Bloomberg’s social media blitz ‘hacking into attention’ of voters
The billionaire Democrat candidate-to-be is paying ‘supporters’ thousands to spread his message online
MIKE BLOOMBERG is hoping to disrupt the Democratic race to take on Donald Trump with an unprecedented digital advertising blitz that critics accuse of blurring the lines between campaigning and fake news.
The former New York City mayor, who on Tuesday will formally enter the race to be chosen as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, has been running a lavishly expensive online campaign using an army of paid “supporters” to spread his message.
At times his tactics have bordered on spam and social media manipulation, leading one expert to accuse him of “hacking your attention”.
Among his more moderate tactics, 500 Americans have signed up to bombard their friends and social media followers with pro-Bloomberg messages for $2,500 (£1,950) per month.
This unusual scheme – a slightly cleaner and much more generous recreation of China’s “50 cent army” of pro-government online trolls – is part of an unprecedented digital advertising scheme designed to short-circuit the contest by carpet-bombing it with money from his personal fortune.
“He’s doing a campaign strategy that I would call ‘all of the above’,” said Tim Groeling, a professor of political communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Bloomberg doesn’t have that intense a following … [so] he is trying to buy the equivalent. This $2,500 a month payment system is for people to do what other campaigns get their volunteers to do for free.”
According to Forbes, Mr Bloomberg is the world’s eighth-richest man, with a net worth of around $60bn (compared with Donald Trump’s $3.1bn) derived from an empire of financial data terminals. His pitch to voters is that he is smarter, richer, more successful and far more sophisticated (though not taller) than the “carnival barking clown” occupying the White House.
In practice, he has struggled for breathing space with a crowd of other Democratic moderates who have so far failed to unite against Bernie Sanders, even though he has already spent more cash on Facebook and Google adverts than every major candidate combined.
But Mr Bloomberg has faced criticism for a series of manipulated video clips. In one clip footage of a television debate had been edited to make his opponents look far more stumped by one of his attack lines than they really were. Aides defended it as an obvious parody.
In another, the campaign tweeted a series of “satirical” quotes from Sanders praising various dictators, only to delete them after a backlash.
It also commissioned a horde of sponsored posts from Instagram influencers, flagrantly violating a ban on politicians running such campaigns.
Mr Bloomberg might be the first truly post-Trump candidate: a rival tycoon, who is shameless about his wealth and willing to bend the truth and incite controversy in order to hijack the spotlight.
But he is far away from actually winning Democratic voters. Last night Joe Biden was expected to make a comeback in the South Carolina primary.