Jexodus: How Modern Astroturfing Mixes Social Media and Traditional Ones

After Donald Trump’s election, the media popularized the term “post-truth”, since we seemed to live in a world where traditional media were no longer trusted as reliable sources of information and where the empty space had been filled by social media and their fake news sources. (McComiskey 2017:16). Astroturfing belongs to these post-truth mechanisms. It could be defined as “the practice of artificially creating the impression of widespread public support for a policy, cause, organisation, individual or product, where little or no support in fact exists” (Bailey and Saimolenko, 2018:282). The case of Jexodus is interesting, because it shows well how modern astroturfing cumulates traditional media support and social media support. First, I will demonstrate that the identity of the leader of Jexodus makes it definitely a fake grassroots movement. The social media statistics of the movement gave the impression of a “phenomenon” when in fact there was no real life correlation. Finally, the support for the movement in traditional media demonstrates how efficient it was.

After debates on Israel, Democrat Senator Omar attacked Israel by using a language close to antisemitism. These declarations launched a wave of disapproval among the GOP, which wanted her to resign as a Senator. After these comments, the website Jexodus.com was created. It was supposed to be a neutral movement, which called for a Jewish Exodus from the Democrat Party following these antisemistic comments. The website describes the movement as "a non-partisan nonprofit that unites people of good will – regardless of faith, ethnicity, identity, and political affiliation – around the simple, formerly non-controversial idea that Anti-Semitism must never be mainstreamed by the media or by any political party" (Jexodus.com). The alleged leader of the movement, 23 year old Elizabeth Pipko, started to give interviews to numerous media outlets saying that Jews leaving the Democrat Party was a mass phenomenon.

What she didn't say however, is that the founder of the movement was Jeff Ballabon. Jeff Ballabon said he was “using this as a Jew [he was] using this as someone whose family directly feels threatened- literally threatened, physically threatened- in the culture that’s being created now by the mainstreaming by the Democrats of these kinds of people” (GQ). However, he did not mention that he was one of Trump’s advisors during the 2016 Presidential campaign and that he made all his carreer as Republican political operative. As Bailey and Samoleiko show it: “The core type of deception involved in astroturfing is identity-based deceit – a false representation of the identity of the author or supporter” (Bailey and Saimolenko 2018:282). It is exactly the case here where all the leader of the movement are linked to the GOP. It is also probably one of the main criticism that the movement faces: using antisemitism for party politics motives and therefore weaponising it instead of fighting it (ThinkProgress).

The other aspect of this movement linked to astroturfing is the use of social media to create an impression of grassroots movement when there was no support. The website Jexodus and the social media of the movement were followed by a lot of bots. On Twitter, we could see that the accounts tweeting with the hashtag #Jexodus were mainly political accounts, that tweeted all day with the same hashtags to make them seem bigger. There has been an increased easiness to produce such fake grassroots movements over the last 10 years. The emergence of social networks has flattened the costs of grassroots lobbying for interest groups and therefore more vigilance is needed concerning the authenticity of such movements. Ehrenberg showed that bots and fake accounts are becoming more and more sophisticated and therefore harder to detect for the social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook (Ehrenberg, 2012:25). The American scholar John Cluverius has argued that instead of judging the volume of grassroot lobbying signals, the focus should be on the trust we can give to those movements (Cluverius, 2017:279). This movement also proves that it is part of a second part of “sock pupetting”, the creation of fake accounts in order to give legitimacy to a movement which has no real life popularity (Bailey and Samoilenko, 2018:281).

Despite their claim of a massive popularity for the movement, it doesn’t seem that the Jewish are leaving the Democrat party, as more than 79% of the Jews voted for the Dems at 2018 Mid-term election (Washington Post). There is a small decrease of Jewish people vote for Democrat party in the last 4 presidential elections (from 79% to 71%) but it remains a huge majority. In addition, another interesting indicator showing that Jewish people are not abandoning the Democrat Party is the fact that 95% of the Jewish donations went to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential election (FiveThirtyEight).

Finally the last aspect of this movement that shows it is astroturfing is its traditional media support. The leaders were immediately invited to talk about the movement in right-wing media outlets such as Fox News (ThinkProgress). The support for the movement even went as far as the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who argued that this movement showed a real worrying in the Jewish Community.

To conclude, the Jexodus movement is obviously a desperate astroturfing, that tried to fake it as a grassroots involvement when in fact it was an attempt by GOP to rally Jews against the Democrat Party. This case shows all the modern aspects of astroturfing: deceit identity (the founder of the movement wants to appear as a “normal Jews” but is in fact a Trump advisor), use of the Internet (creation of a website and use of bots to create a legitimacy for the movement) and finally a traditional media use, in order to give more credibility to the interest group. This case shows us that more than ever, media need to be vigilant of the trustworthiness of grassroots movement. It also proves that even in a reputed democracy such as the United States, the party in power can use dirty tricks to gain more voters and secure its reelection.

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Bailey A. and Saimolenko S. (2018), Astroturfing in The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Vol. 1, London: UCL Press, pp 281-283

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Available at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/6/18251639/ilhan-omar-israel-anti-semitism-jews [accessed on 12/08]

Cluverius J. (2017), How the Flattened Costs of Grassroots Lobbying Affect Legislator Responsiveness, Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 279-290

Ehrenberg R. (2012), Social media sway: Worries over political misinformation on Twitter attract scientists' attention, Science News, Vol. 182, No. 8, Washington: Society for Science & the Public, pp. 22-25

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https://www.gq.com/story/gop-jexodus [accessed on 12/08]

McComiskey B. (2017), Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition, Boulder: University Press of Colorado, pp 3-47

Peck A. (2019), Republicans don't want to curb Antisemitism, they want to weaponize it,

Available at: https://thinkprogress.org/republicans-dont-want-to-curb-anti-semitism-they-want-to-weaponize-it-8ede92d54309/ [accessed on 12/08]

Rosenberg E. (2019), Trump and the GOP are trying to make "Jexodus" happen" but most Jews still vote Democratic,

available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/03/12/republicans-are-trying-make-jexodus-happen-most-jews-still-vote-democratic/ [accessed on 12/08]

Stolberg S. (2019), From a Swimsuit Model to the Megaphone of Trump: the Genesis of Jexodus,

Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/swimsuit-model-trump-jews.html [accessed on 12/08]

Images:

First picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0af8BsZ95hk from One America News Network, " President Trump: 'Jexodus' movement asks Jewish people to leave disrespectful Democrat Party"

Second picture: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gops-jewish-donors-are-abandoning-trump/ from FiveThirtyEight, "The GOP's Jewish Donors are abandoning Trump"