On May 15, the Instagram gossip hub The Shade Roomshared a lengthy postto its 28 million followers on Instagram promoting California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyerâs criticism of Paramountâs acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
âRoommates, with a Trump ally already controlling that much of what we watch, are yâall backing Steyerâs plan to block this?â the account wrote.
The post garnered over 17,000 likes, as well as hundreds of comments and shares. Six days later, the publication updated its post with a note.
The account had received a $25,000 payment from the Steyer campaign, according to campaign spending documents shared last week.
The Shade Room is hardly alone. The latest financial disclosure forms released late last weekshowedthat the campaign paid $400,000 to progressive influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina, as well as $25,000 toTommy Marcus, who posts under the name Quentin Quarantino. Earlier this month, the Southern California meme and news account Foos Gone Wildpostedan interview with Steyer, clad in a black t-shirt and a black LA Dodgers hat, to its 3 million Instagram followers. According to last weekâs disclosure, Foos Gone Wild was later paid $50,000 by the campaign.
The California gubernatorial race has become the latest testing ground for modern digital campaigning, which in the last ten years has morphed from individual politicians doing stunts to go viral on Facebook to a system of paid outreach to creators in exchange for their support and promotion.
And Steyerâs campaign is one of the purest instances of this blurry new world of astroturfed support: His team has offered creators everything from $10 a post to nearly half a million for communications consulting in the hopes that theyâll spread the word about him, or at least take his opponents down a peg.
Federal campaigns keep influencer spending secret, taking advantage of a gap between the authority of the Federal Trade Commission â which polices stealth advertising â and the barely functional Federal Elections Commission, which nominally polices political spending.
A wave of disclosures of Steyerâs influencer spending on social media and Substack appears to have been promoted by Californiaâs strict campaign rules â and, perhaps, an embarrassinglongreadby The New York Timesâs Ken Bensinger earlier this month. Now, these disclosures are offering the clearest window yet into how well-resourced modern political campaigns are deploying content creators.
Going into the race, Steyerâs team had a broadcast media plan backed up by a significant war chest. But the campaign believed that digital channels were going to be a very important piece of his campaign strategy, and not just due to changing media habits that have shifted TV eyeballs to phone screens. Steyer is 68, a liability in a post-Biden Democratic party, and is a hedge fund billionaire attempting to run on economic populism.
Source: Drudge Report
