Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have churned out across the country on Saturday to support the March for Our Lives movement demanding action on gun control and that politicians begin standing up to the National Rifle Association. That movement is spearheaded by student survivors of mass shootings, particularly those who attended the Parkland, Florida high school where a gunman killed at least 17 people in February, and the NRA hasn’t been quiet about how it feels about all this (incoherent rage).
But it’s apparently been preparing for this moment by trying to dominate the digital airwaves over the past few weeks. Per an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, while the NRA may have initially fallen back of its familiar strategy of taking a long social media weekend after the massacre, four days later it returned with a weeks-long digital advertising campaign that saw average spending spike to nearly $50,000 a day.