- We all know on some level that we shouldn't trust everything we see on social media, but today's guest brings receipts, having uncovered a partisan influence campaign to flood our social media feed in the run up to the midterm elections.

He's Ali Breland this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Ali Breland, a staff writer for The Atlantic who reports on the internet, technology, and politics.

He's the author of a tremendous new article, "Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed."

We're gonna talk about it with him today.

Ali, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- I mentioned this article, you know, I came across it, I produce a newsletter in another part of my job, where we track foreign aligned influence and disinformation campaigns.

And so this sort of popped on my radar in that capacity, and I read it, and it set off all kinds of alarm bells.

Let's take it from that 30,000 foot level.

What did you discover?

- Yeah, I mean, where to start?

So, I get this anonymous tip, and what this person has put me onto is that there appears to be this Discord group.

Discord, for people who aren't familiar, is kind of like Slack.

It's a messaging app that people can use to communicate with each other.

It was originally designed for gamers, but it's become this wider thing that people all across the internet use who are very online.

And within this Discord, this community is being coordinated to make videos for the purpose of boosting conservative content.

There's a rough list of people that they're supposed to boost, politicians like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, et cetera.

And then even people off this list can also be included.

And there's also a ban list as well.

So, I start digging through this Discord more and more to try to understand what is going on here, and it turns out that there is a budget of about $300,000 every single month that's being put up towards making these videos, and then people are paid from that $300,000 budget for views that they accrue on each of these videos.

And so then from there, I look into who's behind it, and this group is coordinating it, it's this company based out of Latvia, and there's this very exuberant man who is posting videos explaining what you're supposed to be doing.

And I dig a little bit deeper and I noticed that there is also this interaction and these ties to this group in Las Vegas called Enclave & Key, which is run by Blake Wynn, who is the nephew of Republican mega donor Steve Wynn, and so he appears to also play a part in this massive operation.

So yeah, that's like the very basic- - This is like the opening scene of a movie where you're like, "Wait, what just happened?"

So, you get an anonymous tip.

How do you get in touch with the guy in Riga, Latvia, running this operation?

- It took me a second.

I mean, the first way I sort of worked through everything is I looked at the videos and the posts that he made on his Instagram account, and I just kind of observed who he was and what he was up to.

From there, I spent a good bit of time looking, trying to look through whatever remnants of public information there was about him to get his contact information.

Eventually, I was able to get his WhatsApp information and talk to him over the messaging app, WhatsApp.

And we never talked on the phone, but we texted a little bit.

- And you said he went by the name Serviuos?

- I believe so.

I don't know.

We never resolved that.

- The pronunciation, yeah.

But he's in Riga, Latvia.

So you said he was sort of like this big personality.

What was your impression of what he... Like, what was his motivation for being involved in this?

- He just seemed to be about the money.

As far as I could tell, from what he let on in his videos, he barely knew about US politics.

He genuinely was interested in money.

I think I came across the remnants of what now appears to be like a defunct AI company that he was running that was maybe also like a cash grab.

In one of his videos, he says, "What the F even is Republicans?

I don't know.

You don't have to know either."

It was just clear that someone was holding a big check for him, and that's what he wanted.

- And it was interesting because if I remember in the reporting, he says, "You don't need to know because you can go to Google Gemini, and it will tell you what you need to say about these Republicans."

So, this is, you know, on the front lines of technology and politics, but this is really an example of what I think is called astroturfing, right?

- Exactly.

- So for folks, the uninitiated at home, what is astroturfing?

- Astroturfing is creating the appearance of organic, grassroots support.

I don't know, let's say in your neighborhood, everyone is mad about there not being, like, a stoplight at this intersection that's very dangerous.

Everyone comes together and everyone sincerely cares about this.

Astroturfing would be maybe actually it only benefits one person to have a stoplight, and this person pays a bunch of other people to create this fake groundswell of support.

And so that's what was going on, is that they were trying to create the image that a bunch of people cared a lot about conservative politics.

And to be clear, lots of people do care about conservative politics, but they wanted to amplify this beyond what naturally would happen by paying and injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month to accrue, I think their target goal every month was around a billion views.

- Wow, wow.

So, let's say you got hired to work for this enterprise, and the name of this company is called Elephant Clipping, I believe?

- That's the operation.

The company above it's called ClipIt.

- Okay.

And so if you get hired for Elephant Clipping, walk us through, where do you source your content?

What do you actually do?

- Yeah, so you're probably... You're a subcontractor, right?

So, like, anyone, you or I, any viewer, could theoretically, if we're able to find where to go, can sign up to join this clipping operation, and what you're doing is you're taking videos of conservatives, and then you're editing them down to be very quick things that can go viral on TikTok or Instagram Reels, short form video, very easily.

So you're finding a clip of Vivek Ramaswamy saying something, like, really charismatic, or you're finding a clip of this conservative influencer who's become very prominent, Nick Shirley.

You're finding him, you're showing him doing some expose or winning over some liberal in a confrontation, rather.

And you edit this video, you post it from your own account, and then you submit it to ClipIt's internal services for monetization to show that, like, you accrued 2,000 views or whatever, and then they pay you accordingly based on that.

And in a lot of cases, it was hard to understand this, but from kind of observing and my general research, it seems like a lot of people in the Global South, India is both a poor country and an English-speaking country, so a lot of people from India seem to be involved.

I've heard stories about people in Eastern Europe bringing in thousands of dollars a month as a kind of side hustle via these kinds of services.

- Do you have a sense of... What do you get paid per view, or how many views do you have to rack up to actually see real money?

- In this case, it was about, I want to say it was like $3 per 1,000 views.

The New York Times actually just did a story like yesterday, I believe, that showed that some creators are getting even lower counts.

In other cases, it's like 1,000 views nets you 1.50, or $2 in other cases.

- Okay.

And so you're doing this, you said that the budget was about $300,000 per month.

Do you know how long they've been operating?

- Yeah, so I should say, too, that that was a baseline.

I'll start with the length question.

The earliest remnants I could find were from April of this year.

However, in videos, Serviuos referenced that the campaign had been going on for a year since April, so we're talking about at least, like, a year and a half.

I want to be clear, I don't have proof of what the budgets were prior to April, so I'm not sure.

And actually, after this story came out, they took steps to hide a lot of what they were doing, and they also blurred out a lot of monthly budgets.

So we know it was baseline $300,000.

And actually, what I was able to find even further is that there was evidence of other campaigns running, too.

So I found another campaign that was overlapping, seemingly being run by the same people, Enclave & Key, that also had about 150,000 a month that they were putting into it.

People were putting in five-figure sums specifically to boost the conservative influencer, Steven Crowder.

There was extra money on these sort of sub-campaigns for Tulsi and Vivek specifically, Vivek being the gubernatorial candidate in Ohio who was previously a presidential candidate, and Tulsi Gabbard being the Director of National Intelligence for the Trump administration for a little bit.

And so yeah, I mean, the budget probably runs at least to be about a half a million in these cases.

And the way that I realized too, to be clear, that they were all linked, was because there was an asset folder full of video clips that clippers could use.

They didn't have to use those videos, but they could pull from this video clip file.

And in the metadata of these videos that showed that they were being uploaded by people who worked for Enclave & Key, which again is Blake Wynn's firm.

- Wow.

So, these clippers, do they receive editorial guidance?

You said that there was a list of people to talk about, but are they given guidance about what they ought to emphasize or what they should avoid?

- In a general sense, they're not receiving individualized guidance because they're trying to do this operation at scale, but they're given a set of rough instructions that they're told to follow.

So, they're kind of encouraging some topics, but what was more important from my research and reporting was that there were topics that they didn't want them to hit.

So, like, they didn't want people to talk about Trump's crypto operation or the crypto coins that were linked to Trump.

They didn't want people to talk about MAHA, Make America Healthy Again.

They didn't want people to talk about RFK.

They didn't want people to talk about Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson.

I could not figure out why that was, I'm not reporting this or telling anyone with certainty, but it makes sense that these people would be banned because there is a rift within the conservative movement, and people like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson have not become persona non grata per se, but there are factions in which they are persona non grata.

And so whoever was putting up this money, either through Enclave & Key, or if it was Enclave & Key, has some sort of vendetta with Carlson and with Kelly.

The reason that they might not want to put up stuff about crypto is maybe legal.

It gets in illegally fraught territory.

- Right.

So, you stumbled onto this because someone told you, "Hey, check this out."

How are people typically recruited to work as clippers for an operation like this?

Do you have any idea?

- Yeah, this is a little bit trickier because there's a lot of tension in that you don't want this to exist completely in the open, but you also need it to be accessible enough so that you can develop a small army of people that can find it and work for you.

My very rough understanding of how people come to this is that someone like Serviuos or this other guy, Anders Wedoe, who is based in Norway, or even other clipping operations, they'll have a social media presence.

They'll have their own Instagram account or TikTok account.

They'll have one for their business.

They'll post Instagram Reels and they'll be like, "Hey, there are these opportunities.

If you go to this website or you go to this Discord, get inside of it, you can then see stuff."

And then from there, they're like, "Okay, now that you're here, we have this thing that you can do.

Get in that way."

- One of the things that I loved about your reporting in this piece is that you take us a little bit on this detective trail, sort of piecing together how you sort of pulled the threads on this.

One of the things that I found fascinating was that you described that you were able to identify some of the social media accounts posting this based on an artifact that some had left in some of their other posts.

Would you tell us about that?

- Yeah, so there was like a memo, basically, explaining the purpose of the campaign.

It was like, "We need to boost conservatives.

We need to make conservatives look good."

There was more specific language than that.

I apologize.

I don't remember off the top of my head.

I was at a loss, I was like, "I don't know how to find the endpoint of these videos."

I wanted to see what this actually looked like.

My editors wanted to see what it looked like too, and I was like, "Okay, fair."

And so just on a lark, I copy and pasted the memo, not even to see the endpoint, but just to see if anyone had stumbled across this and was paying attention at all.

And what I found was that lazy or people who misunderstood what they were doing, people, clippers, took the language of the memo and put it in the description of their videos on Instagram and on YouTube.

And so from there, I was able to not see the total scope of the operation, but to able to see just a sliver of what kind of content was being pushed out.

- Oh, that's wild stuff.

So, you know, I can remember, I'm old enough to remember 2016, the Internet Research Agency, a small army of Macedonian teens that were producing content, viral content, that was being injected into the American election.

The IRA, it was a Russian sponsored operation.

Is this different in terms of the approach from what they were doing, or is it part and parcel of the same technique?

- It is basically a continuation of what they were doing.

You can think of it, you can almost draw a straight line between what the Internet Research Agency was doing and this kind of operation.

Some of the differences are mostly superficial.

The internet is different now, right?

It's not as text-based as it used to be.

Short form video is the sort of dominating way in which we consume everything, is to scroll through different videos.

And so this is just an updated version of what the Internet Research Agency was doing, and its astroturfing campaigns, political astroturfing campaigns, but for the video feed.

I guess the other difference too is that even though there's Eastern European, Latvian involvement, the distinction too is that, I can't say this with 100% certainty, but this appears to be a domestic operation.

Enclave & Key is a Las Vegas-based company, run by Americans.

Their client, again, I don't know, but if they have a client that they're working with, they appear to be American.

And so the distinction is that you have almost a fusion.

You have the Macedonian teens, and in that case, this is the Latvians, and they're making money.

Like, the Macedonian teens were just posting stuff to make money.

And then it's being marshaled by this political interest that has its own aims as to what they want content to look like.

And so it's like this kind of fusion, except, again, it's not Russian this time.

- So, do you have a sense of... Did you find the one unicorn out there, or is there an industry of this stuff and we're seeing there's a lot more of our feed that's being hijacked by somebody and may or may not be this operation?

- I mean, in a very basic sense, I don't know, and that's kind of a really big feature and problem of this, is that we're completely in the dark.

Like, we don't have an understanding of what's going on.

My rough educated guess is that this seems to be not an isolated thing, but a bigger operation that does exist.

As I was kind of saying earlier, the New York Times was able to separately find evidence that other people were being paid across the US, and even into other countries, small creators were being paid to generate videos of a political nature that spread political messages.

So, it's clear that this is happening.

In their story though, I don't think that they really were able to report on the scale of the operation or how far these videos are going or how much money was being put into them.

Experts I talked to said that they had not seen this before.

They were not surprised it existed.

They were a little bit surprised at the scale.

It was bigger than they thought it would be.

But it seems like this is definitely a thing.

I came across another creator named Daniel Bitton.

Actually, sorry, not a creator.

He runs clipping businesses, and he was talking too about how politicians across the world are paying him and his company to also run campaigns for them.

But he didn't want to talk about it further in the video.

He said it's anonymous and private.

He didn't go into the scale.

I went to his website.

I couldn't find any more information about it.

But it's becoming clear that, like, our feeds are not what we think they are, but we don't know to the degree to which they're being manipulated.

We just know that they are.

- That's the thing that I wanted to ask you about.

So, again, I told you this work that I do around disinformation more generally, we have this podcast called "The Active Measures Newsletter Podcast," and we had a guest on there a couple of weeks ago, reporter for political by the name of Jason Beeferman, and he was talking about the way some of the polymarket companies, the Kalshis and others, are paying creators to talk about how great their odds are and how predictive, how accurate their prediction models are.

His principle takeaway is that anything you see on social media that isn't like your Aunt Mary has probably been paid for.

And that's a big statement, and I'm not asking you to confirm that, but it sort of seems aligned with what you're talking about here in terms of what's being injected into our social media feeds.

- Yeah, I mean, again, I can't say that that's definitely the case for sure, but I think that on a personal level, if we want to be responsible about it, whether or not everything in your feed has been paid to be there, you should probably treat it like it is.

Unless you really personally know the person or they're a very high integrity source, it's like a professor with some sort of background or a writer that has an established reputation where there are also consequences for if they're caught lying, like, or caught being paid without disclosing it, you should probably assume that someone might have some sort of interest or is being paid to funnel something to you, and yeah, the feed is just not something that you can trust, really.

- Yeah, if I could trust my feed, I'd have abs by now, but that's a whole separate conversation.

(Ali laughs) So you mentioned this company, Enclave & Key, as being sort of... You're able to trace the work of this clipping service back to them.

How exactly were you able to establish that?

- Yeah, so within the Discords, there was Google Drive folders, and within those Google Drive folders are videos that clippers could use to make their own edits from.

They were encouraged to.

And when you went into those, you could see who posted the video files.

And in at least a couple different cases, it showed that there were emails linked to specific Enclave & Key employees.

And so then from there, I reached out to them.

They didn't really talk, but they didn't deny their involvement either.

They gave me a sort of general statement.

I talked to Blake Wynn.

We exchanged one message over LinkedIn.

He said he was going to talk further with me, and then he ended up not doing that.

- And he's the CEO of this company?

- Yes.

He is the CEO of this company.

So, like, this company is interesting.

I don't know if their website is still locked down.

It was public, and then when I reached out to them, they locked the entire website down.

But what its public-facing brand persona was was it's a digital marketing company, and what Blake Wynn had often talked about in public was how they connected NFL and NBA players with different brands and different brand marketing deals.

They also run a celebrity poker tour, which, as best as I can tell, is a sort of interesting kind of networking opportunity for different famous people to play poker together and meet each other.

But then it also seems like they were helping run this kind of operation on the side.

Wynn himself is also very interesting.

He has a lot of his own political connections.

He went on this very little known podcast about a year ago, and he was talking about how during Trump's... Excuse me.

On election night, when Trump won, he was sitting at Trump's table at Mar-a-Lago next to Elon Musk and other people like that, Steve Witkoff, who's Trump's Special Envoy to the Middle East.

He talks about how he texts Kash Patel regularly.

He's posted on Instagram about his relationship with Tulsi Gabbard.

So he's very well connected within politics, within right-wing politics specifically.

- It's fascinating.

So, I think the question that I want to ask is, are these activities a violation of election law?

- They don't appear to be.

According to one or two election integrity experts, like, legal experts I spoke with, they said that this appeared to be probably all above board, which is something that they found frustrating because it's not transparent at all.

I think that you could make a very clear case that this kind of stuff is quite unethical, but there's no actual laws being breached or policies or rule violations because laws have not been updated to meet the social media age.

There's really stringent restrictions when you buy a TV ad or a print ad as to what you have to disclose, but as long as you kind of don't do certain things, you're kind of allowed to say whatever on social media, or rather pay whoever to say whatever without ever disclosing that to anyone.

- And I think in your reporting, you noted that there were some things that they were told not to do, like, you couldn't endorse a specific candidate, you couldn't try to raise money for a candidate.

So there is some recognition.

But the thing that I also found interesting is that when you started asking questions of Enclave & Key, content started coming down, both in the Discord server, and it sounds, too, like on their own website.

- Yes, yeah, they shut down the website.

They basically kicked all of the inactive accounts out of the Discord.

So I think that my account... I obviously was not, I wasn't posting any videos.

I was not making astroturf content.

So, they closed those down.

They took down... I think that they were still running the campaigns from what I could tell, but they made it less visible.

To keep this simple, there was a second website where you had to do certain things, and so I could see on that website that the campaigns were still running.

Yeah, and so they actually took down a lot of the Google Drives that showed Enclave & Key's links to these campaigns.

In one case, they re-uploaded the drive, but then they just shut it down.

I think the drive still exists somewhere, but they are harder to access now.

- Ali, we've got literally about a minute left here, and there's so much great reporting here.

I come back again and again, as a student of disinformation and influence campaigns, to the central question of, but do these things actually work?

And I don't know if there's a way that you're able to assess whether or not these things are effective, but at minimum, it would seem to me like if all they do is produce a level of cynicism about the value of politics and the political process, they're doing some harm.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

- Yeah, at a bare minimum, it degrades trust in institutions and it... Yeah, it erodes democracy.

And then at a maximum... The military has long engaged in psychological influence operations because, like, on some degree, they can be helpful, and maybe that's what's happening here.

I don't have evidence, I can't tell you guys, I can't tell the viewers that that's definitely what the case is, but it certainly warps your reality.

If you see all of these people talking about things, it causes you to view the world differently because you are literally seeing a different world.

The internet is the world now.

- And someone certainly thinks it's effective enough to spend some money on it.

Ali Breland, the reporting of The Atlantic is top-notch.

Thank you for spending some time with us this week.

But that is all the time we have.

If you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, be warned, or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I want to thank you, too, for tuning in.

I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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