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A lot is happening this week. Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial officially kicked off, Congress is trying to reauthorize a major spy law, and Google workers protested a company contract with Israel.
Which is why we’re talking about Jake Paul, and the influencer-politics ecosystem, in this week’s newsletter.
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Politics has never been stranger—or more online. WIRED Politics Lab is your guide through the vortex of extremism, conspiracies, and disinformation.
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It’s Everyday, Bro feat. Donald J. Trump
In between court appearances, former president Donald Trump has been campaigning in a handful of odd places. In February he hawked his golden shoes at Sneaker Con, and now his team might be sending him to Jake Paul’s next boxing match.
Over the weekend, Paul, the influencer and professional boxer, was interviewed by Jesse Watters on Fox News. The pair discussed his upcoming fight with Mike Tyson and whether Joe Biden or Trump would come out on top in a hypothetical match. At the end of the conversation, however, Paul offered Trump a seat outside the ring.
“Trump, if you’re watching this, this is an invite. I know you used to promote Tyson, so I’d love to have you at the fight,” Paul said. “Donny, pull up, we’ve got tickets for you.”
On Monday I asked the Trump campaign whether they’d take Paul up on his offer, and a top Trump adviser told me that the campaign is “seriously considering” attending the fight. When Paul announced his match with Tyson a few weeks ago, the video received more than 4 million views on YouTube, making it his most popular video so far this year. And while the match itself will likely bring in a massive audience, Paul’s more than 60 million followers across platforms would be the real trophy for the Trump campaign.
2024 is already the year of the election influencer. I wrote about Biden’s gaggle of influencers a few weeks ago, and it’s true—influencers are catching the attention of politicians and campaigns like never before. Paul is a great example: Last fall, the boxer met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and said that he was teaching him to use TikTok. Later that year, Vivek Ramaswamy was in the crowd at one of Paul’s fights. Paul stopped short of endorsing Ramaswamy, but offered to join him on the campaign trail ahead of the Iowa caucus (though bad weather got in the way).
“When we talk about political influencers, we tend to really focus on influencers who are inherently political. However, politicians don't just benefit from those kinds of influencers,” Jo Lukito, an assistant professor focused on political communications at University of Texas at Austin, told me. “The ideal is actually to get influencers who are not super political, right? Because you're able to get an audience that you normally wouldn't have access to.”
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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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Some of the US’s most popular political pundits are creators on platforms like Twitch with massive community Discord servers, but activating those audiences has been difficult for political orgs. Wiles said that VOTE-E is in its soft-launch era, and NextGen plans to work directly with streamers to implement this tool in the future.
There’s a lot of talk about relational organizing this cycle, and this bot seems like an easy way to insert election info into places where young people are already gathering online. Still, generative AI poses significant risks of misinformation, as my colleague David Gilbert has reported before about Microsoft’s AI chatbot and election disinformation. VOTE-E will only respond with preprogrammed answers to stymie these risks, Wiles said.
Have you seen any digital tools designed to help people register to vote—or do you have ideas for tools that should be developed for this deeply online election? I'd love to hear about them. Leave a comment on the site, or send me an email at mail@wired.com.
💬 Leave a comment below this article.
WIRED Reads
Fake Footage of Iran’s Attack on Israel Is Going Viral: Fake videos and misinformation ran rampant on platforms like X following Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel over the weekend. Vittoria Elliott writes that these clips have received millions of views.Donald Trump Poses a Unique Threat To Truth Social, Says Truth Social: William Turton dug through some Truth Social SEC filings and found that Trump is one of the platform's greatest “risk factors.”Celebrity Deepfake Porn Cases Will Be Investigated by Meta Oversight Board: In new cases announced this week, Meta’s Oversight Board will be investigating Meta’s rules on deepfake porn involving two unnamed American and Indian celebrities.
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What Else We’re Reading
🔗 Democratic tech group aims to shake up Republican statehouses in 2024: Generative AI is helping groups like Tech for Campaigns support more races than ever this year. The organization, which consists of more than 17,000 tech workers, is expanding its work in six Republican-led state legislatures. (NBC News)
🔗 Small-time investors in Trump’s Truth Social reckon with stock collapse: Diehard Trump supporters are losing buckets of cash as Truth Social’s value tanks. But as WaPo’s Drew Harwell reports, their investments may have been more symbolic than anything else. (The Washington Post)
🔗 Speaker Johnson's team briefed conservative influencers on his election bill before Trump meeting: Mike Johnson is sweating with news of a new push to oust him from the House speakership. He met with Trump last week and has also been courting an array of influencers. (NBC News)
The Download
For my second Politics Lab newsletter, I chatted with WIRED contributor Anna Merlan about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his then newly-announced veep pick, Nicole Shanahan. We’ve brought Anna back to go even deeper on the pod this week, and talked with our host Leah Feiger about RFK Jr.’s extremely online and conspiracy-filled campaign. You can check it out wherever you listen to podcasts.
That’s it for today—thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with me at mail@wired.com, Instagram, X, and Signal at makenakelly.32.
