No Match for Bloomberg’s Billions on Facebook’s Election Rules
No Match for Bloomberg’s Billions on Facebook’s Election Rules
Over the past four years, Facebook has made a big show of demonstrating how much it cares about democracy and how much it’s doing to combat election interference or fake news. It has assembled “war rooms” and published white papers. It has hired thousands of content moderators (as in, they’re looking at content; they’re actually miserable). And the company is constantly reminding people that it’s spending more on security now than the total of its revenue at the beginning of the decade. Big numbers! Facebook cares!
It’s too bad that all it took was one aspirational billionaire to reveal most of that effort as completely ineffective.
Over the past couple of weeks, candidate Mike Bloomberg has rolled out an aggressive program of buying endorsements on social media. He isn’t just asking celebrities and other mayors (of smaller cities) for their backing or posting weird tweets: Last week, a number of popular Instagram accounts with tens of millions of followers rolled out jokey sponcon for the former New York City mayor. Today, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bloomberg’s campaign will go one step further by paying regular social-media users to post about the candidate on the platforms.
From the Journal:
The campaign is hiring more than 500 “deputy digital organizers” to work 20 to 30 hours a week and receive $2,500 a month, the documents show. In exchange, those workers are expected to promote Mr. Bloomberg to everyone in their phones’ contacts by text each week and make social-media posts supporting him daily, the documents show.
That’s more than $1.25 million Bloomberg is spending just to kinda shotgun his name all over social media and into group chats. This comes in addition to a reported program for “microinfluencers,” i.e., people with small follower counts, whom Bloomberg would pay $150 in exchange for their support. That’s a lot for any campaign, but it’s nothing for the former mayor, who seems more than willing to throw money at the wall and see what sticks.
