Malarkey Factory: Everything you need to know about Joe Biden’s online war room
Joe Biden's campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that's largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Donald Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election. The effort, internally called the "Malarkey Factory," consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it's resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is "creepy" and that he is "sleepy" or senile. In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages. The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state. "Our theory of the case has been that we need to find and identify the misinformation that is actually moving voters, even if it is a small number of voters, then find who those voters are and see if we can intervene," said Rob Flaherty, the campaign's digital director and head of the Malarkey Factory. "There's misinformation that inflames a base. There's misinformation that persuades people. And there's misinformation that suppresses a base."
While it is increasingly easy to determine where disinformation is coming from, given the proliferation of online tools, the trickier challenge is figuring out whether it's shaping voting behavior and merits a response. "The real dilemma of misinformation, from a campaign perspective, is that in the vast majority of cases, the correct tactical thing to do is nothing," said Matthew Hindman, an associate professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a study on misinformation during the 2018 midterms. "There is a very real risk that you will take a nothing story that nobody has heard of and raise its prominence and give it oxygen." And given the speed of social media, that decision often has to be made within minutes. When a conspiracy theory emerged that Osama bin Laden was never really killed - and Biden and Obama had Navy SEALs executed to cover that up - Biden's campaign felt little need to respond. The deeply implausible fabrication might affect some potential Trump voters, Biden staffers concluded, but would not affect the types of voters they were trying to attract.
https://www.iol.co.za/technology/software-and-internet/malarkey-factory-everything-you-need-to-know-about-joe-bidens-online-war-room–c38499d6-8da4-43ef-9cb0-742904752710
Wonder if Little Mike Bloomberg has a hand in this. Mike currently sells proprietary equipment and data for Wall St stock markets. He also owns a company called Hawkfish, which does exactly what Biden has going here..Wondering if Mike repeated the model he uses for Wall St, with Big Tech or Big IT. Biden and Mike models of Malarkey/Hawkfish are quite similar.