Do Paid Protesters Really Exist?

As media fact-checkers such as PolitiFact have noted, these accusations about paid protesters haven't been supported by evidence. But that hasn't stopped some people from thinking that they're true. In January, after women's marches attracted hundreds of thousands of participants in cities across the globe a Public Policy Polling survey found that 38 percent of Trump voters said they believed that the protesters had been paid by George Soros, a billionaire liberal activist. (A spokesperson for Soros' Open Society Foundations told The Hill, a political newspaper, that Soros hasn't funded any anti-Trump protests.)

Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Fordham University and director of the school's Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy, says that he hasn't seen any indications that the waves of protesters today are being paid to demonstrate against Trump and GOP Congress members, and thinks that the sheer size of the turnout makes it unlikely. "I think that in many cases, the cost would be so exorbitant that it would be prohibitive," he says.

Indeed, Washington Post political reporter Philip Bump calculated that at $25 per protester, it would have cost $57.4 million to subsidize all the protest rallies against Trump between his election in November 2016 and early February. And as Bump noted, coordinating payments to millions of participants would have been difficult to keep secret.

That's not to say that paid protest has never existed. It's a longstanding tradition in countries such as Indonesia, where protesters typically get cash and a packed lunch, according to this this article in The Diplomat. And in Pakistan, students told BBC News in 2014 that they were paid to attend anti-government protests, and then prevented from leaving.

But in the U.S., most of the reported instances seem to be far smaller. The Washington Post reported in 2007, for example, that a union was hiring nonmembers — many of them recruited from homeless shelters — at $8 per hour to picket construction sites. And an Orthodox Jewish organization hired Mexican laborers to don Jewish prayer garments and hold up signs protesting homosexuality at the 2015 Gay Pride Parade in New York City, according to the New York Times.

In fact, when paid activism scales up, it's often at the behest of business interests, not popular ones. UCLA assistant professor of sociology Edward T. Walker has studied grassroots advocacy networks organized by corporate lobbying firms, which in recent years have grown into a billion-dollar industry. In this 2015 New York Times article, Walker detailed how ride-provider Uber used its mobile app to get customers to protest against proposed restrictions in New York City, and even offered free rides to a rally at City Hall.

But as political science professor Panagopoulos notes, social media and mobile apps now make it easy for large numbers of like-minded ordinary citizens to organize and participate in protests, without anyone having to dangle a few dollars in front of them. "These days, it's easy to get the word out," he said.

One example of such instant, unpaid activism is the anti-Trump Indivisible movement, which started with a Google Doc on grassroots organizing created in December 2016 by a couple of former Congressional staffers. Since then, according to spokesperson Helen Kalla, Indivisible has morphed into a network of nearly 6,000 independently organized groups in every Congressional district in the U.S. — none of which receive any funding from the parent organization.

Unsubstantiated accusations of paid protesters, Kalla says via email, are "just another attempt by the Trump Administration and its allies in Congress to discredit the legitimate concerns of hundreds of thousands of constituents who want to make their voices heard."

Panagopoulos sees a similar motive in the charges. "It's a way of minimizing the impact and in particular the visual impact that that these large gatherings have, especially when they're expressing anger and dissatisfaction," he says.