The Morning Dispatch: Facebook, Twitter Grapple With Campaign Disinformation

Happy Friday! No TMD on Monday—try to tune out for a bit and enjoy your long weekend. We promise to get you caught up on the latest come Tuesday morning.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 36,105 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 4.9 percent of the 734,181 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,081 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 186,785.

• The stock market had its worst day since June on Thursday, with declines in the share prices of blue-chip tech stocks causing indexes to plummet.

• President Trump doubled down on his Wednesday suggestion that Americans should try to vote in multiple formats for the same election yesterday, tweeting that supporters should both mail in ballots and attempt to vote in person in order to test the election system and ensure their vote is counted. Such double voting, as many state election officials pointed out, would be a felony. 

• Michael Reinoehl, an Antifa supporter who claimed to be the person who shot pro-Trump activist Aaron Danielson last week in Portland, was killed last night as authorities attempted to arrest him, the New York Times reported. Agents on the scene claim Reinoehl had a gun on him as he left his apartment and entered a vehicle, though that has not yet been confirmed. Further details were not yet available.

• Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have tentatively agreed to a short-term spending bill, putting to rest the worrisome possibility of a government shutdown at the end of September. Republicans and Democrats remain locked in a stalemate over the details of the next COVID-19 relief package.

• Facebook announced that it will not allow any new political ads starting a week before Election Day. The company also said it will restrict posts that presented President Trump’s comments about double voting without proper context.

• Joe Biden visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Thursday to meet with community leaders and with the family of Jacob Blake, whose shooting by police sparked protests and riots. Before the visit, Biden had called for charges to be filed agains the officers who shot Blake and the Louisville, Kentucky, cops who killed Breonna Taylor.

• The number of initial unemployment claims fell from 1.01 million two weeks ago to 881,000 last week, according to the Department of Labor.

The Election Disinformation is Coming From Inside the House

In his excellent March feature story for The Atlantic, McKay Coppins wrote that the Trump campaign and its allies “are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history.”

This week saw several high-profile instances of that disinformation campaign in action. And they likely won’t be the last.

On Sunday night, Dan Scavino—the White House director of social media—shared a doctored video from his personal Twitter account featuring a TV anchor attempting to wake up a sleeping Joe Biden to begin an interview. The clip—which went out to Scavino’s 939,000 Twitter followers, was based on a 2011 KBAK broadcast, but removed necessary context, swapped Biden in for activist and singer Harry Belafonte, and piped in artificial snoring noises. It was viewed more than 2 million times before Twitter labeled it as manipulated media and eventually took it down due to a copyright complaint.

A day later, Biden delivered a speech in Pittsburgh looking to flip the script on the Trump campaign’s law and order narrative. “Since they have no agenda or vision for a second term,” the former vice president said, “Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating: ‘You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.’ And what’s their proof? The violence we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s America. These are not images of some imagined ‘Joe Biden America’ in the future. These are images from Donald Trump’s America today.”

One of the Trump campaign’s Twitter accounts clipped video of Biden delivering one sentence from the remarks—“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America”—and blasted it out to its 805,000 followers, context-free. Twitter again labeled the post manipulated media, prompting users to click through to a fact check. “To all the triggered journalists who can’t take a joke about their candidate, it’s not our fault Joe Biden was dumb enough to say this on camera,” the campaign said in response to criticism. The video remains up, and has been viewed nearly 1 million times.

It’s not just online. The Trump team has been airing TV ads all summer accusing Biden of wanting to defund the police—despite Biden time and time and time again denying that charge. Republicans point to Biden’s affirmative answer when asked by an activist—Ady Barkan—if he agrees with “redirect[ing] some of the funding” from police departments to social services as justification for the spots. But Biden, in the same interview, said “that’s not the same as getting rid of or defunding all the police,” and his campaign platform has called for more than a year for making a “$300 million” investment in the Community Oriented Policing Services program that “authorize[s] funding both for the hiring of additional police officers and for training on how to undertake a community policing approach.”

Political ads are often misleading, intended to push narratives and paint opponents in the worst possible light. A Biden campaign ad from December, for example, increased the volume of the laughter Trump faced following a boast at the U.N. General Assembly. But there really is no comparison between the two campaigns when it comes to how tethered they are to the truth. And this asymmetry is making life difficult for social media platforms looking to enforce their standards neutrally.

In the past week, Twitter has flagged the aforementioned two posts, plus an ad from Rep. Steve Scalise that inserted words into Barkan’s mouth (he speaks with a computerized voice because he has ALS). Yesterday, both Twitter and Facebook—which has historically been more lax with political content moderation—limited the spread and visibility of Trump’s own comments encouraging Americans to vote twice in November, once by mail and once in-person. “We do, in fact, remove misinformation around the process of voting, the timing of voting, place of voting, designed to get people to essentially not vote or not vote correctly,” an official on the Facebook security team told Declan last week.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a host of sweeping changes yesterday that will go into effect ahead of November. The platform will prohibit new political and issue-based advertising in the seven days leading up to the election, limit the amount of people you can forward messages to at one time, expand its policies to prevent voter misinformation or suppression, and label posts of any candidate who tries to declare victory before all ballots are counted.

Some of these moves are aimed at foreign adversaries—Twitter and Facebook just this week announced takedowns of accounts tied to Russian officials and the Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence bulletin yesterday saying Russia is seeking to “amplify” criticism of mail-in voting to “to undermine public trust in the electoral process”—but others are, in all but name, aimed at Trump.

We asked the president’s campaign where they view the line between satire and disinformation, and whether tech platforms’ new guidelines are being enforced fairly. They responded to one of the questions.

“Social media companies’ biases consistently make the strongest arguments for the President’s Executive Order on Section 230 reform,” campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso said. “It’s preposterous that Silicon Valley, the bastion of diversity and liberalism, is terrified of intellectual diversity and conservative voices.”

Macron Seeks to Aid Lebanon. Will It Help?

Lebanon celebrated its centenary earlier this week, but there isn’t much cause for jubilation in the Middle Eastern country. Just weeks removed from the ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut that killed nearly 200 people, economic and political instability continues to run rampant. In a piece for the site, Charlotte catches us up on the latest.

Last time we checked in, much of the Lebanese government had resigned in the unrest following the Beirut explosion. What’s happened since?

Prime Minister Hassan Diab did resign from his position in a flurry of scandal after the explosion. Lebanon appointed its new prime minister, diplomat Mustapha Adib, on Monday. As a widely unknown former chief of staff and ambassador to Germany, Adib begins his tenure in a very difficult political environment. The new PM carries the weight of his status as one of Lebanon’s despised political elites, but lacks the name recognition and public profile necessary to legitimize his position of authority in a fractured country that has proven difficult to govern for most of its existence. 

To Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and North Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Adib feels like a band-aid solution. “Adib is a creature of the political class. He is a French-educated lawyer who was an advisor to former PM Najib Mikati before becoming his chief of staff in 2011. He was rewarded with being appointed Lebanon’s ambassador in Berlin,” he told The Dispatch. “He most certainly does not represent the kind of change that the Lebanese are hoping for and they are rightly skeptical that he will undertake much needed reforms or that he will pave the way for change. Basically, the Lebanese political class is playing for time with Adib’s appointment.”

French President Emmanuel Macron visited Lebanon this week. What was he doing there?

While the footing of Lebanon’s political elites remains tenuous, French President Emmanuel Macron stepped in to fill the vacuum created by the sectarian Lebanese government’s lack of unifying leadership. Macron visited Beirut to plant a cedar tree—the emblem adorning the Lebanese flag—in a symbolic gesture denoting the revival of the Lebanese state. “When a country disintegrates, you never know when it will be reborn,” he mused.

To push his policy of “rebirth,” Macron offered Lebanon a choice: succumb to potentially irreversible financial ruin, or fully restructure the form and function of the current government. In exchange for implementing a series of French-directed reforms addressing issues as varied as COVID-19, corruption, elections, and energy, Macron agreed to lobby for desperately needed international aid to Lebanon at a donor conference to be held in Paris next month. “Lebanese people, you are like brothers to the French. I promise you: I will come back to Beirut to take stock of the emergency aide and help you build the conditions for reconstruction and stability,” the French leader tweeted on Tuesday. Lebanon is currently seeking $20 billion in financial aid to recover its bankrupt economy and rebuild its capital after the devastating explosion that left tens of thousands of people homeless.

What’s the historical relationship between the French and the Lebanese?

Macron’s strings-attached humanitarianism carries an unsettlingly familiar ring. Beginning September 1, 1920—the date celebrated in Tuesday’s centenary—Lebanon fell under French control as a part of the League of Nations mandate system. France gave up its mandate in 1943 but didn’t withdraw occupying troops from the country until after World War II in 1946. A century after the establishment of Greater Lebanon, France still holds greater leverage in the country than other Western powers. To some, the French jets flying overhead in the recently shell-shocked city of Beirut felt less like a gesture of support than a distasteful reminder of France’s historical dominance in the region.

Worth Your Time

• You’ll probably be hearing a lot about this story over the next couple days, so why not go ahead and brush up now? Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, published a piece last night with a startling claim sourced to four anonymous White House officials: During a 2018 trip to France, President Trump begged off a visit to a cemetery dedicated to U.S. soldiers on the grounds that it was “filled with losers.” This, Goldberg contends, was part of a pattern of similar comments in which Trump disparaged or seemed disgusted by American troops who were wounded or killed in action: “In a 2018 White House planning meeting for [a military parade], Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. ‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said.” President Trump has strongly denied the claims; several other outlets, including the Washington Post and AP, say they have independently confirmed them.

• For the last few decades, conservatism and environmentalism seemed to go together like Deepwater Horizon oil and water. But young conservatives are more likely than their forebears to view climate change as a serious threat, signaling the rise of a new era of policy dedicated toward environmental sustainability using limited government solutions. These climate activists face a dilemma, however: For many young progressive environmentalists, climate policy is inextricably tied to utopian, Green New Deal-esque policies that are designed to climate change as a means to achieving their democratic socialist ends. In National Review’s September issue, former Morning Dispatcher Nate Hochman argues that there’s an alternative to centrally planned environmental policy that blends free market solutions with subsidiarity and stewardship. “Where the Left’s environmentalism seeks to destroy and transform,” he contends, “the Right’s environmentalism seeks to cultivate and preserve.”

• After a significant shortage in recent weeks, the polling floodgates finally opened on Wednesday. In a helpful piece in the New York Times, elections and polling expert Nate Cohn breaks down how the race has (or hasn’t) changed since the conventions and the recent law and order news cycle. “Mr. Biden maintains a lead of around seven to eight percentage points among likely voters nationwide, down from a lead of eight to nine points heading into the conventions,” Cohn writes. “In a direct comparison, an average of the new polls showed Mr. Trump faring a mere seven-tenths of a point better than polls by the same firms conducted in early August before the Democratic National Convention.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Since George Floyd’s death in late May, the country has been hit with an unrelenting wave of urban unrest. But why have things spiraled out of control in so many cities for such an extended period of time? Read yesterday’s French Press (🔒), for David’s insights into why “quelling unrest is one of the most difficult jobs in all of politics and policing,” and for a deeper look into why it emerges in the first place.

• Yesterday’s Advisory Opinions podcast went deep into the weeds on the latest presidential polls before delving into the temperamental differences between city life and suburbia, the president’s memorandum on combating lawlessness in America’s cities, and a primer on time, place, and manner restrictions on the First Amendment. 

• Cato Institute Senior Fellow Scott Lincicome has joined The Dispatch! Be sure to sign up to receive his economic policy-focused newsletter—Capitolism—in your inbox when it launches.

Let Us Know

How do you typically celebrate Labor Day weekend? Have your plans changed at all this year because of, well, everything?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James P. Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).