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  • Hasan Piker Won’t Tell You to Vote for Joe Biden

    Hasan Piker Won’t Tell You to Vote for Joe Biden

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    “If I’m young, I don’t see anyone right now that is captivating me,” Piker told us.

    Pollsters and strategists like to make the case that Biden won the last election in part to the young voters that turned out for him, but over the past few months, polling has suggested that their support is wavering. A new set of New York Times/Siena polls out this week also claim that in every battleground state except Wisconsin, Biden is polling behind former president Donald Trump, and the youth vote could be a large reason why.

    Streamers like Piker are arguably some of the most influential creators on the internet, and there’s no doubt that they could have a real impact on 2024. Earlier this week, I spoke with Samuel Drzymala, the founder of Progressive Victory, a liberal group that works with streamers on get-out-the-vote initiatives. He told me that Twitch’s format allows for the kinds of back-and-forths that can change a person’s mind.

    “The long-form discussion allows for a lot of nuance and detail to be discussed and creates a greater understanding, like these people are educating their audiences when they choose to speak on issues,” Drzymala said.

    Progressive Victory’s approach to moving online activism into IRL has proven successful. In a recent Ohio canvasing event, the group was able to bring together around 20 streamers and 300 volunteers to knock on 40,000 doors for state progressives.

    “They’ve built communities around their personalities and the way that they speak to their audiences,” Drzymala said. “The live nature allows for the creators to make really compelling asks of their audiences and can get people to take crazy amounts of action.”

    Unlike Drzymala’s group, Piker focuses more on issues advocacy than electoral politics. Though he will sometimes encourage followers to vote in down-ballot elections, his largest priorities are the causes he cares about.

    “I think that my impact is way more important when it comes to a Chipotle unionizing in Lansing, Michigan. I went to the UCLA encampment, and all the SJP and JVP students I met were like, ‘I’m here because I started watching you in 2020 and you really broadened my horizons,’” Piker told us.

    That impact won’t be reaching the Biden campaign anytime soon. The Biden campaign declined to comment on what Hasan said about voting, but it has made significant investments in its relationships with supportive influencers, as we’ve talked about multiple times in this newsletter. But is a video with Luke Skywalker more effective than deeply engaged online communities? I guess we’ll find out.

    The Chatroom

    On Monday, I spoke with Erin Hattamer, a comedian on TikTok with more than 1.6 million followers. For the past two weeks, she has spearheaded a program called #PassTheHat, pairing creators like herself with families in Gaza to raise money for them to either evacuate, pay medical bills, or rebuild their lives.

    The grassroots group Operation Olive Branch finds and verifies the families in need, and as of this week, Hattamer has matched more than 700 Palestinian families with online creators. Once a creator is paired with a family, the creator will continue to post about them and their GoFundMes until their goals are reached.



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  • Student Journalists Face Storm of Campus Protest Disinformation

    Student Journalists Face Storm of Campus Protest Disinformation

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    One of the big topics of dissension was the issue of “outside agitators,” a narrative spread by both the Columbia administration and the NYPD that the protests were filled with protesters from outside of the campus community. Student journalists have been forced to deal with this too: In a story on the protests, Ventura and a classmate found that most of the 13 outside agitators identified by the university were either alumni or people associated with organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, which has a chapter at Columbia. Karam told WIRED that the Spectator is still trying to verify these numbers. Despite their reporting to the contrary, New York mayor Eric Adams still said in a statement last week that Columbia’s protests had “basically been co-opted by professional, outside agitators.”

    Similarly, Leon Orlov-Sullivan, a reporter at the City College of New York publication The Campus, told us that the school’s statements didn’t make clear what it meant by “outside” protesters. City College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, meaning that students from other CUNY schools are often able to access the City College campus with their IDs.

    “Media reporting and messaging from the administration wasn’t clear about how many people were affiliated with the CUNY system as a whole,” says Orlov-Sullivan. “Whereas I would say that while I was at the encampment, the vast majority of people were somehow affiliated with a CUNY system.”

    In another story, Columbia News Service’s Ventura mapped out where on campus the protests were actually taking place, in part, she says, to help readers understand that while the encampments dominated headlines externally, they actually only took up a small portion of the campus.

    Stories from student journalists at the Spectator underwent intense editing and fact-checking knowing that they would be read by an audience larger than just the student population. Every protest report went through seven rounds of edits with copy editors fact-checking each line, Karam said.

    Other schools where protests were happening prioritized live updates as opposed to debunking false claims. “We don’t feel like we necessarily have the resources or institutional backing to do full-blown fact checks,” Cat Carroll, a reporter for the University of Wisconsin’s Badger Herald newspaper, told us. “We’re the only ones here reporting live updates and providing information day in and day out.”

    Elea Castiglione, a student reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that the police did not arrest students at her school’s protests, and the encampment was peaceful. “Each school is unique,” she says. “And I think that the college papers specifically have done a really good job focusing on what is actually happening at our schools and not fitting our schools perfectly into a broader narrative of student activism right now.”

    At a time when trust in media is painfully low, student journalists managed to demonstrate the kinds of skills necessary to build trust within a community and to push back on sensationalized narratives and disinformation—even when it was coming from people and institutions with a lot more power.

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  • Michael Cohen Can’t Stop Livestreaming on TikTok

    Michael Cohen Can’t Stop Livestreaming on TikTok

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    “I give no credence to the ABC News opinion piece,” Cohen responded when I asked him about it.

    While the “Michael Cohen Live Show” appears to have launched recently, Cohen has been talking about Trump for years: he has released two books documenting his relationship with Trump and also hosts and cohosts two podcasts with the MeidasTouch guys.

    On Cohen’s Patreon, a club for listeners of the Cohen and Meidas Beatdown Club podcast, he’ll occasionally hold Zoom calls with paid supporters. There’s more than 1,100 of them, and the lowest tier requires a $10-per-month subscription, equivalent to at least $11,000 per month. That’s not counting the $50, $150, or the $500 subscriptions (or the TikTok gifts). At the beginning of these calls, Cohen and Ben Meiselas, a MeidasTouch cofounder, asks followers to “put up their dukes” and mime a few boxing punches.

    On Wednesday, I reached out to the MeidasTouch folks to gauge the extent of their relationship with Cohen. They didn’t immediately respond to comment.

    Whatever the details of that relationship, Cohen has created a massive megaphone for himself online by collabing with Meidas and engaging directly with his fans. He’s basically building his own media network, which is a trend we’ve seen among politicians and pundits since the last media cycle with the likes of Rudy Giulian and Tucker Carlson launching podcasts and creating boutique news programs online. And because of how screwed the internet is, you can’t just post if you’re wanting to break through the noise. Cohen’s got to do a little bit of everything and pray he doesn’t hurt his credibility.

    The Chatroom

    Last week, I asked you all to send in your thoughts on the new law that could ban TikTok in the US. You sent in plenty of thoughtful comments and emails. Here’s one that was incredibly kind and goes big-picture on what we were discussing last week.

    From Barry:

    “The summary: I disagree with the idea of banning TikTok only because of its China connection, without any proof.

    The details: I turn 83 this June, know nothing about TikTok, and next to nothing about social media entirely—I read Facebook postings of friends and relatives, but post nothing myself. My impression of social media is that it’s an amalgam of pet tricks, incompetent dancing, influencers and disinformation. It’s a lot of mass entertainment by amateurs, and that’s OK.

    At this point I could go on a rant about the devolution of the internet, politics, cryptocurrency, and more generally, democracy and society, but that’s why I subscribe to Wired—for Paul Ford, Steven Levy, etc. Leave that to the pros.”

    Happy early birthday, Barry, and thanks for your thoughts!

    Over the next week, I’m going to be digging into all of the Federal Election Commission filings for tech super PACs and campaigns that have been stacking up in my inbox. I’ll report back with what I find next week. But I’m curious, is there anything I should keep an eye out for? You can find a lot in these filings—like which influencer management companies politicians are using or which big campaigns big tech PACs are sending their money.

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  • Donald Trump Is ‘Seriously Considering’ Jake Paul’s Fight Invite

    Donald Trump Is ‘Seriously Considering’ Jake Paul’s Fight Invite

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    Team Trump might also struggle to reach its usual base this year, meaning they’ll need to rely on alternatives. Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that traffic belonging to the top 10 conservative and right-wing news sites has gone down 40 percent since the last presidential election, in 2020. It was these outlets, like Breitbart, that leveraged the internet to elect Trump in 2016. Now that machine is breaking down.

    “The mainstream media is dead. They’re dead. They just haven’t realized it yet,” a former Ramaswamy staffer told me at his caucus night party in January. “If you look at the types of voters that make up the America First movement, they get their news from alternative media. Fox News is just a very small sliver.” Paul, and other creators like him, could fill this void.

    Trump’s team is realizing this. Before, right-wing media and Trump’s online fanatics together generated enough buzz that he didn’t need to build these relationships himself. But as the media landscape has changed, so must the campaign. Already last year, the former president appeared on the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, where he was quizzed, of all things, on Ice Spice. He also hosted a dinner for conservative influencers. The fact that the campaign is considering joining forces with Paul marks the next step in their strategy.

    It’s not just presidential candidates either. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s trying not to get fired by his own party, briefed popular conservative influencers and activists on his election integrity bill. Popular social media figures including LibsofTikTok, DC Draino, and End Wokeness were all briefed and, in turn, put out messages in support of the bill.

    While Johnson’s briefing was an attempt to create his own viral moment, Trump attending Paul’s fight would be him seizing an opportunity that makes sense for his brand. Trump’s involvement in the bravado of men’s fighting sports has lasted decades. More than a decade ago, he famously participated in a Wrestlemania match with Vince McMahon. Recently, Trump’s been attending more UFC fights and chumming it up with Dana White.

    Not only will Paul be hyping up this summer’s fight across his social media accounts, but Netflix will also be livestreaming the match, allowing it to reach the streaming platform’s more than 260 million users. Many digital consultants say political advertising on streaming apps like Netflix will be huge this year. Unlike with a New York Times article or an Instagram post, users are often glued to a movie or show, and some services can force their audiences to watch ads, depending on their subscription tier.

    “If I were a political candidate, this would be the time where I’m recognizing Jake Paul has a uniquely large audience and would want to leverage that to benefit me in some way,” Lukito told me.

    This is all to say that we live in a world where Jake Paul’s endorsement carries weight in politics. Social platforms are no longer prioritizing news content—they’re fixed on the creator economy. Influencers dominate these feeds, where a majority of US voters read the news, and we should expect more YouTube-style collabs like these, at least through November. Get ready. It’s going to be every day, bro.

    The Chatroom

    NextGen America, the nonpartisan youth voting organization, announced that it was launching a new Discord bot to register young voters earlier this week. The bot is adorably named VOTE-E, and is built on OpenAI’s GPT-4. It will apparently be able to answer an assortment of voting questions in DMs over Discord.

    “There’s a huge problem that outreaches made to the gaming community from the political space haven’t felt really authentic—like ‘Pokémon Go to the polls,’” Grant Wiles, NextGen’s vice president of data, research, and polling, told me over the phone.

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  • The Influencers with as Much Presidential Access as the Press

    The Influencers with as Much Presidential Access as the Press

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    “The right has long had its own ecosystem, even before the internet,” Katie Harbath, former public policy director at Facebook, told me on Wednesday. “The left continues to try to think about what that looks like for them, especially with all the questions around the president’s age, they’re trying to figure out the right way of doing that.”

    Still, using creators as venues for political communication online has its risks. Last month, I rushed to Google after seeing several creators, at least one who was briefed by the White House the week prior, and a Gen Z voting nonprofit publish “breaking” news that Biden had negotiated a ceasefire and for hostages to be released in the Israel-Hamas conflict. But there was nothing being reported from The New York Times or the Associated Press. In fact, it appeared to be a misreading of a story in the Jerusalem Post, and it went viral before the creators deleted their Tweets.

    And while there are many nonpartisan news creators across TikTok and Instagram, there are many who are less so. Creators like Posobiec rarely, if ever, criticize Trump, and often exhibit a form of fannish behavior when posting about their favored politician. Part of the allure of bringing friendly creators into the political fold is the trust that they won’t say anything too critical.

    “Fans are by definition not neutral people,” Stacey Lantagne, a law professor who studies fandom, told me on Wednesday. “You’re not going to be critical of the thing you’re stanning.”

    These political influencers aren’t going anywhere, especially with the way news-consumption trends are headed on social media. Instagram and TikTok have become primary avenues in which many people absorb the news. A November Pew Research Center study found that half of US adults engage with news content on social media.

    While Facebook remains the most popular social media resource for news, TikTok’s audience for news is the fastest growing across all age demographics. Around one-third of younger US voters aged 18 to 29 reported that they regularly get their news from TikTok. And these social media platforms themselves have complicated relationships with political, or newsy, content.

    “I think this is the future, but there’s going to be growing tension,” says Harbath. “What differentiates an influencer from a journalist, and what access are they able to be given?”

    Whether it’s mostly journalists or content creators breaking news this election cycle, I’m just hoping it’s all accurate.

    The Chatroom

    Truth Social went public last month, and some Trump fans are trying to replicate the meme-stock moment GameStop had a few years ago. But as my colleague William Turton reported this week, the circumstances surrounding Truth Social’s valuation are entirely different from GameStop—institutional investors had shorted GameStop, while Truth Social stock is primarily owned by retail investors. Not to mention, the company fundamentals are different.

    Do you know anyone investing in Truth Social? Or maybe another stock for whatever political means? I want to hear about it. Leave a comment on the site, or send me an email at [email protected].

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  • A Topsy-Turvy Online Election | WIRED

    A Topsy-Turvy Online Election | WIRED

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    Hey, everyone! Welcome to the first edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. I’m Makena Kelly, a senior politics writer at WIRED, and I’m so glad you’re here.

    After the 2020 US election, the rhetoric of the internet spilled out into the real world with violent consequences. In the years since, those drumbeats have only grown louder, the misinformation more bleak, the conspiracies more unhinged, the technology more enabling. It’s a dizzying backdrop already—and it’s only March. I’m here to help you understand not only what’s happening out there now, but what comes next.

    This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Sign up now to get it in your inbox every week.

    Politics has never been stranger—or more online. WIRED Politics Lab is your guide through the vortex of extremism, conspiracies, and disinformation.

    The State of the Internet

    The web is hardly recognizable compared with four years ago. Companies like Meta have all but given up on news and political content after being grilled by Congress over disinformation and alleged censorship more times than I can remember. Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, laid off most of the site’s trust and safety teams, and turned the platform into a wasteland of conspiracies and disinformation. On top of all that, AI-generated robocalls and spam are filling up voicemail inboxes and news feeds, challenging regulators and social networks like never before. And TikTok has grown into a powerful cultural and political force that even the Biden campaign team has joined, despite the national security risks some intelligence officials and lawmakers have suggested in the past.

    Campaigns have had to adapt: “I think the fact that the internet has become more personalized in the last four years just means we need to play the game a little bit differently and try a bunch of new things,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for the Biden reelection campaign, told me about its decision to join TikTok. Long-shot candidate RFK Jr. has leaned on podcasts, like The Joe Rogan Experience, and influencers on Instagram and TikTok to get his message out to voters.

    Still, everyone heard the news last week: The House passed a bill that would force Bytedance, TikTok’s China-based owner, to sell off the app or have it banned in the US. Which makes it a little wild that campaigns are going all-in on a platform that might not exist, and that their own colleagues are trying to destroy.

    While TikTok may face an untimely end, other platforms are getting resurrected. My colleague William Turton and I reported on Wednesday that Parler, one of the first censorship-free social media alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, is preparing to relaunch after being offline for nearly a year after it was purchased by a right-leaning marketing firm. Just this week, Parler returned to iOS and is expecting to be approved for the Google Play Store later in the week.

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  • Why—and How—WIRED Is Covering Politics

    Why—and How—WIRED Is Covering Politics

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    Since taking the helm as WIRED’s global editorial director last August, I’ve heard from plenty of avid audience members—some with enthusiastic feedback about WIRED stories or coverage areas, and others with a consistent message that goes something like this: “I come to WIRED to read about tech, not [insert topic]. Stick to tech.”

    In January 2024, we made a commitment to do just that—by launching a politics vertical.

    Let me explain. On a global scale, 2024 is poised to be the most purely digital, technologically mediated, psychologically manipulative election season any of us have ever seen. We’ve already witnessed how rapidly advancing gen-AI tools can create propaganda and disinformation that proliferate online, causing confusion among politicians and the electorate alike. Hacks and intrusions are inevitable: Ever since the DNC was hacked in 2016 by Guccifer 2.0, turning “Hillary’s emails” into a Trump punchline, it’s been clear that digital Watergates are now not only possible but likely. And then there’s the rise of influencers, an industry of widely followed online personalities who can and will be bought by companies and campaigns to deliver carefully crafted messages on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

    Most election coverage focuses on the horse race. WIRED’s will be completely different. Across the US election and many more—including key votes in India, Ukraine, and Mexico—we’re going to examine both the campaigns and the election stakes through a digital lens, focusing on disinformation, online extremism, conspiracies, social platforms, election influencers and grifters, the influence of AI, and more. We’ll also dig into policy issues core to the 2024 US election through a tech-centric lens, from AI policy to climate change to abortion access.

    WIRED is relentlessly focused on the future, and on building a better one. The 2024 election season will be instrumental in shaping our collective path forward—and so we’re deepening our commitment to guide you through it. I’m thrilled to introduce WIRED Politics Lab, a weekly newsletter and forthcoming podcast.

    Each week, we’ll walk you through the biggest tech moments in politics and round up stories from the core WIRED politics team. You’ll read scoops and distinctive deep dives from Makena Kelly, on digital campaigns and influencers; David Gilbert, on online extremism and conspiracies; Vittoria Elliot, on platforms and global elections; and William Turton, on right-wing platforms and cybersecurity. Their coverage will be augmented by topical reporting from across the entire WIRED newsroom.

    You can sign up for the Politics Lab newsletter right now. In addition to reading WIRED’s stellar politics reporting, it’s also a great place to keep tabs on our upcoming podcast launch. However nervous you are about this year, know that WIRED is here to help you make sense of it—and that we’re all in this future together. Now: Go register to vote.

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