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With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are making a final push to convince young voters—a demographic best reached online. Harris got off to a good start, with a honeymoon phase of “brat” and coconut memes on social media (which Mathew Ingram wrote about in this newsletter at the time). Financially, she left a big footprint: one report found that, by the end of August, her campaign and various supporters had spent over $180 million on digital advertising across platforms owned by Meta and Google alone. Spending by the Trump campaign (which has had less cash to work with overall) and its supporters amounted to about a quarter of that.
The Democratic spending spree stood in stark contrast to the 2020 election, when Trump dominated the digital sector. Since then, he has had a series of breakups and makeups with Big Tech platforms. Snapchat, a Gen Z darling and potential goldmine for political ads, is one resource that Trump has opted not to use this time around, according to the New York Times. After the January 6 attack, several major platforms, Snapchat included, blocked Trump’s account for inciting violence and spreading misinformation; other platforms eventually reinstated him, but Snapchat maintained its ban. Tensions rose when Snapchat announced that, despite the ban on Trump personally, his campaign could still run political ads on the platform. “Snapchat REFUSES to reinstate President Trump’s account—but then shamelessly asks the Trump campaign to advertise with Snapchat,” the campaign wrote on X. “Big Tech is all in for Kamala!”
The Trump-size hole on Snapchat has allowed Harris to swoop in and plant a flag: since July, her campaign has purchased more than five thousand ads on the platform, amounting to an estimated $5.3 million, according to Fast Company. The ads have targeted two key demographics: young voters and those in swing states. As Taylor Swift performed in Miami over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee rolled out a Snapchat filter that urged voters to be “fearless” (a reference to a Swift album) on issues like reproductive rights, racial justice, healthcare, and the economy. (The DNC also put up physical billboards in the Miami area.)
If Democrats have outpaced Republicans on digital spending, though, there is one exception to the trend: Elon Musk’s X. “Accounts backing Republican candidates spent three times as much on political ads on X than those backing Democrats from March 6 to Oct. 1,” according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Since Musk took over the platform and reinstated Trump’s account, X has undergone a significant partisan shift. Musk himself has gone all in on Trump and donated $75 million to his own pro-Trump political action committee; according to Wired, the same PAC has paid generous sums to run political ads on X, targeting swing state voters and generating over thirty million impressions, according to X’s metrics. Indeed, throwing money at politics seems to be Musk’s favorite activity lately: over the weekend, he pledged to hand out a million dollars a day via a lottery for registered voters in swing states. Experts have raised eyebrows as to the legality of it all. “The actions that we’re seeing…it violates federal law pretty clearly,” Adav Noti, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, told CBS News. “Actually, I don’t think it’s a particularly close call.”
And, if Harris is winning the money race overall, polls still show a neck-and-neck race. Ultimately, money may not be the deciding factor. We’ve seen this movie before: Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite spending much less than Hillary Clinton. Something similar happened during the Republican primary this year, when Trump spent significantly less on ads than Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis but handily beat both candidates. Perhaps the most consequential debate—at least from the platforms’ point of view—is not over who is spending what on political ads, but whether, and when, to allow them at all.
One very important platform doesn’t allow political ads—at least, in theory. In 2019, TikTok decided that such ads risked disrupting its “light-hearted and irreverent feeling,” and banned them. But it’s a ban that TikTok has struggled to enforce. Just a few weeks before the election, researchers from the nonprofit Global Witness put the political ad moderation systems of TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to the test by submitting ads containing election disinformation. (The ads contained incorrect or misleading information, including claims that people aren’t allowed to vote without a valid driving license and that Trump isn’t eligible to run for president.) TikTok, which approved half of the ads, received the worst grade among the three platforms. “Facebook and YouTube performed relatively well, though there were caveats in each case. TikTok, the only one of the three that prohibits political advertising altogether, did not,” the Washington Post wrote, of the study. (According to a TikTok spokesperson, four of the ads were incorrectly approved during the first stage of moderation but did not actually run on the platform.)
For some other major platforms, the question of whether to run political ads is one of timing. Meta will block new political ads during the final week of the campaign, repeating a policy it first adopted in 2020. Google, for its part, has said that it will temporarily pause political ads after the polls close on November 5, according to Axios—a policy driven by “an abundance of caution” and to prevent misinformation about voting and the outcome of the election from paid amplification. Ads running through Google’s ad-serving platforms, including YouTube and Ad Exchange, will be subject to the pause as well. The decision, from a platform point of view, reflects how the most consequential ads might be those that air after the election and spur chaos around the results, as opposed to pre-election spending.
Other notable stories:
- In yesterday’s newsletter, we noted reports that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the medical entrepreneur who owns the LA Times, had blocked the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Later in the day, CJR’s Sewell Chan reported that Mariel Garza, the paper’s editorials editor, had resigned over the decision. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told Chan (himself a former editorial page editor at the LA Times). “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” Meanwhile, Semafor’s Max Tani reports that the decision “seems to have had at least some immediate impact on the paper’s business,” with internal metrics that he obtained showing that “subscriber churn was nearly twice as high on Tuesday as it was the previous day.”
- Also for CJR, Paul Farhi dug into the Medill School of Journalism’s annual “State of Local News” report, which was published yesterday. “In all, Medill found that 212 of the nation’s 3,143 counties are news deserts, a slight increase from 2023. The more bracing finding is that more than half of the counties in the US—home to some fifty-five million people—are now down to just one local news source,” Farhi writes. “Amid this increasingly barren landscape, there were some green shoots,” he adds, with the report counting fifty-one news startups in the past year or so—though the “vast majority” of these ventures were established in counties “where there is already a strong presence of local news sources,” with most “heavily concentrated in urban and suburban areas.”
- The Washington Post’s Catherine Belton reports that John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff now living in Moscow, is working directly with Russian intelligence officials to pump out disinformation aimed at damaging the Harris campaign. According to some observers, Dougan’s network “has become the most potent source of fake news emanating from Russia and targeting American voters over the past year,” Belton writes, and was likely behind the recent dissemination of a fake video smearing Tim Walz as a sex offender. Dougan has “a clear understanding of what would resonate with Western audiences,” one researcher said. (He denies any involvement in the scheme.)
- Recently, a team led by Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, was in the Darfur region of Sudan after brokering access to cover the country’s civil war, which has led to a massive humanitarian crisis, when a militia detained them and held them captive for forty-eight hours. “As a journalist, one never wants to become the story,” Ward wrote yesterday, in an essay about her ordeal for CNN. “And yet our experience is instructive in understanding the complexities of the conflict in Darfur and the challenges of getting food and aid to those who need it most and getting the story out to the world.”
- And a taxpayer-supported radio station in the Polish city of Kraków sparked controversy this week after it launched an “experiment” whereby shows are “hosted” by AI-generated characters, weeks after laying off around a dozen human journalists. A former film critic on the station launched a petition condemning the move as “a dangerous precedent” for replacing creative workers with machines. The head of the station countered that the journalists were let go not due to AI, but because their listenership was “close to zero.”
