“Official voter guide,” read letters sent to voters in seven battleground states ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
By presenting undeniable comparisons of the applicants’ perspectives on key issues such as abortion, education and democracy, confident readers had “asked researchers to delve into the backgrounds, statements and votes of local applicants in the primaries legislative”. elections. ” questions, and then provide that data to voters like you, so they can make an informed choice on Election Day.
Given that they were produced through My Voter Information, an assignment from Forward Majority Action, a dark money organization formed in 2017 to elect Democrats to state legislatures, it’s no surprise that those letters have a strong political focus.
Nor is it unexpected that, for six of the seven states, most of the documents “dug” by researchers to build those cartoonish profiles of the candidates were easy-to-find fruits, such as the candidates’ crusade and their social media posts. , those from relevant advocacy groups, and online stories from local television stations or newspapers.
Exceptional advertisements covering races in Michigan.
Analysis of 92 emails shared on Forward Majority Action’s Michigan page revealed 69 quotes from the Main Street Sentinel, a mysterious, short-lived, quasi-local news site aimed at Michiganders on Facebook, garnering more than 100 million impressions in ten months thanks to an unaccounted ad spend of more than $1. 4 million.
The Main Street Sentinel included 3 virtual entities: a website, a Facebook page, and an Instagram account, all created in February 2022.
The Facebook page, which is classified as a “broadcasting and media production company”, was created on February 7, 2022, and the first post was published on February 24, 2022. Its Instagram page only shows that the account has been created. February 2022, and the first visual publication of August 14, 2024 is dated March 1, 2022.
The domain of the online page was registered on February 17, 2022, according to ICANN’s Whois records. The Wayback Machine’s last screenshot of a running online page is dated February 8, 2023. It now redirects to an Archie template page from Teal Media, a platform that promises “time-of-time, budget-limited” Internet sites for “big guys. “non-profit organizations with small initiatives. ” Teal’s clients come with Courier Newsroom, the local partisan network of the liberal dark money organization Acronym.
The Main Street Sentinel was obviously designed to exploit Facebook’s targeting capabilities. According to data from Meta Ad Library, between $1,215,000 and $1,665,689 were spent on classified ads for the page between February 25, 2022 and November 18, 2022. (The Meta Ad Library provides a figure of $1,412,891, which it describes as “the total estimated amount of cash this advertiser spent on classified ads on social, electoral or political issues. ”
It turns out that this expense allowed Sentinel to be offered to many Michiganders. Meta’s Ad Library provides minimum and maximum numbers of ad impressions: the “number of times an ad was shown on a screen, which would possibly include insights through it. “people” and the approximate location of Facebook users who won the classified ads. According to this data, Main Street Sentinel classified ads gained between 108. 5 million and 123. 9 million impressions, 99. 4% of which were in Michigan (approximately 107. 9 million). Another measure One of Michigan’s successes is that California ranks second with around 61,000 impressions.
Sentinel’s first advertising crusade began on February 25, 2022, with 30 classified ads for ten items. These can be grouped into 4 thematic groups:
These classified ads, which charge $8,900, earned 1,078,000 impressions, according to metaknowledge. The 27 listings for which the Meta Ad Library supports regional knowledge were viewed exclusively by users in Michigan. (The Meta Ad Library does not support location awareness for classified ads with fewer than 1,000 impressions. ) As a result, Facebook delivered over a million impressions to this fake news operation within 4 days of its first post.
The Main Street Sentinel gained some attention in the early and final days of its short life, much of which highlighted the opacity around its property.
On March 27, 2022, Axios discussed it as part of a report on Real Voices Media, an organization responsible for “a vast network of social media communities in battleground political states that can activate ahead of elections and political fights” . , Axios wrote: “It is not clear who the site is. Its indexed publisher, Star Spangled Media LLC, was formed last month [February 2022] in New York and lists a registered agent service as its sole principal.
Shortly after, on April 11, 2022, the conservative news site National Review covered the Sentinel with the headline “Your Favorite Facebook Page May Be a Trojan Horse for Progressive Propaganda. ” The report calls Sentinel “an online page whose appeal screams small-town news, but it is a left-wing propaganda site that offers a heavy dose of Democratic spin and White House talking points. “
A month before Election Day, the Sentinel was cited in an investigation co-published through the Substack Statehouse Action and FWIW newsletters, the latter of which has long-standing ties to Courier Newsroom. FWIW is led by Kyle Tharp, who held communications positions at Acronym and Good Information Inc. , and is now national general manager of Courier Newsroom. FWIW is now indexed as a Courier Newsroom newsletter.
In presenting a positive view of the Sentinel, the FWIW/Statehouse Action authors said: “Of all the states holding competitive congressional elections this year, Democrats and their allies appear to be conducting their most complicated virtual operation in Michigan. “
They added:
Candidates, the state party and outdoor groups are attacking Republicans across the state with abortion-related ads.
Over the past 90 days, the top spender on Facebook political classified ads in Michigan wasn’t Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s crusader or a primary national advocacy group.
Rather, it was a hard-to-understand progressive virtual political organization called the Main Street Sentinel. The liberal site, affiliated in some ways with a progressive Facebook network called Real Voices Media, has spent more than $700,000 on classified ads supporting Democrats running for state legislature and other offices.
Continuing his summary of increased virtual ad spending around Michigan’s declining election, he noted that Forward Majority Action Michigan had “introduced new ad campaigns on Facebook attacking Republican applicants from the negative side. ” Three of the classified ads submitted through Forward Majority Action Michigan in September and October were posted on myvoterinformation. org.
Shortly after, weeks before Election Day, NewsGuard featured Sentinel along with Courier Newsroom, the American Independent, and Metric Media in a report detailing about $4 million in political ad spending on Meta platforms. They also noted the difficulty of understanding where it came from and reported: “The Main Street Sentinel claims on its online page that it is owned by Star Spangled Media LLC, [however] the group’s classified ads on Facebook and Instagram imply that they are ‘paid for by the Main Street Sentinel’ through The Main Street Sentinel, a call that does not appear in any state advertisement and which provides the ads with a patina of journalistic authenticity. NewsGuard’s findings drew more policies from Bloomberg’s Davey Alba, under the headline “Meta Makes Millions from Political Ads. “From fake ‘Pink Slime’ newsrooms. ” Alba noted a connection to Democratic strategist Will Robinson, first reported in Axios’ March report, but added, “The other investors are not known, however, the site has published several articles with President Joe Biden and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a beneficiary.
To date, nothing has been reported about how Main Street Sentinel works outside of Meta platforms.
Forward Majority is a super PAC created in 2017 to assist Democratic applicants in state legislative elections. It is affiliated with the Forward Majority Action PAC and has many state-specific derivatives. Forward Majority Action Michigan was the largest recipient of the Forward Majority Action PAC’s budget during the 2022 election cycle, according to Open Secrets.
When the super-PAC was introduced in 2017, Politico wrote, “The Forward Majority’s style includes targeting more races than local parties or state caucuses are more likely to achieve. The purpose is to shift the cameras from the hands of the Republican Party to the hands of the Democratic Party, employing costly cruising tactics rarely used in this type of local election, adding polls and message tests.
According to OpenSecrets, Forward Majority earned $4. 1 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the shadowy organization with a history of deceptive investment media operations such as the Main Street Sentinel. As Anna Massoglia reported:
In 2018, the Sixteen Thirty Fund sponsored social media pages and virtual operations for five pseudo-local media outlets in 3 states. They gave the impression of being independent from the others, but they promoted themselves with almost the same virtual advertisements.
Facebook pages operating under the auspices of the Colorado Chronicle, Daily CO, Nevada News Now, Silver State Sentinel and Verified Virginia gave the impression of several independent local news outlets with names and disclaimers. But the sponsors of those classified ads are just fictitious names. used through the Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to data from virtual ads and incorporation records from the Washington D. C. government.
In the 2022 midterm elections, the Target States page in ForwardMajority. org stated, “Forward Majority Action excites Democratic applicants in several key target states.
The 8-state target pages, available through the Wayback Machine, showed a breakdown of that state’s “program information. “This included Forward Majority’s target districts, a breakdown of the subset of the electorate it would target, the virtual classified ads they would be targeting with (usually via YouTube), and the accompanying strategy for physical mail.
The Michigan Postal Strategy, dated Oct. 27, 2022, 11 days before Election Day, states, “We will send mailers to the electorate with a midterm turnout rate > 5, with supporters in the middle between 30 and 60. ”
In addition to the five dates on which other letters would be “delivered” (ranging from October 5 to 28), Forward Action attached PDF files of the letters it would send to the electorate to meet its target criteria.
A total of 92 pieces of mail were sent to Michigan, the same number for any of the 8 target states.
All record names followed the same pattern:
[State]-[Mailroom Number]-[House and District]. pdf
e. g. , MI-M01-HD22. pdf (Michigan-Mail Piece 1-House District 22)
Each letter followed the same fundamental formula of contrasting the positions of Republican and Democratic applicants on three key issues (e. g. , women’s health/abortion access, water quality, education/public schools, environment, public safety, and taxes). for each one.
To give an example, data on Senate District Nine candidates’ perspectives on women’s fitness indicated that Democrat Padma Kuppa “opposes efforts to ban abortion and will enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade into state law,” while her Republican rival, Michael Webber, “has the support of a far-right anti-abortion organization and opposes women’s access, even if they are victims of rape or incest. He even voted to limit access to contraception.
The 69 Main Street Sentinel subpoenas, all similar to Democratic candidates, were distributed in 38 Forward Action letters. Of those, 57 were discovered in 26 mailers covering House elections in six districts. The other 12 gave the impression in 12 letters covering Senate elections in 3 districts.
Of course, this means that some candidates’ profiles cited the Main Street Sentinel several times. On the higher end of the scale, the five mailers covering the 83rd House District race between John Fitzgerald (D) and Lisa DeKryger (R) relied on the Main Street Sentinel for all three statements about Fitzgerald’s policy positions.
Another curiosity is that the URLs of the Sentinel articles followed the same “[House and District]” naming convention used for the PDF files of the Forward Majority emails. For example, where the Forward Majority letters selling Fitzgerald were MI-M01-HD83. pdf, MI-M02-HD83. pdf, etc. , the URLs of the articles cited as evidence of his perspectives on key issues were:
We don’t know if Forward Majority Action has any connection to the Main Street Sentinel. The organization did not respond to requests for comment.
What we do know is that they were incredibly willing to leverage that as part of a targeted influence operation. The fact that this supposed news site has been continuously cited in physical mail to augment and spread narratives through an expensive virtual advertising crusade shows something of another undeniable application of this election tactic.
We also know that the Main Street Sentinel is remarkably consistent with a strategy of leveraging virtual platforms for localized data warfare that Forward Majority laid out in a “Plan for Power” in January 2022.
Arguing that the Democrats’ superseded virtual playbook had given Republicans carte blanche to influence persuasive audiences by addressing them with localized political narratives, this document had many echoes of the notorious memo Tara McGowan sent to Acronym stakeholders outlining her vision for what the Courier Newsroom would become. .
The timing of the “three accelerators for building power” defined in the Forward Majority document, titled “Long-Term Storytelling and Branding with Key Audiences,” described what Democrats perceive:
A replaced textbook cannot compete with right-wing propaganda: Array. disinformation and propaganda.
This is followed by a solution vision, which can be summarized above all in a strategy to fight fire by fire:
Opportunity to break through by creating a local narrative and logo: To counter this, especially in the Republican trio states, Democrats want a local communications operation that is just as ruthless, but more astute and opportunistic. in the electorate – and long before the election season begins – we will need to help reshape local political narratives in our target constituencies. This includes an accountability statement that highlights incumbent Republicans’ record on unpopular legislation, strengthens the local Democratic logo, undermines the GOP logo, and highlights the impact of state legislatures on people’s lives. Democrats have focused too much on targeting and not on content. This means that we know who to talk to, but much less how to speak as best as possible to move emotions and achieve electoral objectives. What is needed are next-generation approaches to content research, testing and delivery, leveraging earned and paid media. In particular, this local logo culture and strategic communication has the potential to not only influence local elections, but also drive winning narratives and shift partisan affinities from below that can influence the broader electorate.
The Main Street Sentinel looked like a disposable Courier-lite. It focused on a competitive swing state; had a strategy to identify the compelling electorate and spent significant amounts of cash to microtarget them through Facebook ads; He stressed the importance of addressing the electorate with a small number of localized political narratives.
Speaking after Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, McGowan called local partisan news unparalleled in its ability to help Courier achieve its overtly political goals. In particular, McGowan hinted that Courier’s beloved network may simply be some kind of short-term political endeavor:
In fact, I wouldn’t have invested in a local news network if there were models that were starting to gain traction and succeed in covering that territory and countering misinformation at the local level. I’m just not the one willing to twiddle my thumbs and In the meantime, we’ll watch democracy die if there are short-term answers that can be implemented on a giant scale.
In the same interview, McGowan described the expensive but effective quest to “commercialize. . . news content for audiences in those narrative deserts” and “publish it on the news sources and platforms where they spend their time. “
Although the seven-figure announcement puts it on the more expensive end of the spectrum, it can be argued that the Main Street Sentinel is a manifestation of McGowan’s reasoning taken to its logical conclusion.
Active for less than 12 months, it is a short-term solution. With at least 108 million impressions, it has been deployed at scale. Using Facebook’s targeting features to succeed in a pre-identified segment of compelling constituency in an express location, those were marketing narratives targeting micro-targeted audiences on the platforms they spend their time on. And while its total spending of about $1. 4 million is closer to what Acronym would have spent each week in the run-up to the 2020 election, it is still, to use McGowan’s words in the same interview, “incredibly expensive. “
The Main Street Sentinel case shows the extent to which platforms allow deep-pocketed political influence operations to contaminate geospecific data streams on a giant scale. In this case, a new page with a logo is capable of generating more than a million impressions in a specific state within 4 days of its first publication. At the time of its dissolution, having met its political goal, it had amassed at least 108 million impressions in less than 12 months.
Figures like these explain why this trend shows no signs of slowing down.
Earlier this year, studies conducted through Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub showed that teams with ties to Russia had used generative AI to cover up pro-Kremlin narratives on fake local news sites with names like DC Weekly, Miami Chronicle and New York News Daily.
The emergence of such sites suggests that the appetite for polluting the virtual news ecosystem with political narratives disguised as news remains strong.
The Main Street Sentinel case only highlights the enduring appeal of this style or the blatant hypocrisy of outfits that claim to be driven by a commitment to strengthening democracy while undermining journalism and degrading the news ecosystem. It also highlights the lack of interest on the platform. corporations to do something about it.
The gap between the ease with which political actors can flood the ecosystem with data and the ease with which citizens bombarded with it (and researchers interested in examining it) can identify its provenance may be wider. Of course, it all comes down to money.
While we can get an idea of how many times the Sentinel managed to infiltrate Michiganders’ Facebook feeds, we can’t know if they were successful in convincing voters.
But we can be sure that if their operators succeed, they will have something similar in the works before November 5, as countless contemporaries of all political persuasions did.
Whether your platform of choice is Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or even the print version, we’ll be keeping an eye out.
The Tow Center maintains a list of partisan and politically supported news sites here. Includes main points about individual networks, copies of physical mail that has been sent, and existing searches on individual networks. If you get physical mail, have examples of similar networks. operating in your area, or if you would like more detailed data, please contact us here.
The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, a partner of CJR, is a think tank that explores how generation is transforming journalism, its practice, and its admission, while seeking new tactics for judging trustworthiness, standards, and credibility. of online information.
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