Who Influences the Influencers?
Mary Harris: If he’s being totally honest, Ben Wofford isn’t really on the Internet. He doesn’t have a TikTok or an Instagram. Okay, so you’re a digital Neanderthal. But even Ben has found it hard to miss the way politicians and the people who work with them have started to cultivate the people who use the apps he so assiduously avoids.
Speaker 2: I think it was Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, in one case that comes to mind that filmed some clips with a TikTok star.
Speaker 3: One sec. Democracy’s calling you Daddy, baby. Hi. My name is Cooper, and this is a day in my life as a White House intern.
Speaker 2: I think his name is Benny Drama.
Mary Harris: Yeah, he was pretending to be the White House intern.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, exactly.
Speaker 3: Jenny, I’ve watched you an appointment, love. Yeah, I didn’t tell you to do that. It’s called the initiative.
Mary Harris: This influencer wasn’t just at the White House to have a little fun, though. He did that. He was there to sell the president’s agenda. Spreading the word about COVID vaccines.
Speaker 3: Here’s my man. We need to get shots in the arms of every single American. I’m heading to a haircut.
Mary Harris: And it’s not like Beni Drama was the last influencer who made his way to the West Wing. Back in the spring, the White House became a punchline after they invited social media content creators to a special briefing on the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 4: People are saying this is a first war foreign ticktock, which is tough for me because I’m the last line of presidents.
Mary Harris: Saturday Night Live loved this.
Speaker 4: What would you do about Ukraine?
Mary Harris: And I would go up behind the Russian tanks and go, Morning, coffee. Morning. How did you get here today? You flew me first class from California and on the plane. It’s so easy to roll your eyes when you hear stories like this. But Ben, today is going to do everything he can to convince you to look at this moment as one of fundamental change. His article for Wired about the rise of social media influencers in politics is called Meet the Lobbyists Next Door.
Speaker 2: And of course, it’s not just the White House, right? I mean, there’s lots and lots of evidence that the Trump campaign was an early, early adopter of this, let’s call it a technology and messaging technology. In the 2020 election. We’ve turned to influencers and they’ve accrued more and more power as people report feeling more and more alone. Our parents grew up in the age of like hokey, silly TV ads that end with, you know, this ad was paid for by Senator Joe Manchin. You know what? If our children grow up in an era where that kind of archetypal cultural experience of politics is actually felt through influencers.
Mary Harris: Today on the show, a look inside the growing web of everyday people who are trying to sell you political ideas. You might not even know they’re doing it. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to What Next? Stick around.
Mary Harris: When Ben Wofford wanted to figure out how social media influencers were transforming the world of politics, he knew just where to go. A firm that calls itself urban legend, urban legend was founded by a guy named Ori Reinhardt, who is key to understanding the way political salesmanship is changing. We’re not grew up in Queens, New York, went to Columbia, studied history and political science. He got a law degree, too. And then he moved down to Washington to work in The Atlantic’s business department. Reinhardt’s job was to figure out how to make a Legacy magazine viable in Internet era. He did that by pioneering the sponsored content movement, where companies and brands would pay to run editorials in reputable publications.
Speaker 2: So, you know, early on, Reinhardt is part of a team of really smart people trying to keep magazines alive, but doing it in a way that blurs the line right between who the speaker is, what is veritable editorial information, and what is paid for.
Mary Harris: Then he landed a job in the Trump White House as the director of digital strategy.
Speaker 2: And what’s so interesting about Renard is that he’s not a raging partisan. If you listen closely to his back story, you know, grows up in New York, goes to Ivy League schools, works in legacy elite media. You know, his closest parallel is like a Jared Kushner Republican. If you spend time with him, he’s not pounding on the table, reciting MAGA talking points. His politics are a little inscrutable. And while he’s working at the White House as the director of digital strategy, he’s taking on a number of interesting projects that aren’t not themselves inherently political. He’s working on coronavirus dot gov and managing some interesting portals for the opioid epidemic. But one of the interesting things that happens while he’s there is he and some staffers at the White House cook up this idea for the White House social media summit. And that’s an early sign that we’re not and other people at the White House are thinking about influencers.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Please sit down.
Speaker 4: I want to thank you all for being here. A very special day, very important day. Many of your friends and many of your friends and I don’t know what you look like, but I know what you sound like, which I guess is probably more important. Right. But I want to thank you.
Speaker 2: And it was an event at the White House in July, that summer, I think several, certainly several dozen. I think actually maybe hundreds, like almost 200 influencers. You know, digital leaders in conservative politics show up at the White House and these include, you know, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. They include James O’Keefe, the Veritas founder, and just a bunch of others.
Speaker 4: And I don’t know if you call it influence. I don’t know if you call it power. But whatever it is, we’re in the White House and we’re going to stay in the White House and we’re going to get our agenda done and completed beautifully.
Mary Harris: And you. At the time, was it seen as kind of silly?
Speaker 2: I think that it was at the time seen as intriguing, and I think it was seen very early on as something that potentially had upside. You know, this is a strange media landscape where if, you know, 15 million people tune into the nightly news. Right. Well, 30 million people might follow any given influencer. And so it’s a tremendous amount of power, right, to send your messengers out into the Internet and fan them out and have them deliver a message almost directly from the White House that’s in this 1 to 1 relationship that the influencer social media dynamic affords and provides.
Mary Harris: So listening to you talk, I can really kind of understand the point of view of this guy or not and how he came to the idea of influencers being important. He eventually left the Trump White House. He started this. This firm urban legend. How did he carry forward what he’d learned other places to become this political branding machine?
Speaker 2: Yes. Overnight realizes that if he can recreate that room at the White House. Right, 200, 300, 400 influencers and build them into sort of a stable of people who are in his employ, you can create a really powerful messaging service for hire. So what he does is he builds a platform, an internal proprietary platform called the Exchange. And if you’re on the exchange right, you can bring together influencers of almost any variety or type who he has vetted for quality control to make sure they’re reaching the right number of people.
Speaker 2: And on the other side of the exchange are clients, whether it’s a campaign, whether it’s a super PAC, whether it’s a think tank, you know, a big pharma lobby, you name it. And you can bring these two people together where the influencers can sell their services on this exchange to anybody who has a political message to sell.
Speaker 5: I’m the author of a forthcoming book on climate optimism, and I’m so excited to share this unique opportunity for climate activists around the world.
Speaker 2: And it’s quite clever insight that you could basically bring a campaign to the table. And the campaign will tell you we are trying to reach, you know, white suburban moms outside of Philadelphia. Here is our message. How can we tailor this specifically to the people we’re trying to reach and we’re not? Team at Urban Legend can say, hey, this is perfect. We have 100 influencers who can tailor this message to exactly the demographic that you need. We have a dozen influencers in the makeup artist vertical. We have a dozen influencers who are mommy bloggers. We have a dozen influencers who are giving great cooking tips. We have exactly the perfect sculpted, branded intermediaries that can reach exactly with incredible precision the target audiences that the campaign wants to reach.
Mary Harris: And the campaign only has to pay. If these influencers actually convert someone to do exactly what they want them to do. Right.
Speaker 2: Right. So that’s where not second big insight. Right. Which is that he can jump ahead in this world of cutthroat political marketing by only selling the message on a commission basis. Basically, what makes him this exchange that he’s built really exciting to campaigns is that he’s lowered the cost of the message. Whereas before, imagine it just like a TV ad, you have to sink $1,000,000 into a blanket TV ad, right? You know, that reaches the whole Philadelphia market. Well, that’s expensive. And you don’t know if it’s going to reach the people that you want. We’re not comes along and says you just pay for the eyeballs that these influencers get you.
Mary Harris: I was surprised by how little it takes to become a, quote unquote influencer. Like urban legends has micro-influencers with people who have fewer than 100,000 followers and even nano influencers, people with fewer than 10,000. Which is kind of interesting to me that like you can be so small and yet still be considered influential.
Speaker 2: It’s so interesting. And that’s the third big insight that we’re not has when he’s building his firm, which is that it’s not the size of the following, it’s the strength of the bond. Right. And this is what he is selling. This is the heart of the model.
Mary Harris: He’s selling trust.
Speaker 2: They’re selling trust. But they’re selling a type of trust that’s. Really nowhere else on the Internet. And arguably nowhere else in political messaging. And you can delete these posts. You can sort of wash away any evidence that you were involved in political messaging once the campaign has run its course. And so you don’t have to be remembered or thought of as sort of a political agent. You can really stay on brand once the campaign is over and can retain your sort of aura as a neutral mommy blogger or a neutral makeup artist or whatever your brand is.
Mary Harris: And the kinds of influencers we’re talking about, like you talk about there’s a 23 year old climate activist in Texas who’s one of the people on Urban Legends list. She’s got, you know, 49,000 followers on TikTok. And, you know, she may push a progressive, you know, agenda. And then you have a Philadelphia area attorney who gives financial advice. And she’s got 1700 followers on Twitter and she convinces people to sign up for a credit union. So it’s these people with really diverse followings and really diverse interests completely.
Speaker 2: And, you know, this is the key is one you know, I keep saying he has a rich stable, but it’s an army, really. I think it’s now about 800 influencers that just cover every conceivable aspect of life on the Internet. I mean, he has makeup artists, he has NASCAR drivers, he has doulas. He has stars from The Real Housewives. He has at least one NFL quarterback.
Mary Harris: Give me an example of some of the campaigns that this firm has run.
Speaker 2: So we’re not clients totally run the gamut. They have campaigns that are as totally banal and apolitical as Alzheimer’s awareness. Right. Or signing people up for credit unions. They have issue campaigns as beneficial as, you know, bills that are meant to protect endangered species or climate justice. They have, of course, importantly, some left wing clients, including campaigns, to elect Democratic secretaries of state or to raise the minimum wage for nurses. Right. And so you can see quickly how this is a powerful technology for potentially for Democrats and liberals.
Mary Harris: But Republicans are using urban legends tools a little differently. When we come back, why undisclosed influence or lobbying could be a cause for concern?
Mary Harris: About a year ago, Ben Wofford and some other reporters noticed a bunch of influencers running what seemed to be coordinated campaigns, and they were disturbing lots of anti-vaxx and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Basically, the kinds of things a straight laced political marketing firm like urban legend would rather not be associated with. But this stuff was using urban legends. Same tactics. Not just that, but it all seemed to go online after the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Basically, the Republican Senates fundraising wing purchased a huge ad buy half a million bucks.
Speaker 2: It was firebrand hardcore MAGA political messaging, you know, by a sort of meme Army talking about ending mask mandates. And, you know, that vaccines are tyranny and talking about a, you know, secret collusion between Biden and big tech. I mean, sort of using a lot of the volcanic language of the MAGA meme army. And one of these posts actually was by someone as young as 16 years old. But when you clicked on these means, you know, unsuspecting people would click the link and it would take them to an email harvesting form. Right. And if you followed that email harvesting form to its origin, you would quickly see that it was sponsored by the NRC.
Mary Harris: If I was a follower of any of these people who are influencers for hire, would I know that they were posting something that was different from just a normal like, here’s something I like or here’s a campaign I’m into. Like, Would I know the difference?
Speaker 2: In some cases you might. But we found in many, many cases. No. You would not be able to tell that you were influencer is getting paid to post.
Mary Harris: Why does that trouble you?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it should trouble everybody. It’s one thing to be paid as a political spokesperson for a campaign to reach your audience. But if you’re going to do that, it is something that should be disclosed. And that’s a norm that we have in most of our politics. You know, I talked to one digital messaging professor at Berkeley who said, look, I have no problem with people getting paid. But if you’re going to do it, you need to disclose that you have a conflict of interest.
Mary Harris: A little bit of digging proved what Ben suspected. These toxic campaigns could be traced right back to urban legend.
Speaker 2: One of urban legends subsidiaries, one of their clients. Turned over to us documents that basically had this digital fingerprint, this sort of digital key at the bottom. And if you understand how that key works, you can unlock all of your notes clients in the summer and fall of 2021. And so we were able to unearth, I think, about 700 political posts by these influencers and with pretty high confidence interval, see who was buying them.
Speaker 2: And it was a fascinating window into this early moment at the dawn of influencer politics.
Mary Harris: What did you learn? What was the main thing you took away like? Was it about which political party is being most aggressive in this space? Was it about what kind of campaigns are being put up with influencers?
Speaker 2: So first of all, conservatives seem to be outnumbering liberals. They seem to be more aggressively using this technology and seeing the potential to change the political discussion space. But the second thing is not just the numbers of difference between conservatives and liberals. It’s the tone. It’s the substance of what’s being posted. So Democrats were more likely to post sort of earnest messages about, hey, guys, we really need to raise the minimum wage for nurses. You know, click here to support hardworking health care workers or, hey, guys, voting rates are really under attack right now. We need your help, you know, stand up for voting rights. Sort of banal appeals like that. The conservatives, on the other hand, are talking about really fire and brimstone, kind of acid angry.
Speaker 2: Right. Apocalyptic message branding. Right. That’s like the heart of Republican populism. And so, you know, I can read some of these to you if you want. Woke communism is rewriting our nation’s history while destroying the very institutions that teach the values necessary for preserving America. The radical left is using our children to turn America into a marxist nation. Save our borders. Thousands of illegal aliens are pouring into America. The border crisis is out of control.
Mary Harris: So listening to you, I don’t think urban legend is the problem. I think social media is the problem and urban legend is the symptom. Like the problem is that we have this situation where we’re all being encouraged to kind of present ourselves as brands and advocate for something publicly. And this is just taking advantage of that. And I personally don’t know if there’s a way to fix this kind of marketing if you want to fix it, or if you see it as problematic, while social media still exists in its current form.
Speaker 2: No, I think you’re right that as long as social media is here, these types of problems are here to stay. There is some good news here because in the immediate sense, there are ways to address this. And the number one thing we can do is enforce disclosure.
Mary Harris: So say hashtag ad after all of these.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Or being even more direct, you know, saying directly into the camera. Right. Who you are and how much you’re getting paid. But, you know, that requires enforcement from agencies that have been weakened thanks to a decade and a half of regulatory weakening in the federal government. The FTC is supposed to regulate deceptive trade practices, and they have a rather elaborate set of rules around this very, very new space. But because it’s so new. There’s a big question mark over the enforcement of these rules that say an influencer has to disclose either in their message if they’re filming a video, either in their posts saying hashtag sponsored or hashtag disclosed. Right. They have to make it clear to their users in some way that this is paid speech.
Mary Harris: Is anyone policing that?
Speaker 2: We found no cases of an influencer being fined or punished for failure to disclose, and we found hundreds of cases where influencers on the exchange were not disclosing that the links they were posting were paid usually by political think tanks. And in fact, we unearthed, I think, around 700 posts of some of Ranaut’s influencers. And in only one case that we found did someone use the disclosure rules that the FTC requires by putting hashtag disclose at the end?
Speaker 2: So the issue is that it’s not just a matter of enforcement. Right. It’s also a matter of guidelines. And, you know, the guidelines from the FTC around this are kind of murky. Is a anger post about immigrants rushing over the border. Click this link. Is that selling a product right that falls under deceptive trade practices, or is that political speech that falls under the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission? And this is a question that falls into this kind of crevice between the FTC and the FTC. And in a lot of these cases, it’s actually not clear who should be regulating this. So the easiest thing we could do is just make people aware that they’re getting a political message. And that’s not going to solve this bigger problem of a lack of trust. It’s not going to solve this bigger problem of political money. That itself is undisclosed. Right.
Mary Harris: But it’s a place to start.
Speaker 2: It’s a place to start. And the like. Immediate beachhead you could reach maybe in the next five years is this medium is basically expected to grow very large, very fast, you know, before the next presidential election is an Internet where we are savvier consumers, where we are savvier users. You know, we all have been a culture to understand when a political ad comes on TV that that’s a political ad. We can sort of have our guard up. We can be skeptical. Right. And we can hopefully be critical thinkers. Right. What’s concerning is if you don’t know that your makeup artist influencer is talking to you about a bill while she’s putting her lipstick on because she really believes it or because they were paid.
Speaker 2: Now we’re in a world that looks closer to the sort of Russian disinformation efforts where we’re sort of supposed to not be able to tell what’s been paid by powerful forces, sort of beyond our apprehension and what really constitutes earnest civic discourse in the public square. These social media platforms were founded on the idea, idealistic as it was, that these are the new civic squares that you and I and any user are on equal playing footing, being able to debate the important ideas of the day. That’s the credo, right, of of something like Twitter. And the real potential damage of something like this. Until we saw the disclosure problem is that people stop being able to tell what’s a really earnest political idea being offered and what was bought and sold.
Mary Harris: Ben Wofford, I’m super grateful for your time. Thanks for telling me this story.
Speaker 2: Oh, it’s so much fun. Let’s do it again sometime.
Mary Harris: Ben Wofford is a writer. He is based at Stanford Law School. He’s also a contributor to Wired. All right. That’s the show. If you’re a fan of what you’re hearing, you like, what next? The best way to support our work is to join Slate. Plus, going over to Slate.com, slash, what next? Plus, to find out how what next is produced by Alan Schwarz, Mary Wilson, Carmel Delshad and Madeline Ducharme. We’re getting a ton of support right now from Anna, Rubanova, Anna Phillips and Jared Downing. We are led by Alicia montgomery and Joanne Levine. And I’m Mary Harris. I’m about to go on a little tiny vacation. Lucky for you, Mary Curtis is going to be in the host’s chair for the next little bit. And I will catch you on the other side.
