How to Fight the Smears Online

By Will Bunnett, Trilogy Interactive

As we get closer to the 2010 elections, campaign consultants like me are fielding more and more requests from clients looking for help pushing back against lies, smears, innuendos, or whatever you want to call them.

A lot of candidates even say they want something just like Fight the Smears -- the Obama campaign's online rumor defense program from 2008.  As luck would have it, I happen to have a background in political psychology and linguistics that I put into action as the lead writer for Fight the Smears during my own time on the campaign.

Fighting smears is more than simply correcting the record.  You're not debating evidence like you would in a court room.  Instead you're often debating ignorance, bias, and notions. To be a successful smear fighter, your approach must match the different ways people process information psychologically under smear conditions.

But the first step in smear fighting is deciding whether and how to engage.

Is it Worth it for Me to Fight the Smears?

Here's why it made sense for the Obama campaign to launch and maintain Fight the Smears:

Resources Obama for America had enough resources to hire literally thousands of people.  We had the resources to do a nationwide primetime infomercial on multiple broadcast networks, for crying out loud.  There were about half a dozen people devoted to working on Fight the Smears.

Branding One of the biggest keys to Obama's brand was changing the way politics worked, so enlisting grassroots supporters in a fight that would normally only be fought by the communications team was more than an investment in conveying information.  It conveyed the brand.

Fighting online with online You don't want to be responding to outlandish, occasionally pornographic email smears with press releases and TV ads, but you still want to push back, so you respond online. Fight the Smears started as an effort to confront smears that had started online within that same medium -- the online world -- which helped target the right audience. Only once the site was established as its own brand did we use it to target traceable smears from declared opponents.

If you guessed that the purpose of this section was to dissuade you from doing your own Fight the Smears site just because you liked Obama's, you were right.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn't do it at all.

As John Kerry famously learned in 2004, letting smears go unchecked can be risky.  Smears create anxiety, which has been shown by political psychologists to make people seek more information about candidates.[1]  If they go seeking information and find only smears, that's all they'll weigh.  Once that bad story is in place, it's much harder to change down the road.

You Actually Want to Smite the Fears

The most important thing to remember when you actually go to fight some smears is that you're not in a courtroom where both sides get to present their evidence to be weighed equally. 

Instead, people essentially form a story in their minds about your candidate using mostly gut-level impressions. Stories like this are retained longer than facts, and they build on each other -- smears about John Kerry's swift boat service wouldn't have caught on if they hadn't built on already-established stories about his credibility.  These stories also require a different kind of persuasion to change.[2]

That means you don't want to get too caught up refuting the facts of the smear (like the relative merit of John Kerry's military service).  When a smear risks catching on, work on beating back the fear underlying the smear (like the fear that John Kerry is less than who he says he is). 

You're more likely to successfully update the "story" someone has in their head of John Kerry by appealing to their gut with a more generic character defense or counterattack than by peppering them with facts about medals and commendations.[3] Joseph Welch's famous counter to Senator McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?" is a textbook example of how to do this.

That also means you should avoid repeating a smear, as Welch did, whether to negate it outright or to set the stage for the truth.  All that does in most cases is recall and reinforce the original story the voter established when he first received the bad information and make him immune to the new facts.  There's definitely a balance to be struck when you're creating a reference site, since you want people to be able to find the information they're looking for while still following this rule.  I think this is one place where FTS could have improved.

The last piece of advice I have is always to ground your response -- whether defensive or offensive -- in moral language.  As Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote, "Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular."[4]

When confronted with a conflict, the anxiety produced by smears tends to lead to avoidance.  You need to turn that anxiety into anger, which tends to lead to approach, so people will get engaged and help you.

In the FTS context, that means it's not "rumors are going around that Barack is a Muslim."  Instead it's "shameful, shadowy attackers have been lying about Barack’s religion."  That second version involves morality in the forms of shame, cowardice, and deception and uses active voice to give people a better sense of an opponent. 

There's also evidence that people respond best to political appeals that match the emotion they had going in.[5] Since the fear behind the smear is often moral (Obama has tried to deceive us about his religion), it's best to match that with a moral response.

Fighting Smears in the Post-Change Era

The number one rule of smear fighting is don't let a bad narrative about your candidate settle in. Because the anxiety a smear creates leads people to seek information, you have a window to make sure some of what they receive counters the smear.  Take that window, attack the smear with moral conviction rather than just facts, and do your best not to repeat it.

If your smears are online, consider taking your smear-fighting online.  One of the best examples right now is John Kerry's own TruthFightsBack.com, which avoids repeating smears and pushes back in strong, moral language. 

But be mindful that smear fighting in a consistent, sustained way online takes a lot of resources; just because it was wise for the Obama campaign to spend them there doesn't mean it will be wise for you.

[1] Marcus, George E., W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen. 2000. Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[2] Popkin, Samuel L. 1994. The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

[3] Lodge, Milton, Kathleen M. McGraw, and Patrick Stroh. 1989. "An Impression-Driven Model of Candidate Evaluation." The American Political Science Review 83 (2):399-419.

[4] Hume, David.  (1739-1740). A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. §3.1.1.6.

[5] Roseman, Ira, Robert P. Abelson, and Michael F. Ewing.  1986. "Emotion and  Political Cognition: Emotional Appeals in Political Communications," in  Political Cognition, edited by Richard R. Lau and David O. Sears.