Anons look at the digits of post, the mark of the beast comes up with News for Democracy, something makes me think this is the next big DIG and exposure. DIG, MEME and PRAY on this one
More from Atlantic article in News for Democracy
The videos are testimonials, in essence, for protecting one of the key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which would have been weakened if the failed Republican attempt to “repeal and replace” the act had succeeded. During the midterm season, this has been a tough issue for Republicans.
—If you were shown one of these ads and took the initiative to try to learn about the page running the advertising (say, Better With Age), you’d find precisely nothing in any page’s “About” section except that it was self-described as a “Media/News” organization. Moreover, Facebook offers no information about News for Democracy or any “ad sponsor.” News for Democracy has no website, no contact page, no email.
So what is “News for Democracy”?
—Buried in unrelated Google results, you’d find an item from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay, which linked together a series of Denver LLCs that were sponsoring ads on Facebook: Three of these entities share a Denver P.O. box with two other LLCs, one of which, Beautiful Colorado, features a video starring a man named Dan Fletcher. Fletcher, a media-industry veteran, co-founded a company, MotiveAI, with fellow Vice alum Kirsten Frisina (since departed). A Markay source tied the company to News for Democracy. He also reported that LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman is a backer. The company has raised $10 million in venture capital.
—In an interview this week, Fletcher acknowledged to me that MotiveAI, working with outside groups, is behind News for Democracy. He said that his company is trying to reach people who don’t trust mainstream media and who find themselves awash in deceptive sources. Using audience, engagement, and polling data, they’ve tried to find people who might be open to liberal counterpoints pushed into their feeds.
—There’s an all-out battle against the truth and facts from both inside and outside of the United States,” Fletcher told me. “We know that the battle against truth isn’t going to stop, and interventions like this are important to ensure that many online communities who are prone to misinformation or no longer trust legitimate media sources can be reached with real news and good facts that they may not see otherwise.”
—MotiveAI employs video editors as well as Adam Mordecai, a key early employee at Upworthy, and, according to its HR page, works “with a small group of amazing clients to spread ideas that create political change.”
—In the past month, News for Democracy has become MotiveAI’s primary means of purchasing ads, subsuming the other entities. Meanwhile, News for Democracy has become a player in the online political-ad market on a par with any other organization in the country, including all the super pacs, candidates, and other known political entities.
Three weeks out from the 2018 midterms, we still know very little about the financial backing, operation, or ultimate goals of one of the biggest political-ad purchasers on Facebook in the run-up to the election. It’s not perfectly clear what News for Democracy is trying to build. Is it simply pushing individual-issue ads in key states, or is the organization trying to amass information on voters, which it can use in subsequent campaigns?
—Anyone who watches one of these videos for more than 10 seconds can be added to a Facebook “custom audience” and can be targeted with future ads. So if someone wanted to reach older women in Arkansas or younger men in Kansas who respond strongly to health-care messages, News for Democracy’s owners could do that now. They can create similar audiences with any number of content-type, age, gender, geography, and interest markers. Then, using the data they’ve gathered, they can use Facebook’s tools to find “look-alike” audiences that would, nominally, respond similarly.
—With a little gumption and some savvy, News for Democracy and MotiveAI easily evaded Facebook’s system for making political ads more transparent.
—Given that LLCs are opaque and can pop into and out of existence, there is no formal mechanism for figuring out who is pushing what agenda.
Though Fletcher maintains that his funding comes from Americans, it’s easy to imagine a hypothetical in which it does not. Let’s say MotiveAI had substantial Chinese or European investors. That foreign involvement could very easily be laundered through an American starting an LLC—even better, a thicket of LLCs that would make it more difficult to connect different purchases
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/the-secretive-organization-quietly-buying-millions-in-facebook-political-ads/573289/