‘Arm the public with facts’: Microsoft billionaire fights US election disinformation

If you stay up late enough watching TV in the US, you may come across what appears to be a short educational program packed with numbers.

The man hosting the program may only be instantly recognizable to a handful of people, though according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, he is currently the eighth wealthiest person in the world.

“Hi, I’m Steve Ballmer. I spent 34 years growing Microsoft, 10 years owning the LA Clippers basketball team. I love computers, data and facts. That’s why I started USAFacts,” Ballmer says at the top of the program.

Leading up to election day in November, USAFacts is rolling out a series of fact-filled educational videos centered on the US. The videos are available on YouTube and will be shown as late-night commercials on select TV channels.

Depending on what program you’re tuning into, you’ll come across stats and information about the federal budget, immigration, the environment or healthcare. And while Ballmer is leading the program, he says he is not out to change people’s minds.

“We’re trying to arm the American public with the information to do their jobs as citizens,” Ballmer said. “We don’t pick sides.”

The idea behind USAFacts came when Ballmer started helping his wife with his family’s philanthropic efforts and found himself facing the scale and complexity of government data.

The organization’s first project, published in 2017, was what Ballmer considers a version of the 10-K financial reports companies are required to compile that illustrates the financial conditions of the company.

The report, now published annually, is called the Government 10-K – named after the yearly financial report that public companies in the United States must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Every year, the organization goes to Washington DC to host a session for lawmakers on its annual report and gives recommendations to lawmakers on collecting data.

“It’s just, here’s how we look at our company. Here’s our numbers about how we’re doing. It has to be presented with context,” Ballmer said.

Ballmer said USAFacts was non-partisan and only used information published by local, state and federal governments as a way to gain people’s trust in its data. Information from other sources, like university research or thinktanks, is not included.

“No forecasts and estimates, which can get partisan. Try to avoid adjectives, which sometimes also get partisan, and really try to ground it in numbers,” he said.

It’s a radically different approach to politics compared with other wealthy tech executives, like Tesla’s Elon Musk and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who have opted for large donations to their political party of choice and big public statements as a means of getting involved.

“Are CEOs paid by shareholders to take partisan positions or not? I say no … Taking extreme partisan positions from the top, that doesn’t seem right to me,” Ballmer said. “I have a lot of respect for tech executives, many of whom started great companies and run great businesses. It just doesn’t seem the way to go for me.”

Though Microsoft had political action committees – known as Pacs – supporting the interests of the company while he was CEO, “there’s more going on” now, Ballmer added.

“More people are out there. It’s a different world than the world I left when I retired 10 years ago, and we’re in a very different political environment.”

In an election year in which both parties are using fake news – so-called “pink slime” – websites to push their agenda, Russia and Iran have been accused of election interference and the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, regularly lies, truth and fiction can be hard to separate.

Through USAFacts, Ballmer has been trying to cut through the noise, reaching people through the organization’s weekly newsletter and on social media. He noted many people land on the USAFact’s website when searching the internet for government stats.

Ballmer sees presidential elections as key opportunities to draw more people to the data. During the 2020 election, USAFacts ran an ad campaign called Change the Story, which encouraged viewers to “find the non-partisan facts behind the real stories”. This year, the organization is turning to longer formats, putting Ballmer front and center to deliver the data directly to viewers.

“This comes through a wistful memory … I had of the 1992 election when Ross Perot ran for president. He would buy these, essentially, infomercials. They were half an hour and they were him talking, holding up poster boards with numbers on them, explaining what was going on in America and then what he might do about it. Very grounded in the numbers,” Ballmer said.

USAFacts has released four videos in their Just the Facts series which have collectively received a respectable 14m views on YouTube so far. The organization plans to release a total of six videos before election day.

“This year, we’ll have a whole lot more visitors and users than we did, certainly [compared] to the 2020 election. We feel good about that. We’re still going to be shy of what I always want to accomplish, which is [figuring out] how many people want the data, are willing to take the time,” Ballmer said. “It’s hard to predict.”