website Politifact rates 33 percent of the site’s content “False” and gives another 33 percent an even worse rating — “Pants on Fire.” A remainder of 25 percent of the postings are “Half True,” while just 8 percent are rated as “True.”

A typical “Pants on Fire”-false posting on Occupy Democrats is one which reads, “President Barack Obama has taken less vacation days than any other president in a generation, while Congress has taken more vacation days than any other Congress in history.”

U.S. Uncut used to display this message in an “About” section, which it has since removed: “US Uncut is a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S. Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans. That’s unacceptable.”

However, as the campaign of Bernie Sanders faded and the Democratic candidate became Hillary Clinton, the website has given corporate-friendly Clinton a free pass while exclusively mocking middle-class tax-cutter Trump. Today, there’s nary a message about taxes at all on U.S. Uncut. The six sections of its website are: News, World, Politics, Economics, Uprising and Black Lives Matter.

According to Wikipedia, “US Uncut generally publishes articles critical of Republican politicians and conservative economic and social policies in the United States, though many articles also criticize Democratic politicians who are seen to favor corporate interests.”

The progressive/liberal agenda on U.S. Uncut should be very clear from postings such as: “A Terrorist Just Fire-Bombed a California Mosque While People Were Inside” — note the word “people” is used instead of Muslims, who almost certainly comprised 100 percent of the mosque’s occupants; note also the attacker is called a “terrorist,” despite the fact that the action almost certainly had no political motivation, but rather was a hate crime.

Another piece on U.S. Uncut was a glowing post about “How Billionaire Financier George Soros Is Slowly Fixing the Broken Criminal Justice System.”

In all of these cases, it’s impossible to say if Facebook has also given any of these sites money directly. It’s known that the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is one of Hillary Clinton’s most generous donors, giving her campaign at least $28 million dollars in 2016 alone.

It’s speculated that, like other tech companies, Facebook wishes Clinton and the Democrats to “open the doors” to more H1-B visa workers, from India and elsewhere, who will most likely replace more costly American workers at these companies in the coming years.

Clinton and Barack Obama have both given the green light to H1-B visa program reforms so that the number of foreign-born workers at these firms can be vastly increased.

It should be patently clear that these three groups in particular have been promoted ultra-heavily to millennials and have been saturated almost 100 percent with pro-Democrat, anti-GOP messages.

While it’s true that these groups strongly hyped Bernie Sanders at the expense of the Clinton campaign early on, once Sanders conceded to Clinton and endorsed her, the messaging switched to pro-Clinton memes and posts within weeks. Post after post railed against all of the character (as opposed to policy) flaws of Trump almost exclusively.

But such is the naiveté of the millennial generation and so powerful are the messages being promoted that most of these viewers are being willfully blinded. Even when connections to globalist elites are pointed out, they’re often dismissed out of hand because some of the Republicans’ messaging is abhorrent to millennials.

Also to many of them, Trump has been portrayed as irrevocably toxic. Never mind that Trump’s policies could actually benefit them in many ways that those of Bernie Sanders would have (reducing the nation’s debt through pulling out of foreign conflicts, dropping the TPP free-trade agreement) — these sites have succeeded in making this election all about character as far as millennials are concerned.

Clips of Saturday Night Live segments with Alec Baldwin playing Trump and defaced pictures of Trump that have been turned into memes are particularly popular. Even messages that are outright lies such as Trump’s sexual exploits with a minor have been given a “thumbs up” by millennials as the writers and creatives at these groups have successfully connected with what entertains and stimulates these younger voters.

Until and unless conservative groups are able to match the exposure level and the creative talent of the aforementioned groups, one of the most important blocs of voters — millennials — will largely be driven to Democratic tickets as Election Day approaches.

The influence of social media sites such as Facebook cannot be underestimated; this is way bigger and more important than television. So dominant is social media in today’s world that the United Kingdom recently announced it was specializing entire brigades of soldiers as “social media warriors” to influence opinions and win hearts and minds in many of the foreign conflicts it’s involved with.

The Democrats have realized how to maximize this channel with content that is particularly effective and persuasive; it’s now up to conservatives to step up to the plate (and perhaps work regulatory magic as far as getting “equal Face[book] time”).


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