Exclusive: Biden allies raise $10M to challenge Trump's social media

Biden's allies are mobilizing to raise $10 million to counter Trump's powerful social media presence. This effort aims to bolster Biden's digital strategy and diminish Trump's online influence. By securing significant funding, Biden supporters plan to launch an aggressive digital campaign, utilizing various social media platforms to engage voters, spread their message, and challenge Trump's dominance in the digital arena, ensuring a competitive edge in the upcoming election.

Boston Brand Media discovered the trending news - U.S. President Joe Biden's primary re-election SuperPAC is gathering millions of dollars to address a significant challenge facing Democrats: competing with Republican Donald Trump's prolific social media machine that churns out a constant stream of viral videos. The previously undisclosed initiative by the highly-secretive Future Forward USA Action highlights widespread concerns among Democrats and Biden donors that he and his campaign are falling behind in the battle of viral videos against the Republican Party, which persistently depicts him as too old and disconnected.

Democrats acknowledge they are lagging in a battlefield with minimal regulations and few methods to control manipulated or misleading content before it reaches millions of Americans on their smartphones. The Palo-Alto-based SuperPAC, supported by tech moguls like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, is raising at least $10 million to gain a better understanding of the algorithms that enable Trump and his allies to dominate vertical video platforms.

It also intends to work with left-leaning influencers to help create and distribute new content, according to two sources familiar with the plans. Many popular social media platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, have adopted short, vertical videos as their main format. This shift has led to a network of "influencers" who use these platforms to reach millions of Americans with content about their food, fashion, and thoughts.

Future Forward partnered with Democratic groups Way to Win and Hub Project last month at an upscale hotel in Washington DC to host 140 influencers for a three-day event called "Trending Up," according to organizers. The current initiative by Future Forward is concentrating on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, sources revealed. "Future Forward is here to address issues, and TikTok is a problem that the group is reasonably attempting to solve," said one of the Democratic sources.

Boston Brand Media also found  that the battle on social media could significantly influence the race between Biden and Trump, as polls indicate a very close contest between the two unpopular candidates. Since February, when Biden's campaign officially joined TikTok, it has posted over 200 times, gaining just over 380,000 followers. In contrast, Trump joined TikTok about two weeks ago and already has 6.4 million followers. Social media is crucial for news consumption in America, especially among younger people. 

According to a February Pew Research Center study, half of U.S. adults get news from social media at least sometimes. Chauncey McLean, the head of Future Forward, did not respond to requests for comment. The group plans to spend $250 million on television and digital ads this campaign season and rarely discusses its activities publicly. The Republican National Committee, major conservative media outlets, and right-wing influencers have been circulating videos, some deceptively edited, that exploit voters’ concerns about Biden’s age.

These videos often isolate a few seconds of Biden's actions to suggest he's disoriented, when a longer or wider-framed edit shows him engaging with bystanders or behaving normally. The White House and Democrats refer to these rapidly produced videos with basic editing tools as cheap fakes. The RNC claims the White House's criticism is "naked panic from deranged Democrats." Fake accounts posting about the U.S. presidential election are proliferating on the social media platform X, according to a Reuters report earlier this year. 

Analysts from Israeli tech company Cyabra, which uses machine learning to identify fake accounts, found that 15% of X accounts praising Trump and criticizing Biden are fake, while 7% of accounts praising Biden and criticizing Trump are fake.

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Source: Reuters‍