Biden donors put up $10 million in effort to compete with Trump campaign’s viral videos: report
Fox News
President Biden’s allies have donated at least $10 million in an effort to compete against the Trump campaign’s prolific use of social media, according to a new report.
Leaders at Biden’s top re-election super PAC, Future Forward USA Action, fear that the current president is losing the viral video war to Trump and his allies, Reuters reported. Trump and his fellow Republicans have bombarded social media with videos of Biden freezing or otherwise appearing old at public events for weeks.
The Democratic super PAC boasts supporters like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman. The effort aims to help Biden’s campaign understand how social media algorithms work, in addition to collaborating with pro-Biden influencers.
“Future Forward is around to help solve problems, and TikTok is a problem and the group is reasonably trying to solve that problem,” one Democrat source told Reuters.
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Since February, when the Biden campaign officially joined the TikTok platform, it has posted more than 200 times and garnered just over 380,000 followers. Trump joined TikTok barely two weeks ago but has already accumulated 6.4 million followers.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has been leaning into Biden’s age issues by sharing footage of him freezing up or appearing confused at public events.
The White House has condemned the clips as “cheap fakes,” but there is little evidence to suggest the clips have been altered in a deceptive way.
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The “cheap fakes” line has proven to be the White House’s primary defense against embarrassing videos of Biden in recent weeks.
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The term was used in some news articles as early as 2019, but there were significantly more this week following the videos on social media of Biden.
Not everyone is buying the explanation, however. This is all part of “election slogans and buzzwords,” according to Heritage Foundation tech researcher Jake Denton.
“It’s very clear what’s going on here,” Denton told Fox News Digital. “They’re trying to push a new term underneath the school of misinformation to try and pressure social media companies to take action on videos of this nature.”
“This kind of requires a ramp-up stage where you allege that something is a ‘cheap fake,’ or that it’s malicious in some way related to misinformation, and then you have essentially the evidence, the fact pattern, whatever, to go and push the social media companies with takedown requests, because it’s misinformation regarding an election. So to me, that’s kind of the seed that’s being planted here.”
Reuters contributed to this report.