>> Koch Foundation is well known for using its money to influence elections.
But it also has other ways of swaying individuals to vote for candidates that go along with
their political ideology.
So Charles Koch has actually expanded his political influence through using consumer
data that the Koch Foundation has collected to push very targeted ads toward individuals
who might believe things like migrants are coming, they're dangerous, we need to look
out for them.
In fact, they have a whole organization known as i360, which not only collects this consumer
data, but uses it to target individuals with these types of ads.
This was reported on by Lee Fang over at the intercept excellent reporting as always, and
it profiles Marcia Blackburn's Senate race in Tennessee and how she won.
So let me give you the details.
Koch's sprawling political network's in-house technology company has mined consumer data
to motivate Republican voters with dehumanizing messages that depict immigrants as an invading
army of criminals and potential terrorists.
Marsha Blackburn’s anti-immigrant ads were distributed using an empirical approach to
motivating Republican voters.
The Blackburn campaign had turned to Koch's i360 company, to develop a series of custom
predictive models to peel Republican voters away from her opponent, Phil Bredesen.
Now as we know, she unfortunately won in that Senate race, but to give you an idea, Americans
for Prosperity, the primary political advocacy arm of the Koch Network, spent $5.6 million
to support Blackburn's Senate run through its nonprofit and Super PAC arm.
Now with that said, you know, Marsha Blackburn hires i360 to help her out.
She realizes, there's some portion of Tennessee Republicans who are anti-immigrant, that motivates
them, that's their passion, and so we need to target our ads to them.
And so she starts using these completely inaccurate ads about her political opponent, to push
the message out.
We're gonna show you a compilation of some of those ads in this next clip, take a look.
>> A caravan of 14,000 illegal immigrants is marching on America, but Phil Bredesen.
>> A few thousand very poor people is not a threat.
>> Phil Bredesen gave driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
>> It was Phil Bredesen who quote, lured illegal immigrants to Tennessee.
>> Gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.
>> Phil Bredesen opposes the Trump immigration ban.
>> Phil Bredesen, he won't stop illegal immigration because he lured it.
>> Phil Bredesen, dangerously wrong for Tennessee.
Marsha Blackburn will stand with Trump to build the wall and stop the caravan.
>> So I can't help myself, I've gotta do at least one fact check before we open this up
about i360.
But Bredesen was actually the one who did away with what the previous Republican governor
did with handing Driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.
It was actually a Republican governor who did that, Bredesen gets elected and he scrapped
it.
But nonetheless, it doesn't matter, he didn't win.
Marsha Blackburn won, and there are consequences to that, because she's a terrible person,
so- >> Yeah, and this is why I think worrying
about the Russian disinformation campaign is a little myopic, right?
Because it is an issue, it's a big issue.
But disinformation like this, paid for by Super PACs and people with a lot of money
who now, the Supreme court says that this is speech when it's actually propaganda, that's
as big of a problem, if not bigger.
Just as big of a problem, a bigger problem, is what I meant.
Because really, when all of these semi-legitimate big donors are able to fund these information
arms and target people specifically from within the country with less covertness, they're
still able to do just as much damage and it's terrifying.
People genuinely now believe that Phil Bredeson was doing this with driver's licences for
illegal immigrants, so.
>> Yeah, it would be cool if people had any ability whatsoever, to see an ad and know
whether it's true or not, to care, to fact check it.
But people don't have those defenses, and we know-
>> It is interesting because we have laws against false advertising when it comes to
companies.
I mean, they still find ways to be misleading, but when it comes to political ads, you could
just straight up lie.
You could say anything you want.
>> You can say whatever you want, yeah.
>> Because it's just speech.
>> Yeah, the Trump rallies, and we know that Facebook, which is a big source of this sort
of stuff, they're not gonna do anything.
They don't care.
They're making tons of money off of it.
I've had on multiple times, he's been doing analysis of Trump's campaign spending on Facebook,
and he's just violating the terms of service left and right, and they don't do anything.
It doesn't matter, because they're spending millions of dollars and Facebook wants that
money so they're not gonna do anything.
And people don't have the psychological guards necessary to not realize that they're being
manipulated, people get radicalized, they have no idea that they're being manipulated
in the way that they are.
Someone will start watching Alex Jones because it's a little bit funny, and then two years
later, they really think that frogs are being turned gay, like they just, you don't know
when you start watching a show what damage it can do to you or where it can take you
in the end.
>> Yeah, and these large companies that are tech giants online.
I mean, that's why I think what Elizabeth Warren did at the outset of her campaign was
so important, and I went to one of her rallies and covered it.
In the area where Amazon was supposed to be, where she talked about breaking up big tech
because these companies, especially Facebook, and when we're talking about disinformation,
have a monopoly over all this information that is being consumed.
And people think it's gone through some filtration process when it actually hasn't.
They should be regulated as public utilities, as opposed to these free flowing megacorporations
like they are, because they control the revenue streams for a lot of companies.
Some political companies, as well media companies, and there's no regulation on what the content
is.
>> When it comes to the right wing, we have to really pay attention to strategy and how
well organized they are.
Because with the Koch brothers, just focusing on them alone, you have, of course the campaign
funding, there's the money.
But it's a multipronged approach.
They go into universities and they donate billions of dollars to get the science department
to not only put their name on their buildings, but it influences the science department in
a way.
So they're focusing on education, they're focusing on these disinformation campaigns,
and these very targeted ads through, by the way, data that they're mining through our
consumer habits, which is also pretty terrifying.
They've contracted with the Dish Network in order to collect some of this data, so they're
working with other corporations in order to do this.
So it's a very well thought out multipronged approach in order to accomplish what they
want to accomplish.
Then you have the Federal Society that for decades, has been pushing the Right Wing to
stack the Courts with Conservative judges against our best interests.
So I mention all this because the left needs to get its ish together, okay?
We need to think not only policy-wise, but strategically.
What is the best path forward?
How can we get organized?
How can we take a step back for a second and stop with the, hey, let's police this language,
because this is the most important thing we wanna do at this very moment.
And instead focus on hey, how do we get the right people elected?
The right people who actually wanna stand for the policies that we want to accomplish,
right?
I think that we get distracted by things too easily, that's just my take.
We have to pay close attention to how they organize on the other side, cuz they're better
at it than we are.