During last year's midterm elections, Lisa Kaplan, digital director for Maine Sen. Angus King, established a new-age war room to ward off the kind of online disinformation that dogged the 2016 race, Kaveh reports.
Driving the news: Now, three years after the 2016 mess, Kaplan has set up a firm focused on helping 2020 candidates protect themselves from online bad actors.
- Hers is one business in a growing field selling weapons to defend against online disinformation.
- This burgeoning industry is beset by problems, experts tell Axios, crowded by some products that don't do the job at prices that are so wildly different that, at least for now, a lot of campaigns are choosing to go without protection.
- But, Kaplan says, the crisis is too urgent not to push past the current headaches. “To not have these defensive measures set up is, in my view, negligent.”
The threat includes everything from deepfakes — digitally manipulated videos that can make it look like candidates said something they didn't really say — to social media campaigns that make it seem like a fringe view is broadly held.
Against this, campaigns are inundated with vendors claiming the secret sauce. Solutions run from simple dashboards that show spikes in online chatter about a candidate, at a cost of $3,000–$4,000 a year, to custom monitoring, training and communications strategies reaching $300,000 a year.
- "There are a lot of people offering snake oil, so it's hard for campaigns to make decisions on what to invest in," says Jiore Craig, a vice president at GQR Research who advises democratic campaigns on disinformation.
- "Campaign operatives are put into paralysis by fear," says Melissa Ryan, a consultant who works on disinformation issues.
Some political consultants — and, of course, the vendors offering expensive treatments — argue the services are worth it.
- "Piecemeal information can be distracting, discouraging and even damaging," Craig tells Axios.
- Kaplan, whose Alethea Group is one of the high-end providers, says human analysis brings in crucial context. "To use only technology is incredibly short-sighted," she says.
Several firms told Axios they're in talks to sell their services to presidential campaigns.
- The seven highest-polling Democratic campaigns declined or didn't respond to interview requests.
- For its part, the DNC — which uses an inexpensive tool to monitor online chatter about candidates — said the onus is on campaigns to protect themselves.
The bottom line: It can be hard to make room in campaign budgets, which historically have no line item for battling online mobs, for untested tech and services. "You're working with limited resources and you're being pulled in so many directions," Ryan says.
- The DNC tells campaigns they can accomplish a lot with free or cheap services, and one prominent expert has told 2020 campaigns to stay away from expensive counter-disinformation products.
- "It's an extraordinary amount of money to get information that they fundamentally cannot act on" because the damage has already been done, the consultant tells Axios.
Go deeper: The 2020 campaigns aren't ready for deepfakes