Category Archives: social media and social protests

“Under Siege From Trump and Musk, a Top Liberal Group Falls Into Crisis”

July 25, 2025, 2:04 pmchicanery, social media and social protestsDan Tokaji

Fascinating NYT story about the financial difficulties facing Media Matters. The Times reports that it “has racked up about $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits by Elon Musk, in addition to investigations by Mr. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission and Republican state attorneys general.” The story also reports on the group’s tension with its lawyers:

In early February, frustrated by what some at Media Matters saw as the high cost and slow pace of their lawyers at the influential Democratic firm Elias Law Group, the advocacy group began transitioning the X cases to different law firms. An Elias lawyer notified the group that it owed roughly $4 million.

“We understand this case has been and remains very difficult for everyone involved, as was Musk’s intention when he brought it,” Ezra Reese, the chair of Elias’s political law group, wrote in an email to Mr. Carusone and Media Matters’s lead fund-raiser, Mary Pat Bonner.

Mr. Reese offered to wipe away about half of the unpaid tally in exchange for payment of $2.25 million within about a week. If the group did not commit to the payment plan, Mr. Reese wrote, his firm would expect full payment of the original amount and would “go pens down and take steps to withdraw from the case by the end of the month.”

The ultimatum did not sit well inside Media Matters.

“You must be kidding!!” Ms. Bonner responded to Mr. Reese. “This is how you treat people who have been clients for 16 years and are friends?”

In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Reese defended his firm’s work, noting that it helped with matters including the effort to shut down the state attorneys general investigations. “These victories,” he predicted, would help Media Matters and other organizations “stand up to politically-motivated investigations and lawsuits brought by the right wing.”

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My new one at MSNBC Opinion: “Two big questions raised by Elon Musk’s Trumpian transformation of X; Even if the worst does not come to pass, Musk is already hastening truth decay.”

October 14, 2024, 7:05 amcheap speech, Plutocrats United, social media and social protestsRick Hasen

I have written this opinion column for MSNBC Opinion. It begins:

Conservatives were rightly outraged when social media platforms including Twitter removed links to a New York Post story run weeks before the 2020 elections detailing embarrassing information contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter executives later admitted it was a mistake, an overreaction to the platform’s handling of tweets linking to 2016 Democratic National Committee documents hacked by the Russian government.

But if the removal of the Hunter Biden content was problematic because of its potential impact on the 2020 election, how should we feel about Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) using his platform to give unremitting support to Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy via at times misleading and incendiary election content pushed to millions of users’ feeds daily?

A new deep dive by The New York Times last week described Musk as “the richest man in the world [who] has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.” Indeed, even as Musk railed about social media’s Hunter Biden censorship, the Times alleges X worked with Trump’s campaign to stifle a potentially embarrassing Trump story: “After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.” (Musk did not return a request for comment on the Times’ reporting.)

Meanwhile, what to make of Musk’s recent post stating, “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” Musk went on to make a wholly unsubstantiated claim that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to turn millions of noncitizens in the U.S. into voters who will inevitably vote for Democrats.

This, on top of Musk’s commandeering of the @america handle for his super PAC, the millions of dollars he has pledged to a pro-Trump super PAC, and his personal appearances on the campaign trail for Trump. Plus his efforts to gather voter registration information for his super PAC by offering $47 for every referral that results in a petition signature. (The petition pledges support for the First and Second Amendments.)

Musk’s transformation of Twitter to X helps us think clearly about two issues that have been percolating about social media platforms: Should government regulations police speech on platforms for political bias? And what should social media companies do about election-related disinformation?….

Perhaps our greatest fear should be the impact of Musk inflaming the passions of those who already believe false narratives. How will the public react, and what will those who certify elections try to do, if Trump and Musk fan the flames of voter denial after voters have cast their ballots in November?…

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“Elon Musk’s misleading election claims reach millions and alarm election officials”

September 10, 2024, 7:31 amcheap speech, fraudulent fraud squad, social media and social protestsRick Hasen

WaPo:

The chairman of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pa., was well acquainted with the regular attendees at his monthly meetings who peddled old,debunked voting conspiracy theories.

But something changed after April 4, the chairman,Neil Makhija, explained in an interview. That was the day Elon Musk retweeted a false claim that as many as 2 million noncitizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Suddenly, the same people were coming to the meetings with a new, unsubstantiated theory of voter fraud that appeared to align with Musk’s latest post: They were convinced that droves of noncitizens were voting illegally in their suburban Philadelphia county of nearly a million people.

For Makhija, a Democrat who is also a member of the county board of commissioners, it was a lesson in the influence of Musk, the South Africa-born billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. In the two years since he bought Twitter, now X, Musk has transformed it into a primary source of false election rumors, both by spreading them on his own account, which has 197 million followers, and lowering some of the site’s guardrails around misinformation.

“You have one of the richest men in the world putting out this idea that the elections are fraudulent and the results are questionable,” Makhija said. “X has obviously become a platform for misinformation and disinformation. Because we know it’s not true.”

Musk’s online utterances don’t stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests to purge voter rolls and heighten their worry over violent threats. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of misinformation because his digital following stretches well beyond the political realm and into the technology and investment sectors, where his business achievements have earned him credibility.

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“Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media”

September 7, 2024, 9:56 amcheap speech, chicanery, social media and social protestsRick Hasen

NYT:

In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media.

By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine — that were then promoted across the spectrum of social media, from YouTube to TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram and Rumble.

It was all, federal prosecutors now say, a covert Russian influence operation. On Wednesday, the Justice Department accused two Russians of helping orchestrate $10 million in payments to Tenet in a scheme to use those stars to spread Kremlin-friendly messages.

The disclosures reflect the growing sophistication of the Kremlin’s longstanding efforts to shape American public opinion and advance Russia’s geopolitical goals, which include, according to American intelligence assessments, the election of former President Donald J. Trump in November.

In 2016 and 2020, Russia employed armies of internet trolls, fake accounts and bot farms to try to reach American audiences, with debatable success. The operation that prosecutors described this week shows a pivot to exploiting already established social media influencers, who, in this case, generated as many as 16 million views on Tenet’s YouTube channel alone.

Most viewers were presumably unaware, as the influencers themselves said they were, that Russia was paying for it all.

“Influencers already have a level of trust with their audience,” said Jo Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s journalism school who studies Russian disinformation. “So, if a piece of information can come through the mouth of an existing influencer, it comes across as more authentic.”

The indictment — which landed like a bombshell in the country’s conservative media ecosystem — also underscored the growing ideological convergence between President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and a significant portion of the Republican Party since Mr. Trump’s rise to political power….

Martin J. Riedl, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies the spread of misinformation on social media, said the case of Tenet spotlighted gaping regulatory holes when it came to the American political system.

While the Federal Election Commission has strict disclosure rules for television and radio advertisements, it has no such restrictions for paid social media influencers.

The result is an enormous loophole — one that the Russians appeared to exploit.

“Influencers have been around for a while,” Mr. Riedl said, “but there are few rules around their communication, and political speech is not regulated at all.”

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“DOJ alleges Russia funded US media company linked to right-wing social media stars”

September 5, 2024, 7:06 amcheap speech, chicanery, social media and social protestsRick Hasen

CNN:

The unnamed Tennessee-based company that the Justice Department alleges was being funded by Russian operatives working as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated influence operation targeting the 2024 US election is Tenet Media, which is linked to right-wing commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms, according to a US official briefed on the matter.

The indictment unsealed in New York’s Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company, described only as “Company 1” in court documents.

CNN has independently confirmed that “Company 1” is Tenet Media, which is a platform for independent content creators. It is self-described as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” according to its website, which matches language contained in the newly unsealed indictment.

The goal of the operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests.

The indictment also says that Company 1’s website identifies six commentators.

Among the commentators listed on Tenet Media’s website are right-wing personalities Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. Both have millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms. Pool interviewed Trump on his podcast in May.

In separate statements released Wednesday, Johnson and Pool said they were victims of the alleged scheme and said they maintained editorial control of the content they had created.

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Announcement: UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project Fall Calendar of Events

September 4, 2024, 7:44 amcheap speech, election administration, electoral college, social media and social protests, The Voting Wars, UncategorizedRick Hasen

As we prepare for another fall semester, we’re excited to bring you a robust series of events on the 2024 Elections, Election Law, and the risks facing democracy in the U.S.

This semester, we present a mix of live, online, and hybrid events. Please see below or click the link for details. We hope you can join us!

Sept. 12: From Here to There: How States Can and Should Certify the Results of the 2024 Elections (Webinar)

Thursday, September 12, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar, (Recording to Follow)
Webinar Registration
Ben Berwick, Head of Election Law & Litigation Team & Counsel (Protect Democracy), Lauren Miller Karalunas, (Brennan Center for Justice), and Michael Morley (Florida State University College of Law). Moderated by Rick Hasen

Sept. 17: Democracy and Risks to the 2024 Elections (in person at UCLA Hammer Museum)

Tuesday, September 17, 7:30pm PT at the UCLA Hammer Museum, (Recording to Follow)
Co-presented with the Hammer Forum and the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law & Policy, UCLA Law
Can the United States conduct a free and fair election in November in which the public will have confidence? Are concerns about foreign interference, deep fakes, and disinformation serious or overblown? Is participation equally open to minority voters? What are the risks to U.S. democracy if significant portions of the public do not accept the election results as legitimate? Moderated by Rick Hasen, UCLA Law. Panelists: Leah Aden, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; John Fortier, American Enterprise Institute; Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Yoel Roth, The Match Group.
More information here.

Sept. 24: One Person, One Vote? (in person at UCLA Hammer Museum)

Tuesday, September 24, 7:30pm PT at the UCLA Hammer Museum, live in person only
Co-presented with the Hammer Forum
Documentary film screening.
At a time when many Americans question democratic institutions, One Person, One Vote? unveils the complexities of the Electoral College, the uniquely American and often misunderstood mechanism for electing a president. The documentary follows four presidential electors representing different parties in Colorado during the intense 2020 election.2024. dir. Maximina Juson. Color. 78 minutes.
More information here.

Oct. 8: The United States Electoral College and Fair Elections (in person at UCLA Hammer Museum)

Tuesday, October 8, 7:30pm PT at the UCLA Hammer Museum, (Recording to Follow)
Co-presented with the Hammer Forum
Why does the United States use the Electoral College for choosing the President? Is the Electoral College a fair way to choose a President? What specific risks does the method for choosing electors pose for free and fair elections? How likely is the United States to adopt a national popular vote instead of the Electoral College? Moderated by Rick Hasen, UCLA Law. Panelists: Joey Fishkin, UCLA Law; Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Pomona College; Derek Muller, University of Notre Dame.
More information here.

Oct. 9: Finding Common Ground in Election Law (in person and online)

Wednesday, October 9, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Lunch will be provided, (Recording to Follow)
In person at UCLA Law School Room 1430 and online
In person registration
Webinar Registration
Co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean, UCLA Law
Lisa Manheim (University of Washington School of Law), Derek T. Muller (Notre Dame Law School), and Richard L. Hasen (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, moderator)

Oct. 15: Are We Ready for a Fair and Legitimate Election? (in person at UCLA Hammer Museum)

Tuesday, October 15, 7:30pm PT at the UCLA Hammer Museum, (Recording to Follow)
Co-presented with the Hammer Forum
Are election administrators up to the task of holding elections and fairly counting votes when they are subject to unprecedented public scrutiny and face possible harassment? Will delays in reporting vote totals undermine the public’s confidence in election results, regardless of how well the election is administered? What are the risks to acceptance of election results and peaceful transitions of power between election day and January 6, 2025, when Congress counts the states’ Electoral College votes? Moderated by Rick Hasen, UCLA Law. Panelists: Larry Diamond, Stanford University, Ben Ginsberg, Stanford University. Franita Tolson, USC Law.
More information here.

Oct. 21: A.I., Social Media, the Information Environment and the 2024 Elections (webinar)

Monday, October 21, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar, (Recording to Follow)
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy, UCLA Law
Danielle Citron (University of Virginia Law School), Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth), Nate Persily (Stanford Law School). Moderated by Rick Hasen
Webinar Registration

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Zuckerberg on 2020 Election Administration Spending, Hunter Biden Laptop

August 27, 2024, 6:52 amcheap speech, social media and social protestsRick Hasen

WSJ:

Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was improper for the Biden administration to have pressured Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the coronavirus pandemic, vowing that the social-media giant would reject any such future efforts.

Zuckerberg also said he didn’t plan to repeat efforts to fund nonprofits to assist in state election efforts, a Covid-era push that had drawn Republican criticism and sparked many Republican-leaning states to ban the practice.

In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) that touched on a series of controversies, Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”…

Zuckerberg also made clear he didn’t plan to repeat heavy spending on election access. The billionaire Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to nonprofits to help conduct elections during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

While many localities said the money was a lifeline helping them register voters, set up socially-distanced voting booths and provide equipment to sort mail-in ballots, among other uses, Republicans said that the money, which they dubbed “Zuckerbucks,” unfairly benefited Democratic areas. More than two dozen mostly Republican-leaning states have now banned, limited or regulated the use of private funds to manage elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Despite the analysis I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg wrote. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”….

In his letter to Jordan, Zuckerberg said that Meta “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Post story about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. The Post said at the time that its reporting was based on email exchanges between the two Bidens that were provided by allies of President Donald Trump, who in turn said they received them from a computer-repair person who found them on a laptop. At the time, dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter that then-candidate Biden cited in a presidential debate saying that the release of the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote.

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My Forthcoming Yale Law Journal Feature: “The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law”

August 20, 2024, 7:18 amauthoritarian threats in US, ballot access, Bush v. Gore reflections, campaign finance, cheap speech, chicanery, Constitutional Right to Vote, election administration, election law and constitutional law, Election Meltdown, election subversion risk, First Amendment theory, legislation and legislatures, political equality, political parties, political polarization, primaries, Real Right to Vote, social media and social protests, Supreme Court, The Voting Wars, voting, Voting Rights ActRick Hasen

I have written this draft, forthcoming this spring in Volume 134 of the Yale Law Journal. I consider it my most important law review article (or at least the most important that I’ve written in some time). It offers a 30,000-foot view of the state of election law doctrine, politics, and theory. The piece is still in progress, so comments are welcome. Here is the abstract:

American election law is in something of a funk. This Feature explains why, what it means, and how to move forward.

Part I of this Feature describes election law’s stagnation. After a few decades of protecting voting rights, courts (and especially the Supreme Court), acting along ideological—and now partisan—lines, have pulled back on voter protections in most areas of election law and deprived other actors including Congress, election administrators, and state courts of the ability to more fully protect voters rights. Politically, pro-voter election reform has stalled out in a polarized and gridlocked Congress, and the voting wars in the states mean that ease of access to the ballot depends in part on where in the United States one lives. Election law scholarship too has stagnated, failing to generate meaningful theoretical advances about the key purposes of election law.

Part II considers the retrogression of election law doctrine, politics, and theory to a focus on the very basics of democracy: the requirement of fair vote counts, peaceful transitions of power, and voter access to reliable information. Courts on a bipartisan basis in the aftermath of the 2020 election rejected illegitimate attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Yet the courts’ ability to thwart attempted election subversion remains a question mark in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States. Politically, Congress came together at the end of 2022 to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act to deter future attempts to manipulate electoral college rules in order to subvert election results, but future bipartisan action to prevent retrogression seems less likely. Further, because of the collapse of local journalism and the rise of cheap speech, voters face a decreased ability to obtain reliable information to make voting decisions consistent with their interests and preferences. Meanwhile, parties have become potential paths for subversion. Party-centered election law theory and the First Amendment “marketplace of ideas” theory have not yet incorporated these emerging challenges.

Part III considers the potential to transform election law doctrine, politics, and theory in a pro-voter direction despite high current levels of polarization, the misperceived partisan consequences of pro-voter election reforms, and new, serious technological and political challenges to democratic governance. Election law alone is not up to the task of saving American democracy. But it can help counter stagnation and thwart retrogression. The first order of business must be to assure continued free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But the new election law must be more ambitiously and unambiguously pro-voter. The pro-voter approach to election law is one grounded in political equality and based on four principles: all eligible voters should have the ability to easily register and vote in a fair election with the capacity for reasoned decisionmaking; each voter’s vote is entitled to equal weight; the winners of fair elections are recognized and able to take office peacefully; and political power is fairly distributed across groups in society, with particular protection for those groups who have faced historical discrimination in voting and representation.

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