Stop Doom-Scrolling

...and do something useful.

Everything is terrible. And much of it can be directly tied back to Trump. Though he didn’t devise environmental degradation, create COVID-19, or invent racism, he has inarguably advanced all these disasters, and as you read the endless bits of bad news on your social feeds, it’s hard not to feel hopeless. Sometimes it feels like doomscrolling is all you can do — whether it’s a mortifying addiction to pain and disappointment, or a restless search for something hopeful.

But I have a great alternative: hateclicking.

Early this year, the Pew Research Center released a study suggesting that executives in the tech sector had a fairly dire diagnosis for the pattern of what the study called “digital disruption.” In fact, a full 49% of the respondents felt that the “use of technology will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the next decade.”

But in June, TikTok users and K-pop fans had a different idea about the virtues of digital disruption. Famously, they joined forces to throw off the official count for Trump’s rally in Tulsa. It was beautiful, it was brilliant, and it was all done from the confines of their respective quarantine.

It’s in this spirit that I offer hateclicking as a practical way to cost the Trump reelection campaign money, and to distort the data they’re capturing for further advertising investment.

What follows was written by a friend of mine who is running for public office in the 2020 election cycle. Not wanting to piss off his campaign manager, he can’t publish it under his own name. I told him I’m more than happy to.

What hateclicking is, and how to do it.

The Trump campaign is unprecedented in how aggressively it runs paid online advertisements. These ads nominally push out messaging and solicit the opinions of voters, but in actuality they are about generating fundraising dollars and merchandise sales, collecting data, and building a giant house file of email addresses and phone numbers to use for further fundraising and merch sales.

Advertisers pay social media companies and publishers like Google in a variety of ways, but generally each time an ad is clicked it costs the advertiser money, usually from a few pennies to a few dollars.

Here is where you come in. Every day (and up to a couple times a day) Google “Trump” or “Trump Store” or “MAGA Hat” or something similar and then click on the ad links. Look for the ones that say “Ad” next to them, those are the ones they are paying for.

What follows was written by a friend of mine who is running for public office in the 2020 election cycle. Not wanting to piss off his campaign manager, he can’t publish it under his own name. I told him I’m more than happy to.

If thousands of us do this a few times a day it will increase the campaign’s online ad spend while producing nothing of value for them. It is probably not helpful to refresh and click again more than a handful of times per day because online advertising platforms often filter out repetitive frequent clicks from the same computers and don’t bill for them.

Here are some things you can do for bonus points:

• Let the page load fully before closing it so that trackers have time to register the click
• If you happen to click through to a Trump merchandise page, add a few items to your cart before you close the window — this can tie up inventory and make some items appear unavailable to legitimate MAGA shoppers
• Right Click on links to open multiple links in new tabs
• Use your browser’s “incognito” mode to search and click multiple times
• Use a VPN to click on ads from virtual locations multiple times.
• If you can stomach it, follow some prominent GOP pages on Facebook so that you start getting Trump Facebook Ads and then click and comment on those to also use up their Facebook ad budget.

Happy hating, everybody.