Weaponize survivors’ families in ads

Campaigns will increasingly recruit the relatives of alleged victims to publicly cast doubt on victims’ accounts, turning private family estrangement and trauma into political evidence. These tactics exploit public unfamiliarity with complicated personal histories and rely on online leak-and-amplify chains to create scandal without traditional vetting or TV disclosure. — If normalized, this tactic lowers the threshold of decency in campaigns, chills reporting about abuse, and makes social platforms vectors for personal-ruin politics that degrade democratic norms.