Zoom call videos following the 2020 election cycle show Biden-Harris staffers reveal how they manipulated “disinformation” to hide then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s cognitive decline from voters.
Former Biden-Harris campaign Digital Director Rob Flaherty — now presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s deputy campaign manager — revealed that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) created a program to detect, track and have social media platforms flag “misinformation narratives” including “conversation online” about Biden’s “mental fitness,” according to videos obtained by journalist Matt Orfalea. These videos showed a Zoom call Flaherty conducted with HOPE not hate, a U.K.-based activist group touting its mission of combatting “far-right extremism.” The Zoom call took place on Nov. 18, 2020, according to a screenshot of from a HOPE not hate Twitter post.
Biden/Harris digital director Rob Flaherty says the DNC created a program to detect, track, and censor what it deemed “misinformation” (like Biden’s mental decline). He calls it “critical” and “one of the more important decisions” made by the party in recent years. /2 pic.twitter.com/pbIqUnY8ib
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
But in the Zoom call, Flaherty said “misinformation narratives” include “conversation online about corruption or mental fitness…or [Biden’s] record on the Crime Bill”—effectively defining “misinformation” as anything that the Biden team found inconvenient. /5 pic.twitter.com/HMKJfokeHG
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
Flaherty, who called the program “one of the smartest things” orchestrated by the Democratic Party, was joined on the call by Timothy Durigan. A Dem List news release from May 2021 said he had been announced as the DNC Counter-Disinformation Program’s lead analyst “in recent months.” Then-Biden For President’s Director of Rapid Response, Rebecca Rinkevich, who later became the Biden administration’s White House deputy director of digital strategy, also took part in the call.
Rinkevich said there was a massive amount of disinformation relating to Biden’s “mental acuity.” She explained that people making posts related to topics deemed disinformation were targeted in real-time based on “online behavioral cues, building out personas based on the kind of content they were consuming, what they were searching, [and] the kinds of websites they were visiting.”
Becca Rinkevich, Biden’s Rapid Response Director (later WH Deputy Director of Digital Strategy), also classified talk of Biden’s mental decline as “disinformation”—”disinformation around his mental acuity”. /6 pic.twitter.com/GZMJclMYNs
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
RINKEVICH: “We targeted folks based on online behavioral cues, building out personas, based on the type of content they were consuming, what they were searching, the kinds of websites they were visiting so that we could target folks in real-time as they were exposed to that… pic.twitter.com/M92g62zQW3
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
Durigan took the helm of the program and his reports “went to the literal highest levels” of the Biden campaign, according to Flaherty. The program is still listed on the DNC’s official website, and Durigan remains employed by the DNC going on six years, according to his LinkedIn page. He previously worked for a few months as a Data Visualization Analyst on former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Joining Flaherty & Rinkevich on Zoom, was the DNC Counter-Disinformation Program creator and lead analyst, Tim Durigan. His reports, according to Flaherty, “went to the highest levels of the [Biden] campaign”. /12 pic.twitter.com/GK0slllW8i
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
Rinkevich attributed at least 200,000 votes Biden received in 2020 to the program. The Democrat president won the states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than that put together, according to data collected by NPR from state officials. Orfalea appears to have taken a screenshot of NPR’s graph.
“The risk and the hit concern around mental acuity in particular went down by eight points over the course of our campaign,” Rinkevich said.
But the Biden team didn’t just get the media to forward their deception, they changed real votes. According to Rinkevich, “concern around [Biden’s] mental acuity in particular went down by 8 points over the course of our campaign,” resulting in “about 200K” votes for Biden. /16 pic.twitter.com/Siqtdoo3y4
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
To put things in perspective, Biden won by fewer than 200K votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin ***combined*** 😲 /17 pic.twitter.com/jW2ULDbePw
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) August 7, 2024
Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 election on July 21 after a weeks-long campaign spearheaded by top Democrats following his poor debate performance on June 27 that raised concerns regarding his cognitive ability. This came after the White House insisted videos of Biden apparently freezing during a Juneteenth celebration and wandering off at the G7 Summit were “cheap fakes.” (RELATED: ‘Very, Very Concerned’: Trump Recalls ‘Only’ Interaction With Kamala’s VP Pick On ‘Fox & Friends)
On July 20, 2021, Durigan told the New Democrat Network (NDN) in a Zoom interview that big tech companies “really hold the cards” when it comes to what content disseminates on social media platforms. The NDN wrote at the time that Durigan “runs the DNC’s countering disinformation program” in a post highlighting the interview.
“There’s a reason why the hard-right dominates Facebook. It’s because of the way their system is oriented to hold people’s attention, to keep them afraid and outraged. That content kind of moves to the top, and then those publishers are incentivized create more of it, create more of this propaganda,” Durigan said, Biden-Harris posters visible on the wall behind him.
Concerns regarding censorship of conservative political content under the guise of “misinformation” and “disinformation” reached a fever pitch in October 2020, especially following the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story by social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook — which was later accepted as accurate reporting.
Outrage intensified when former President Donald Trump was banned, either for a period of time or permanently, across many social media platforms including Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube following the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.