A new marketing and multimedia creator has opened up shop in Milledgeville.
Old Capitol Productions, the creative content provider operated by local public servant and jack-of-all-trades Walter Reynolds, has spent the past several months making videos, press releases, social media campaigns, and a host of other marketing and audience engagement services for local organizations. Equipped with a talent for nearly every type of outreach that businesses and nonprofits could need, the new business owner and lifelong Milledgeville resident has already helped several organizations get their message out to the community and hopes to continue the service in the community and across Middle Georgia.
“Old Capitol Productions was a group that I actually started back in 2013,” said Reynolds. “Originally, my friend Tommy Cook and I were going to use Old Capitol Productions to run events out of. The event that we had in mind to run, we decided to hand off to the Milledgeville Young Professionals because they needed a fundraiser for Keep Milledgeville-Baldwin Beautiful, and Old Capitol Productions kind of sat dormant. … When I left the radio station [formerly Z97 FM] in March of this year, I said ‘You know what? Let’s get that back up and dust it off’.”
For nearly six months now, Old Capitol has helped local organizations market both online and through more traditional mediums. Although the company’s videos have already garnered hundreds of thousands of views on social media, the business offers a multitude of different services to help organizations better reach local audiences.
“Old Capitol Productions provides a number of different services,” said Reynolds. “We offer social media management, content production, graphic design, and I’ve also added video services as well. I still produce radio commercials for clients, and at the moment I’m working with a couple of big clients out of Augusta. I do producing for a lot of television and social media video content, so I’ve taught myself how to use Adobe Premiere and have actually gotten pretty good at it in the past six months.”
Although the business has only been active for a short time, Old Capitol has already helped spread the word about several local businesses and nonprofits. After just a few months of operation, the business already counts music festivals, major health care providers, and museums among its clients. Reynolds even offers emcee services, equipment and coaching for event and multimedia presentations, utilizing his immense talent for public engagement for the benefit of his clients.
“I do big projects and I do small projects, from filming recitals to shooting television commercials,” he said. “Whatever you need done, I can do it. … If I had to narrow it down to one thing, I’d say my specialty is creative content. Anyone can post on their business’s Facebook, but if you really want something that’s going to be engaging, it needs to be visual and ideally it needs to be video-based. That’s what we see as being the latest trend online — people will watch videos if they catch their attention. Some of these videos that I’ve shared are reaching five and six thousand people without spending a dime.”
After years of working in the radio business and serving the city of Milledgeville as a member of City Council, Reynolds has gained a newfound measure of freedom in being able to set up his own schedule. This past week alone, he has produced videos for the Antebellum Inn, Beverage Depot and the Deep Roots Festival, constructed theatre scenes for the Baldwin High School Fine Arts Department, and travelled to Atlanta to help GeorgiaForward, a statewide nonprofit that promotes leadership and economic development, put on its annual forum. With such a vast array of different skills and a price point well below similar businesses in larger cities, Reynolds has created a business model that can assist nearly any type of business, organization or event.
“I’m really glad to be able to help people reach a changing audience,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, your audience was in traditional media: billboards, print, radio, television and all your traditional places. Now, people spend so much time on their phones that the phone becomes their television. To be able to reach people in a way that’s compelling on that device, you have to do it with the media that they’re spending the most time with.”
By Chris Landa, Former Sr. Director of Content Partnerships at YouNow
As news of Studio71’s lawsuit against Bethany Mota broke, an aspect of the lawsuit most spectators focused on is the alleged diva behavior of Mota’s “Dadager” Tony during the deal. Many people reacting to the news brought this up as the reason behind the collapse, while other more experienced professionals felt this was a weekly occurrence in the influencer marketing world that finally managed to get publicity.
While the verdict on Mota’s case hasn’t been given, and will most likely be settled out of court, it’s raised questions regarding representation in online video. Below are the four different types of representation in online video along with insight into each.
360° Managers:
A “360° Manager” is the same as a manager in traditional media with one notable exception: they often negotiate deals themselves. These managers have an exclusive relationship with talent, work with them on all matters relating to their career and help shepherd their career forward.
Even if the 360° manager is employed by a company and isn’t independent, the talent only pays the 15-20% commission to the manager and the expectation on the talent’s side is that the number one priority of the manager is their career. An interesting trend over the last few years is for Multi-Channel Networks to have a department for 360° managers, most recently evidenced by Studio71’s hiring of longtime independent manager Naomi Lennon.
Pros: A 360° manager can be worth their weight in gold as they often take the majority of the non-creative work off the creators plate and are a trusted ally in making sure they can continue their career growth in a way that allows them to be creative and happy.
Cons: As with YouTube and each emerging platform since, 360° managers with no real experience (or experience at all) often approach talent as they see an opportunity to establish themselves and make money. As a 360° manager is the biggest investment talent can make in their careers (15-20% of all earnings), talent needs to carefully vet any potential manager and make sure they know their experience, reputation and personality before signing with them. Additionally, there should not be a contracted term in the management agreement, which is something many new and inexperienced managers insist on.
Multi-Channel Network Managers (MCN Managers):
As Multi-Channel Networks formed and signed talent to their networks, the companies built out departments in order to provide customer service and other promises aligned with the company’s offering to talent at the time, such as channel optimization, promotion and brand integrations. The people working in these departments were often called Talent Managers or Partner Managers, which was never initially meant to include opportunities outside the ones provided by the company.
As time passed, many talent considered their MCN Manager their overall manager, as they didn’t fully understand what the role meant. As MCNs started offering more than their initial offering, including touring, merchandise, custom programming and more, more talent has decided to stick with their MCN Manager as their only form of representation. An interesting note is that often larger talent has both a 360° Manager as well as an MCN manager, who in that case is mainly maintaining and facilitating the relationship between the talent, the 360° Manager and the company.
Pros: If an MCN Manager is prioritizing the talent, they can often help bring more brand deals and revenue opportunities due to the company having fully staffed sales, distribution, touring and merchandise teams. Additionally, the MCN Manager gets no fee from any deal outside their purview unlike an Agent.
Cons: Typically, an MCN takes a 30-50% margin on all incoming deals, so if they handle any deal that is brought to talent, the talent is paying a larger amount to representation than normal. Another issue is that the loyalty of an MCN manager is ultimately to the company and not the talent, so if push comes to shove talent may have someone they perceive as their closest ally talk them into something they may not want to do.
When looking at the relationship between MCN Managers and 360° Managers, it’s important to note that many of the best known 360° Managers started as MCN Managers before taking the leap and going solo.
Agent:
The role of an agent is pretty much the same as in traditional media. The agent procures and negotiates deals, as well as helps talent move into new areas of the entertainment industry such as film and television. The biggest difference is that in traditional media an Agent (or an Entertainment Lawyer) negotiates all deals on behalf of talent, while in digital 360° Managers may negotiate as well.
Pros: They can expand a talent’s career and open up new opportunities for revenue and exposure. Since talent agencies were started by focusing on film and television and are the heart of those industries, they are also best positioned to help talent make the jump to traditional media.
Cons: While some Agents have really helped establish some of the biggest stars in online video, there are talent that have found little value in being represented by an agency. As some talent have 360° Managers to negotiate on their behalf, and have little desire to enter film or television, there may not be much value to being represented by an entity taking at least 10% on every dollar made even if they weren’t part of the deal (which may or may not include platform earnings such as AdSense). While agencies typically charge 10% for their services, that percentage may increase depending on the type of deal they do.
As a lot of young talent rises to internet stardom, parents, significant others and friends often times occupy various roles for talent. While this can be extremely helpful to emerging talent, there are often times where the people stay on in the assigned roles for longer than they should.
While I know wonderful managers that are related to the talent or grew up with them in some way, I have also ran across a lot of talent with poor management as a result of being overly loyal to friends and family. Looking back at the Mota case, there’s a lot of claims that may or may not be true, but there is a general stereotype against this type of manager that makes them easy to gossip about (rightly or wrongly).
Pros: Who knows the talent better than their friends, family or significant others? Also, who’s willing to invest their time and effort into the talent before the talent has established themselves?
Cons: Often times this type of representation has a lack of experience and hasn’t been trained properly for what can be a huge job. They also may not understand the industry or what behavior is acceptable. They can really dent the reputation of talent and turn people off of working with them.
Overall, there’s quite a few different types of representation in online video that offer different services for talent. While the above is a breakdown of the 4 different types of representation, there are variations in most cases to percentages and other details as no industry wide standard yet exists.
Chris Landa (Pictured) most recently served as the Sr. Director of Content Partnerships at YouNow, where he worked with top talent and brands to maximize their presence on the platform. With a wide range of expertise around brand integrations and original content featuring creators, Chris recently launched Transparent Influence, a company focused on accountability and transparency in Influencer Marketing.
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by Superior Farms Posted: Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 3:22PM EDT
SACRAMENTO, Calif.– Capturing the pastoral story of ranching life and the family commitment to the animals it raises, Superior Farms released its latest digital short. Shot like a film and featuring Ryan Mahoney and the Emigh family, the three-minute piece provides an intimate window into the daily life of a lamb shepherd and one family’s deep-rooted connection to the land.
Anders Hemphill, Vice President of Marketing Brand Strategy for Superior Farms, has led production of the series. “It’s one thing to talk about our ranchers as stewards of the land, but it’s another to really capture it and then share it,” said Hemphill. “We’re proud to work with family farms like the Emigh’s throughout the western states and we believe that by sharing their stories through videos like this one, people will gain a better understanding of where their food comes from and the kinds of people who are raising that food,” added Hemphill.
The video, “Life Comes from the Farm,” located at http://superiorfarms.com/our-ranchers/ captures Mahoney, his 6-year-old daughter, and his 87-year-old grandfather, at work on the Emigh family’s ranch. “The core philosophy of the business is to put the animal first; it’s a long-term investment. Sustainability is at the core of what we’ve been doing as a family for 150 years,” says Mahoney. “We pride ourselves on working quiet and working correctly and making sure that that animal has the strongest, healthiest, happiest life possible. You make sure that things are held together because it’s your obligation to your crop, your family, your community and your country.”
Superior Farms, founded in 1964 with headquarters in Sacramento, California, is North America’s largest processor and marketer of lamb. The company is the recognized leader in the retail and foodservice markets it serves. An ESOP Company (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), Superior Farms is an employee-owned company whose 400+ members take pride in their individual roles and contributions to the company’s success. The Superior Farms’ family of brands includes, Superior Farms, Cascade Creek and Farmer’s Mark.
Appealing to the decision-makers of tomorrow, the millennials, is an increasingly complicated challenge for marketers, particularly those working across B2B businesses.
According to
research, 84% of millennials do not trust traditional advertising. Given that they have matured at a time when it’s
possible to simply fast-forward through television ads, and they are more likely to see sponsored social media posts on their phone than notice billboard advertisements, this is unsurprising.
Millennials have grown up surrounded by innovative technologies—also making them much harder to impress—so how can B2B businesses reach these decision-makers of tomorrow?
The ‘B2B consumer’
In 2017, the consumer is king. This factor has also impacted B2B marketing, with marketers now tasked with appealing to the
individual decision makers in businesses; in essence, the “B2B consumer.” Marketing has entered the era of specialization and niche messaging; a single marketing message is no longer
enough. Adding further complication, the generations rising up the ranks to become decision makers know which
marketing appeals to them; that is, marketing that genuinely values their interest, and not just their money.
Capturing the attention of B2B
consumers demands that organizations create stories that align themselves with industry innovation. The insurance industry has managed to do this particularly well with smart devices such as telematics
and wearables, despite not typically being considered an early adopter of new technologies. This tactic is advantageous in industries that focus on the discovery and development of something new such
as pharmaceuticals, where this means a new drug or medical device. For these industries, it’s important to align the company with broader innovation by promoting regular breakthroughs, as a part
of a B2B consumer marketing approach.
Digital natives, and other B2B consumers, don’t want to be bombarded with marketing buzzwords, they want stories that engage them.
Accordingly, B2B marketers should favor a more story-driven approach spread across a variety of media. For example, internet video traffic is predicted to account for 82%
of all consumer internet traffic by 2021. Whereas video it is not currently heavily used by B2B marketers, it is vital that they develop a narrative-focused, immersive marketing strategy using
platforms like video to their advantage.
Marketing pharmaceutical innovation
Individual “big” pharma businesses have long been focused on
their own individual successes. However, many are starting to understand the need to promote the progress of the whole industry to their B2B consumers. But in targeting a millennial audience, to truly
differentiate, then businesses need to actively contribute to moving innovation forward within the industry.
Currently, with big pharma continuing to labor under a productivity
deficit — 45% of its total forecast
revenue comes from external sources — fostering industry innovation is crucial. Our company is playing a part in steering industry development through a start-up project. This virtual
hub offers a platform to the most innovate start-ups selected from over 100 applicants to promote their own innovative technologies to the pharmaceutical industry while creating inspiring and
insightful stories that can appeal to millennial B2B consumers.
The new face of industry
With businesses battling to meet customer expectations and
overtake competitors, industries are progressing at breakneck speed. At the same time, organizations are trying to maintain their originality in an ever-more technologically advanced world. While
innovation is the way to move forward, there is a growing responsibility to show the rest of your industry how you innovate, and encourage them to do the same. The industry needs to learn how to keep
up now that the context of marketing is changing.
The phrase ‘pivot to video’ now has meme status in the world of media, as a euphemism for when a publisher fires a bunch of journalists in response to disappointing ad revenue.
Fog Creek Software CEO Anil Dash’s joke on Twitter is the most joyful scoff at this phrase: “Horse broke its leg, so we had to take it out back and help it ‘pivot to video’.”
Horse broke its leg, so we had to take it out back and help it “pivot to video”.
Newsweek writer Zach Schonfeld began a recent article with a useful summary of the problem: “There’s a video at the top of this article. I know. I’m sorry. It’s probably set to autoplay too, which means it’ll scream at you whether you want it to or not. (The answer, I’m assuming, is ‘not’.)”
This was not his decision but his employer’s, he added, because “banner ads don’t work anymore, and the solution handed down by frantic media executives is video. More video. Lots of video.”
The pivoting began in earnest last year, when Mashable cut staff to focus on video. In 2017, a slew of publishers followed: Bleacher Report in February, ESPN in April, Fox Sports and Vocativ in June.
Perhaps the most discussed pivoting was by MTV News. Prior to this, in 2015, a team of fantastic writers and editors had been hired, with experience at the likes of Rolling Stone, Village Voice and BuzzFeed. Former Grantland editorial director Dan Fierman had succeeded in turning MTV News into a destination for award-winning reporting.
As Billboard puts it: “At a time when MTV’s television wing was airing ‘Friends’ reruns and episodes of ‘Teen Mom’, the MTV News reboot ushered in by Fierman had shifted to producing widely discussed stories on topics as diverse as harassment at Planned Parenthood, a clinic for trans [military] veterans, and what to say to a friend who has been sexually assaulted.”
But by 2017, MTV had decided that long-form journalism wasn’t what the youth wanted. Average dwell time on MTV.com had risen but unique visitors were falling, even if, as Billboard points out, this was likely partly to do with changes to the Facebook algorithm (with organic content suffering and video flourishing). So, in June 2017, MTV News pivoted to video and all those great journalists were out of a job.
Why the fascination?
The reasons for this fascination with video among publishers are pretty simple. First, publishers are desperately chasing any advertising model that works. And, just as importantly, advertisers (and therefore Facebook and Google) are pretty keen on video.
For many brand advertisers, ads around the outside or in the middle of long-form articles are seen as all too easy to ignore and scroll past, whereas branded video content (or even pre-roll) is thought of as more inspiring – closer to the old-fashioned TV ad experience and what consumers want.
Facebook agrees, and why wouldn’t it? It wants to share in the success of branded video content on its platform, with publishers uploading advertorial-style video on behalf of their advertisers and paying Facebook to promote them.
Facebook recently produced a study saying Facebook and Instagram users are emotionally engaging with video, watching more of it than ever, and expecting to watch still more in the future.
An article by Fast Company refers to this as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Facebook, the anonymously-authored article states, “has been shoving video down everyone’s throats—video is everywhere on our news feeds. So it shouldn’t be shocking that people are watching more video and expect to watch more of it.”
Just because Facebook and Google are championing video doesn’t mean it always delivers value for advertisers.
Here’s the thing: despite all the bluster, few in publishing are particularly confident that video is what the people want from their favourite online publishers.
Survey data from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford shows 71% of respondents across all markets mostly consume news in text form, while 14% say they use text and video equally. The popularity of text holds true across age groups, suggesting the idea that ‘millennials’ want video is a myth.
Indeed, video is often associated with clunky user experience, whether it’s content or advertising. Autoplay videos and pre-roll ads are universally derided, mid-roll ads are even worse (Facebook is reportedly due to cancel an experiment with mid-roll) and everybody knows the annoying feeling of clicking on an interesting headline and finding a video and not a text article.
So what should advertisers and marketers take from this mess? Well, just because Facebook and Google are championing video doesn’t mean it always delivers value for advertisers.
The quality of video content produced by some publishers is still iffy, with slideshow-style imagery and text overlay that seems either automated (there is tech out there that does this) or rushed. Placing an ad is, as ever, all about context, and you want to make sure your ads are seen in places where viewers are happy with the perceived transaction.
Furthermore, this new focus on video may mean that publishers have lowered their standards as to what branded content they will put out there. On Twitter, financial journalist Felix Salmon highlighted a video feature from Wired about Tesla cars, which is nothing more than a glorified advertorial. Brand advertisers may feel they can take advantage of publishers’ laxity, but this is missing the point entirely.
There are media companies out there producing great video. The Washington Post is doing interesting things with vertical video on mobile, for example (though is a bit of an outlier, as a well-funded publication). Successful subscription businesses, too, such as the New York Times, are able to innovate without pandering to the advertiser.
One thing seems clear: the pivot to video is just the latest attempt at finding a publishing revenue model that works. As Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffrey tweeted: “Pivots, more often than not, aren’t led by real audience strategy. It’s chasing an ad [demographic], or dream of a [demographic], like a cat chases a laser.”
5/ Pivots, more often than not, aren’t led by real audience strategy. It’s chasing an ad demo, or dream of a demo, like a cat chases a laser pic.twitter.com/gkbYft4q0D
Marketers are always going to partner with publishers to create content, but now more than ever they have to make sure that they produce stuff (video or otherwise) that readers actually want to consume. Ultimately, rationalisation is necessary whatever the format, to make sure content and context represent quality.
Ben Davis is senior writer at Marketing Week’s sister title Econsultancy.
Hugh Hefner on the Esmaralda yatch during the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2001. (AFP/Getty Images)
The year was 1955, and science fiction author Charles Beaumont had, by most accounts, crossed the line with his latest short story.
“The Crooked Man” depicted a dystopian future where homosexuality was the norm, heterosexuality was outlawed and angry anti-straight mobs marched through the street chanting “make our city clean again!” Even the relatively progressive Esquire magazine had rejected the piece because it was too controversial.
But Beaumont found a fan in a young Hugh Hefner, who agreed to run it in his Playboy magazine, then less than two years old.
Outraged letters poured in to Playboy. Even readers of the pioneering nude publication found Beaumont’s tale of straight people dressing in drag and sneaking into dark barrooms to find partners too offensive for their tastes.
Hefner responded to the backlash in a defiant note. “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society,” he wrote, “then the reverse was wrong, too.”
The move would serve to represent an early example of Hefner’s lifelong commitment to gay rights, and civil rights in general. Hefner, who died Wednesday at 91, prided himself as an advocate for the LGBT community, taking public stands on high-profile issues such as sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and transgender rights well into his later years.
The anecdote about “The Crooked Man” was little known until 2009 when it was highlighted in “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel,” a documentary on Hefner’s civil rights advocacy. The film expounds on Hefner’s efforts to promote black writers and artists, expand reproductive rights and resist racial segregation. It won praise for showcasing a different side of the celebrated libertine and media mogul, though some criticized the documentary for glossing over the more controversial aspects of his legacy, namely drug abuse and sexism, while others dismissed it as a shrewd attempt to remake his image as he aged.
Indeed, Hefner’s life was full of contradictions that are sure to be debated exhaustively in the days and weeks following his death. He portrayed himself and his magazine as defenders of women’s rights, but his critics have called him anything but, pointing to his rotating cast of girlfriends, multiple divorces and general objectification of women in the pages of Playboy (“They are objects,” he once told Vanity Fair).
A widely-publicized memoir by one of his former girlfriends, Holly Madison, described a life of manipulation and constant fighting at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner was also accused last year of paving the way for Bill Cosby to drug and sexually assault a woman at the famed estate in 2008. Hefner denied the allegation.
Hefner’s contradictions weren’t lost on The Advocate, a gay magazine that published a wide-ranging interview with him in 1994. Hefner told writer Jeff Yarbrough their magazines had a lot in common in the sense that they were both “anti-discrimination.” Yarbrough was caught off guard.
“What suprises me about that statement is that Playboy and you, of course, are both known as representations of male heterosexuality and, to some degree, the objectification of heterosexual women,” Yarbrough told him. “I’m surprised you recognize the issue of oppression concerning gays and lesbians so clearly at a time when most Americans still don’t.”
Asked if he considered himself a gay rights activist, Hefner responded that he had been a “human rights activist” from the magazine’s inception. He said he had campaigned against the nation’s sodomy laws, which criminalized certain sexual acts. “If the pursuit of happiness has any meaning at all as it is written in the Constitution, the government’s intruding into one’s bedroom, into personal sexual behaviors, is as unconstitutional as anything can be,” Hefner said.
The interview also touched on the AIDS crisis, which “profoundly changed Hefner’s life” in the early 1980s, Yarbrough wrote. Hefner fixated on the disease soon after it was identified, he wrote, and used Playboy to keep a spotlight on the epidemic “with articles that examine everything from the disease’s origins to safer sex practices.”
Hefner told The Advocate: “The only thing ‘wrong’ with AIDS is the way our government responded to it. They are culpable on many, many levels… I have chosen every aspect of human sexuality — and the discrimination that goes along with some of those aspects — as my major concern. Homosexuality and, later, the homophobia that surrounds the AIDS crisis are part of a much bigger picture for me.”
Long before Caitlyn Jenner became a household name, Hefner took something of a symbolic stand on transgender rights. In the 1980s, model and actress Caroline “Tula” Cossey was outed as a transgender woman by the tabloid News Of The World and subjected to a series of intrusive headlines. Playboy helped her bounce back from the ordeal by publishing a photo series with Cossey, making her the magazine’s first openly transgender model.
When the magazine reran the spread in 2015, Cossey thanked Hefner by name, saying the exposure helped her show that transgender women can be sexy. “I wanted to fight for the right of recognition,” she told Playboy. “That was my goal, and Playboy was a great platform for that.”
Hefner came out forcefully in support of same-sex marriage just as a group of marriage equality lawsuits were weaving through the federal court system. In a commentary in the September 2012 issue of Playboy, Hefner, then 86, argued that same-sex marriage was “a fight for all of our rights.”
“Without it, we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time,” he wrote. He railed against people trying to “criminalize your entire sex life,” using language that echoed his remarks to The Advocate decades earlier.
“No one should have to subjugate their religious freedom, and no one should have their personal freedoms infringed,” Hefner wrote. “This is America and we must protect the rights of all Americans.”
Hillary Clinton’s surrogates and campaign aides faced what they called an overwhelming wave of Twitter attacks during the 2016 election cycle — some of it, they’re convinced, driven by Russian bots and trolls.
Now Senate Intelligence Committee investigators plan to ask Twitter representatives on Thursday whether false information spread by Russians accounts made it into real news stories aimed at torpedoing the Democrat’s candidacy, and whether the social media company took any steps to stem the fake news.
Story Continued Below
Thursday’s closed-door briefing in the Senate’s Hart office building is the latest move by federal investigators to probe social media’s role in last year’s presidential campaign, putting Twitter into the same hot seat occupied for weeks by its larger rival Facebook.
Facebook was a natural first target for congressional scrutiny, given its enormous 2 billion user reach and its role as an intermediary between trusted friends and family. But Twitter is also of keen interest to the Intelligence Committee because of the company’s outsize influence in distributing and amplifying news, a source close to the investigation told POLITICO.
Among other topics, the Senate staffers are eager to learn more about how disinformation posted on Twitter found its way into the news. They’re also interested in exploring whether automated Twitter accounts known as “bots” were used to boost the Google rankings of fake or misleading news items.
Senate investigators are inviting Google, Twitter and Facebook to testify publicly on Nov. 1 about attempts by Russia to use digital platforms to influence the presidential race, a Senate aide said Wednesday.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official said the Russian use of Twitter is “consistent” with what U.S. intelligence agencies found in their election post-mortem, which concluded that hackers associated with Vladimir Putin’s regime had interfered in the presidential campaign. That includes “the methodology of using multiple different lanes in an information operations campaign, » said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.
Twitter’s power to influence the news cycle makes it a convenient tool, people who have studied the social network’s role in the election say.
“The fastest way to move a story from outlying media to mainstream media is to promote it on Twitter,” said Clint Watts, a counterterrorism expert and former FBI agent who has studied Russian influence campaigns. “All mainstream media is watching Twitter and it spreads organically from there to other platforms.”
Former Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ann Ravel said tweets from foreign entities intended to cause trouble in U.S. elections should be no less alarming to lawmakers and regulators than the paid advertisements at the center of Facebook’s role in the Russia investigation.
« The sock puppets, the fake accounts cost money,” Ravel told POLITICO. “It’s not just a couple of guys in Moldova. If it were just a bunch of kids doing it for no reason, or a bunch of crazies putting stuff up on the internet, OK, that’s fine. That’s not political ads. But these are political ads: People are being paid to do it. »
Clinton supporters say they sensed early on that Twitter would be surprisingly toxic terrain.
“You’d get dogpiled for days if you expressed support for Clinton,” said one supporter, Brooklyn-based author Sady Doyle, who shared screenshots of critics who lambasted the Democratic hopeful as an “unindicted criminal,” “liar” and “fraud.” Doyle added: “One time I got something that was either a bot or a very bad impersonation of an American Trump supporter because it was a tweet in Cyrillic that when I translated was something like, ‘You are an ugly and bitter woman.' »
But it’s unclear how much help Twitter will offer the investigators.
Facebook showed up for its own Senate briefing earlier this month with a detailed story to tell about how Russian actors had used its site. The company shared seven out of about 3,000 ads linked to a St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency — a level of preparation the source close to the investigation called a “happy surprise.”
That raises the stakes for Twitter, which declined to say what it plans to show Senate staffers. A Twitter spokesperson has simply said the company is cooperating with congressional investigations.
But Senate investigators are coming to the debriefing with specific questions, the source said. Chief among them: What, if anything, did Twitter do to addressbots once it had identified them as potentially malicious?
The prevalence of bots is a known problem on the platform, and researchers at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute found, in a study published on the eve of Election Day, that an estimated 400,000 bots were participating in the conversation around the election during a six-week period in September and October 2016. That represented about 19 percent of all election-related tweets.
The congressional investigators are also eager to learn more about how disinformation posted on Twitter bled into news outlets. This spring, researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology documented “a network of mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites” including Breitbart and Infowars that gleaned content from Twitter.
Moreover, the Senate aides are interested in exploring whether the bot-driven amplification of tweets was used to boost the Google rankings of fake news. Google does not fully disclose how its algorithm works, but in 2010 a company official in charge of search-result quality revealed in a video posted on YouTube that the “organic rankings treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook” as they do from traditional websites. (Google periodically modifies its ranking methods without revealing the extent of the changes, so it’s unclear whether that practice has changed since then.)
U.S. intelligence officials have been closely studying Russia’s interest in tapping social media to fulfill its own geopolitical ends. Areport on Russian election interference that the director of national intelligence issued Jan. 6 concluded that Russian elements enlisted social media trolls « as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. » Those efforts included pro-Kremlin online activists who prepared to mark Clinton’s expected victory by circulating the hashtag « #Democracy RIP. »
Even without foreign meddling, the internet might have remained a hostile place for Clinton. As a candidate, the former secretary of State has often been criticized for what’s judged to be a lack of authenticity, a quality often held in high esteem online. Former President Barack Obama openly joked about Clinton’s lack of online prowess, remarking that “Hillary trying to appeal to young voters is a little bit like your relative just signed up for Facebook.”
But Clinton herself has concluded that the overwhelmingly negative reception she got on the internet was ginned up at least in part by Russians. She dedicated four pages of her campaign memoir to the topic, writing that both Russian publications and independent trolls circulated stories saying she was « a murderer, money launderer, and secretly had Parkinson’s disease » — themes that often quickly found their way to right-wing outlets.
Twitter has long avoided drawing too much attention to the prevalence of bots on its platform. In part, that’s because such artificial accounts raise questions about the company’s already shaky business model. The platform makes money selling advertising in the form of promoted tweets, and shrinking its already stagnant user base by culling fake accounts would make it potentially less attractive to advertisers.
Twitter has defended its hands-off approach by saying it encourages the free exchange of ideas and information, and that journalists, media watchdogs and engaged citizens will push back on fake or manipulated tweets.
But the former senior intelligence official and other observers of the 2016 campaign say Twitter’s response doesn’t address the fact that a sophisticated bad actor — such as Russia — can create entirely new and false narratives by manipulating the size and scale of Twitter activity.
The cybersecurity firm FireEye reported that many hundreds of fake accounts with links to Russian entities were actively posting anti-Clinton messages, especially as Election Day neared.
“And then the day after the election, all of it decreased,” said Frank Cilluffo, a former Bush administration cybersecurity official who testifies frequently before Congress on the issue.
Much of the Russian effort to manipulate Twitter and Facebook was aimed at exploiting controversies over such issues as immigration and police shootings of minorities, according to Cilluffo, who directs the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. “It was more that they were driving wedges into existing cracks in our society, around divisive issues, and trying to provide legitimacy to fringe ideas.”
“And that’s very consistent with the old KGB tradecraft, like [the false rumor] that the CIA created AIDS, but leveraging social media to do it,” he added. “And if it fails, it’s cheap.”
This month, the majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate voted to raise the debt limit without doing anything to rein in spending.
Republican lawmakers are pushing to increase military spending by tens of billions of dollars, topping even Mr. Trump’s request for a beefed-up military. Democrats are sharing in the fiscal intemperance, lining up behind a “Medicare for all” proposal despite having no definitive plan for how to pay for universal, government-provided health coverage.
And as Congress mulls large tax cuts, the tabs for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria keep rising.
Now, the budget office forecasts that deficits will total $10.1 trillion over the next decade. The deficit is expected to top $1 trillion a year in 2022 and keep growing from there. Federal debt held by the public is at the highest level since shortly after World War II, at 77 percent of the gross domestic product.
“I think the greatest threat to our nation is us,” warned Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and a member of the Senate Budget Committee. “The way we handle our finances, we as a nation are the greatest threat to our nation. It’s not ISIS. It’s not North Korea. It’s not ascendant China. It’s not Russia. We are the greatest threat.”
But such voices are strangely quiet these days in Washington. Even Mr. Corker seems accommodating.
Last week, he reached a deal with another Republican on the budget panel, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, to allow a tax cut of up to $1.5 trillion over a decade, helping pave the way for the overhaul of the tax code that is a top goal for Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans. He did say he will not vote for a final tax plan if it would add to the deficit.
The mantra now is economic growth.
“Every Republican I know of is concerned about the deficit,” said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana. “Every Republican I know of is concerned about tepid growth, too.”
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While Republicans denounced the ballooning debt when President Barack Obama was in office, they have much less of a political incentive to dwell on the issue now that their party controls the government.
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“There’s been less talk about it this year with a Republican-led administration than there has been the last seven or eight years,” said Mr. Walker, who bristled at the Senate’s plan for tax cuts that would add to the deficit and said it was imperative that lawmakers pay attention to the debt.
Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said it seems like “fiscal responsibility is more about playing defense than it really is caring about the issue.”
“The party that is the minority, you hear them talk about fiscal responsibility so much more to try to stop the other party from implementing their agenda,” she said. “But then when that party gets in power, and you’re seeing that now, they’re more likely to throw those fiscal concerns to the wayside in order to implement their agenda without having to face any of the hard choices about how to pay for things.”
Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, said his party deserves blame. He warned that the United States could wind up facing an economic collapse akin to that in Venezuela, adding that Republicans in the House and Senate had not demonstrated that they possess “the intellectual understanding of the dangers posed by these deficits and accumulated debt.”
Mr. Trump, who has called himself “the king of debt,” may be setting the tone.
During his presidential campaign, he insisted that he could eliminate the national debt in eight years, even as he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, programs that are projected to consume an ever larger share of federal spending as the country’s population ages.
After Mr. Trump struck a deal with Democrats on a short-term debt limit extension, Representative David Schweikert, Republican of Arizona, asked, “In this entire discussion, how many members have you heard, how many from the White House said, ‘We’re in the middle of a demographic crisis that’s going to crush us in just a few years; let’s get to work on it’?”
He left unsaid the answer to his question: Not many.
The change in tone on fiscal matters has been swift. This spring, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, asserted that the tax overhaul needed to be revenue neutral, citing the nation’s debt and invoking Mr. Trump’s Democratic predecessor.
“We added an enormous amount of debt during the Obama years,” Mr. McConnell said.
Now, Republican lawmakers are betting that economic growth will fix the nation’s fiscal woes with no pain and a lot of gain.
“The only way we’re going to solve our long-term debt and deficit issue to allow the federal government to have the revenue it’s going to need to fund all these promises made is with strong — and I mean strong — economic growth,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and a member of the Senate Budget Committee. “You’re not going to achieve that with an awful tax system.”
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Mr. Kennedy, another member of the budget panel, said Americans have to have faith.
“If we do it right, then the economy will be stimulated appropriately and tax revenues will go up and the deficit won’t increase,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Now, I can’t prove to you that that will happen. But neither can anybody else.”
President Donald Trump was put into the highest office in the land in part by women who “voted against their own voice,” according to former First Lady Michelle Obama. As seen in the below video, Michelle spoke at the Inbound marketing conference in Boston, and she had a lot of information to share about the Trump administration and the women who voted to help put him there. Although Michelle told the audience that the Obamas “want the sitting president to be successful,” it was hard to leave the White House knowing that a “peanut gallery of people” would be taking over.
President Trump’s female voters “voted against their own voice” because they looked at Trump and said, “He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.”
In the wake of the Access Hollywood tape making the news, wherein Trump was caught on tape telling Billy Bush that he grabbed women and kissed them without asking and could “grab ’em by the p****,” CNN reported hearing from women who voted for Trump that they didn’t agree with Trump’s words, but they didn’t care enough to change their votes to Hillary Clinton. On the campaign trail, many female Trump voters simply said they didn’t like Hillary.
Michelle said that a vote for Hillary shouldn’t have been a focus on what it meant for Hillary — but what it meant for women at large. However, Obama said that for women to look at Trump and Hillary and to say to themselves that Trump was better for them and that Donald’s voice was truer than Hillary’s voice, those female Trump voters must not have liked their own voices. Instead, Michelle said that women who voted for Trump like the things that they are told they should like, instead of being independent enough to listen to their own voices.
“You like the thing you’re told to like.”
As reported by Boston.com, Obama was speaking in a question-and-answer session with Roxane Gay at the Inbound marketing conference. During the event, Michelle criticized Trump’s “America first” rhetoric. Obama not only focused on the women who voted for Trump, but she also joked about what it was like to spend the last night in the White House when her girls requested a sleepover. Michelle also spoke about both her and former President Barack Obama writing books about their experiences.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama. [Image by Jason Bahr/Getty Images]
The New Hampshire company that makes Velcro hopes the message in its new marketing video will stick as well as its products. The video features actors portraying trademark lawyers pleading with the public to refer to other “scratchy, hairy” products as “hook and loop” fasteners. CEO Fraser Cameron says he wants people to know there’s a difference between Velcro brand products and others. Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer in the 1940s after he studied burrs that stuck to his dog’s fur and his wool pants. It has been used on everything from spacesuits to diapers.
Nights
at the Museum
The Exploratorium is hosting a month of events called Field of View related to virtual reality and other high-tech experiences. As part of the program, VR movie “Collisions” by artist Lynette Wallworth takes viewers to the indigenous people of a Western Australia desert; it is shown on Thursday evenings and on weekends. Reservations are needed, though tickets to the film are included in the museum entry fee. Also Thursday evening, a series of presenters will help the audience “tour the inner and outer edges of new media experiences.”
Tweet of the day
“Facebook was always anti-Trump. The Networks were always anti-Trump hence, Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) @wapo were anti-Trump. Collusion?”
— The president, days after
Facebook
agreed to provide material to congressional investigators probing Russia interference in the 2016 election. (He added: “the people were Pro-Trump!”)
Facebook shares Wednesday closed up 2 percent at $167.68.
From San Francisco Chronicle staff and news services. See more items and links at www.sfgate.com.
