Name: “You Start Seeing the Dreaded Sensitivity Label”: Is a Pro-Trump Twitter Army Strategically Throttling Biden Ads?
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“You Start Seeing the Dreaded Sensitivity Label”: Is a Pro-Trump Twitter Army Strategically Throttling Biden Ads?

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On August 21 at 4:42 p.m. local time, Eleven Films, the movie studio that James and Tiffany Dugger run from the family room of their 1,400-square-foot house in Portland, Oregon, tweeted out its latest ad: “The #BlueWave2020 Trailer.” The two-minute-and-19-second spot features clips of Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and John Lewis; food lines; Black Lives Matter protests; Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima; first responders raising the flag over Ground Zero; an astronaut jumping on the moon. It was not actually a trailer—“We just make them look like trailers,” James Dugger said. “We’re always asked, ‘When is the movie coming out?’ And we always say, ‘You’re living the movie.’” It was meant to inspire, to rally the troops in advance of the final stretch of a long and tortuous campaign.Before making viral videos full-time, James was a kombucha rep and Tiffany was a massage therapist. They were also progressives, and, in 2013, they created Eleven Films. In the beginning they made movies about the Portland protests. Then two weeks before Election Day 2018, they released “The #BlueWave2018 Trailer.” It blew up, and suddenly the entire Democratic Party was watching. A few months later the Duggers quit their jobs and became full-time filmmakers.&nbsp;They expected the “#BlueWave2020 Trailer” to rack up 5 million views. Eleven Films had released a slew of videos in 2020 with millions of impressions, including “Midnight in Washington,” which trended number one on Twitter and has been seen more than 22 million times. Its Twitter account has amassed more than 100,000 followers, including influencers like Debra Messing, Mark Ruffalo, and George Takei. But this time around, something was up.&nbsp;The ad had been retweeted about 50,000 times, but the hashtag BlueWave2020 wasn’t trending, and the view count was off by a few million. “Then you start seeing the dreaded sensitivity label,” James Dugger said. Which was odd. The “#BlueWave2020 Trailer” isn’t violent or lewd.&nbsp;The Duggers soon discovered that Eleven Films wasn’t alone. Other filmmakers who had produced anti-Trump ads—including those from Really American, MeidasTouch, the Democratic Coalition, and the writer-activist Don Winslow—say they’ve also seen their clips slapped with sensitivity labels, leading to a 50% to 75% drop-off in eyeballs, social media strategists estimate. (Twitter users must change their settings to view sensitive content, and few bother to do so.) Brett Meiselas, one of the three Meiselas brothers behind MeidasTouch, said videos tagged “sensitive” generally top off at 1 million views, as opposed to the usual 3 million to 5 million. Grant Stern, a senior adviser at the Democratic Coalition, said movie impressions had dropped from 9 million to 4 million from August to September.&nbsp;The so-called suppressions, said Alan Rosenblatt, a social media strategist and partner at Unfiltered Media, are “huge.” He explained: “If this is the kind of content that is shaping the conversation, then it creates a more fertile environment for the campaign that they’re advocating on behalf of to gain an advantage. Right now we’re in the middle of it. Many states have already started voting, so it’s a big deal.”&nbsp;The likeliest explanation for the suppressions involves an army of online Trump supporters—a mix of humans and bots, said Tudor Mihailescu, the CEO of SpeechifAI Inc., in Amsterdam. (SpeechifAI, which uses A.I. to generate social media content, works for DemCast, a progressive media group that’s also in Portland.)&nbsp;“Someone (human) is monitoring the content that is being shared on Twitter and identifying content they want to target,” Rosenblatt said in an email. The moment one of the filmmakers—who have been targeted, Democrats believe, because they’re making viral content—publishes a video, these monitors are believed to spread the word through a network of Twitter direct-message, or DM, rooms. (The DM rooms are invite-only and limited to 50 members. Many Trump supporters belong to as many as 20 DM rooms.) Then hordes of Trump supporters report the video to Twitter, citing a violation of Twitter’s terms of use. And that, Rosenblatt said, is thought to trigger the sensitivity label.&nbsp;It’s nearly impossible to say who the monitors are, but many of Trump’s most fervent Twitter supporters, including those in the DM rooms, share certain similarities: They’re anonymous; their handles include hashtags like #MAGA, #KAG, and #BackTheBlue; they’re militantly pro-Trump; and they follow and are followed by roughly the same number of people. “It’s part of the little etiquette thing,” said Jim Spangler, a 49-year-old, Georgia-based Trump supporter who goes by indrid cold on Twitter, where he has just over 2,200 followers. (Spangler said he used to have another account with a following of close to 27,000, but he said it was suspended after he tweeted that the person who a man affiliated with a right-wing group in Portland should be electrocuted.) “If somebody follows you, you follow them back, and if you don’t, they get pissed at you.”Also, they’re mostly, if not entirely, human. “The bots following Trump are amplifiers, not identifiers,” Rosenblatt said. (Seventy percent of Trump’s 87 million followers, or 61 million, are bots, according to the market research tool SparkToro.)&nbsp;Reporting content en masse to limit its reach is thought to have been pioneered by Todd Kincannon, a former head of the South Carolina GOP. In 2011 or 2012, he formed the Twitter Gulag Defense Network and launched #TGDN, which liked to portray itself as defending conservatives from being suspended by Jack Dorsey’s progressive overlords. In fact, #TGDN often trolled progressive influencers until those influencers lashed out, violating Twitter’s terms of use. Then #TGDN followers would report the influencer to Twitter, triggering a suspension of the influencer’s account. It could take days for the account to be reinstated. (Kincannon has a checkered history. In 2015, he was domestic violence and threatened to kill himself, his wife, and their family, to a police report. In 2018, he was arrested for killing his parents’ dog, a beagle and cattle dog mix, with his own hands. He he was “the second coming of Christ.”)Most PopularRosenblatt told me Twitter has since done away with automatic suspensions, but that doesn’t mean the platform has dispensed with triggers altogether. It could be, he said, that an algorithm still exists that automatically slaps a sensitivity label on content that’s mass-reported.&nbsp;Twitter did not reply to requests for comment. Filmmakers say they have reached out to Twitter to try to get the sensitivity labels removed from their videos, to no avail.It’s not just that millions of viewers aren’t seeing the content. It’s that independent filmmakers not on the payroll of the Democratic National Committee or Joe Biden’s campaign are freer to make smarter, punchier, less stilted, more evocative movies. “It’s not sanitized,” said Lindy Li, a Democratic bundler and adviser to the Biden campaign who is also advising the filmmakers on messaging. “It doesn’t have to flow through communications staff.” She cited Really American’s latest video, “#ProudBoyTrump.” “Doubt traditional campaigns would go there,” she said. “None have.”A senior Democratic strategist agreed with Li, adding that Democratic Party higher-ups are still catching up to the GOP. “The Republicans get this is entertainment,” the strategist said. “They understand that it’s a movie theater. It’s a trailer. It doesn’t even matter what the message is.”The strategist said that Democrats are “still fighting the last fight, which is paid digital” advertising. The strategist estimated that in 2016, 10% of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s budget went toward paid digital advertising. “Now it’s 35%.” In this era, however, paid digital is passé—the online battle will be decided by high-quality content that travels organically with the coordinated help of influencers, the strategist said. “We have to organize on social media. That’s what the Republicans are doing. But the Democrats say, ‘I don’t fucking care about impressions.’”Tiffany Dugger said the messaging battle this time around has been “horrific.” “Trump can’t even condemn white supremacy,” she said. “Riling up a base with guns who are already pissed and have been told for a decade on Facebook that the Dems are some sort of baby-eating New World Order machine trying to enslave them is lighting a fuse that isn’t going to go out. It is going to keep smoldering until it catches.”Fears of civil unrest notwithstanding, the plates appear to be shifting, said Grant Stern of the Democratic Coalition. In 2016, he said, Trump steered the national discourse. He was more than a man. He was a phenomenon: Trumpism. “Everywhere you looked, it was Trump, Trump, Trump,” he said. The Trump forces can still suppress content, but they’re not as powerful as they used to be, Stern said—at least, not on Twitter. “There’s a lot of inauthentic behavior that’s been identified,” he said of the bots. “There was so much faking going on. We’re not seeing the Republicans trend because, probably, they just don’t have real people who believe in this stuff.” Stern said they have no plans to make a movie about Trump having tested positive for COVID-19. “I feel like that was the trap that Hillary Clinton stepped into,” he said. “Her closing argument was: ‘He’s bad, I’m better.’ We all know that.”More Great Stories From Vanity Fair— Progressives Are to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s — Why Might Actually Be Helping Him— Tax Mess Aside, Can Trump Pay Off His ?— Begins to Contemplate a Post–Trump White House— The Kimberly Guilfoyle Get Even Darker— As Trump Falters, Democrats See an — From the Archive: Inside for Mar-a-Lago— Not a subscriber? to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

On August 21 at 4:42 p.m. local time, Eleven Films, the movie studio that James and Tiffany Dugger run from the family room of their 1,400-square-foot house in Portland, Oregon, tweeted out its latest ad: “The #BlueWave2020 Trailer.” The two-minute-and-19-second spot features clips of Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and John Lewis; food lines; Black Lives Matter protests; Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima; first responders raising the flag over Ground Zero; an astronaut jumping on the moon. It was not actually a trailer—“We just make them look like trailers,” James Dugger said....

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Peter Savodnik

Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“You Start Seeing the Dreaded Sensitivity Label”: Is a Pro-Trump Twitter Army Strategically Throttling Biden Ads?

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