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Silicon Valley billionaires line up behind Biden with their digital might to beat 'Trump's brand machine'

As Biden struggles to adapt to a fully-remote campaigning model, liberal Valley billionaires are tapping into their arsenal of cash to bolster his chances of winning
PUBLISHED MAY 28, 2020
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

Quite a few Silicon Valley billionaires are plotting with the Joe Biden campaign to influence the upcoming November elections. With less than six months at hand, Democrats are scrambling to patch the digital shortcomings of their presumptive nominee for president. However, liberal Silicon Valley billionaires have come to the rescue, and are willing to spend millions of dollars in a bid to catch up to President Donald Trump's notable lead on digital campaigning. According to a report by Vox's digital news arm Recode, these tech titans have plans with the potential to make them some of the country's most influential people when it comes to shaping the November results.

As Biden continues to struggle to adapt to a fully-remote campaigning model, these billionaires are tapping into their arsenal of cash to bolster his chances of winning - helping the Democrat Party obtain more data by creating a series of startups and tech tools aimed at rivaling Republicans who are currently much ahead in that field.

“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign,” one Democratic operative involved in these efforts told Recode. “What we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously.”

There's no denying that the coronavirus has put added pressure on the Biden campaign. According to fundraisers, it is not an easy sell to ask donors to pay $2,800 for a Zoom call. In fact, one Silicon Valley titan described the nascent relationship of Biden and technology thus far as no more than "birds chirping." Tech leaders are, therefore, inundating Biden officials with their expert digital suggestions to boost his campaign during the ongoing crisis.

According to Recode, four billionaires, in particular, are dedicated in this effort to help defeat Trump - LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, philanthropist and Steve Jobs' widower Laurene Powell Jobs, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Of course, the president is not one to remain silent about this unprecedented alliance. He has notably upped his criticism of social media platforms in recent weeks. This week, he accused Twitter — his favorite platform — of "stifling free speech", " totally silencing conservative voices", and "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election."

His comments came after Twitter flagged two of his tweets regarding mail-in voting with "fact-check" exclamation points in a bid to educate users about the facts surrounding vote-by-mail. In fact, Trump is all set to sign an executive order that would expose social media giants to unannounced government probes into allegations of bias as well as related lawsuits. "This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!" the president touted in a tweet Thursday morning.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that he would not have acted in the same manner as Twitter did in flagging the POTUS's tweets. He alleged that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was acting as an "arbiter of truth" and said Facebook would never do something like that.

Alloy

Recode was able to obtain a private 12-page memo distributed by Hoffman's top political adviser, Dmitri Mehlhorn, who said in the document that he felt the best way to win in November was to beat "Trump's brand machine."

Democrats needed to build a network of "trusted media channels with peer-to-peer elements" and publish content that had a "journalistic flavor" specifically for the party, Mehlhorn advised. However, he insisted the new content network needed to be equivalent to the scope and efficiency the Republicans had already achieved.

"When truth is tribal, traditional media and advertising can't reach voters," Mehlhorn declared in the memo. "But people still listen to their friends and members of their communities."

Hoffman is currently looking to bolster Democratic election efforts by backing Alloy, a startup that is building a warehouse to store voter data (like cellphone numbers) collected by progressive groups and use it to get left-leaning voters to the polls. The LinkedIn founder has already invested close to $18 million in the startup - making it his biggest investment in the election cycle so far. "We're already putting data into the hands of Democrats and progressives on the front lines of this critical election cycle," an Alloy spokesperson, Luis Miranda, said. "We're proud of our work, and we're just getting started."

Democratic Data Exchange

According to sources, Eric Schmidt has invested a considerable sum into the Democratic Data Exchange, a competing effort by the Democratic National Committee aimed at encouraging data sharing by state parties to enhance the party’s digital backbone. Schmidt has also started a new division called OneOne Ventures in order to fulfil this goal, with investment in more than 20 different political startups, according to a person familiar with its work.What is surprising is that it has no public profile and its existence hasn’t been previously reported. OneOne is an attempt to serve as a bridge between traditional political operatives and technical teams. That’s why one of Schmidt’s key projects is heavily funding a never-publicized group called STAC Labs, created in late 2019 to train state parties on how to use data, according to a job posting, including what the Schmidt-backed Democratic Data Exchange gathers. STAC assigns team members to state parties that serve as consultants, of sorts, to help them model their voters and use data effectively.

ACRONYM

Meanwhile, Facebook co-founder Moskovitz and Apple heiress Powell Jobs are also funneling millions into some of the nation's most ambitious voter registration programs. Jobs has already invested $10 million into controversial non-profit ACRONYM, an organization that aims to create a digital infrastructure for the progressive movement. ACRONYM, which is dedicated to creating more partisan media as the election date approaches, aims to raise $25 million to set up seven local news stations in swing states that would specifically portray Democratic candidates in a favorable light while still maintaining appearances as an "objective" news source.

Steven Brill, a well-known journalist who leads NewsGuard, a center focused on combating misinformation, described ACRONYM's strategy as both “really smart and really terrible.” “One of the things that really bothers me is the hypocrisy of people who say that they favor liberal values. And one of the most basic American values is the democratic process,” Brill told Recode. “When you undermine that process by posing as journalists — when you’re just out to make a partisan hit on someone or a partisan support of someone on the left — I think that is so hideous that it really needs to be called out.”

Nonetheless, ACRONYM maintains that its work is purely “factual and transparently progressive.” While Democratic operatives have deemed this strategy as an "upworthy model" to effectively mobilize their base voters, its efficacy can only surely be gauged come November.

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