Nick Nyhart and Adam Eichen at TAP. … Continue reading
Category Archives: campaigns
NYT: A top Democratic official said the witnesses — William B. Taylor Jr., the top diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a senior State Department official — would lay out a timeline of serious misconduct by Mr. Trump and … Continue reading
Marietje Schaake oped in FT. … Continue reading
NYT: A few hours after polls closed in Kentucky last Tuesday, a Twitter user writing under the handle @Overlordkraken1 posted a message to his 19 followers saying he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.”It was clear that … Continue reading
Yahoo News reports. … Continue reading
The Economist reports. … Continue reading
Courier-Journal: Republicans in Kentucky’s legislature have expressed skepticism about Gov. Matt Bevin’s dispute with Tuesday night’s election results, saying the governor should back up his claims of “irregularities” and not drag the outcome beyond next week’s recanvass.“If there is evidence of fraud or illegalities, as was alluded … Continue reading
AP: A top aide to Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer in Iowa privately offered campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for endorsing his White House bid, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the conversations.The overtures from Pat … Continue reading
SacBee report. … Continue reading
Issue One: Issue One’s latest report, “Digital Disaster: The failures of Facebook, Google, and Twitter’s political ad transparency policies,” reveals how piecemeal, voluntary approaches by the largest social media platforms to stop disinformation campaigns fail to protect our political system from foreign … Continue reading
LAT: Election officials and social media firms already flummoxed by hackers, trolls and bots are bracing for a potentially more potent weapon of disinformation as the 2020 election approaches — doctored videos, known as “deep fakes,” that can be nearly impossible to … Continue reading
Kate Ackley for Roll Call. … Continue reading
Star-Ledger editorial. … Continue reading
NYT: A progressive organization is plunging itself into the presidential campaign, unveiling plans to spend $75 million on digital advertising to counter President Trump’s early spending advantage in key 2020 battleground states.The effort, by a nonprofit group called Acronym and … Continue reading
I’m honored to be included among those announced today as receiving support from the Knight Foundation. for work on internet governance and policy. I’ll be working on turning my cheap speech work into a book. My terrific UCI colleague David … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: President Donald Trump’s team was “very happy” that Wikileaks released emails hacked from the Democratic party during the 2016 race, a former campaign official told investigators from the special counsel’s office.Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chair, … Continue reading
NYT oped: If Facebook’s leaders were willing to level with us, they would stop defending themselves by appealing to lofty values like free speech. They would focus instead on more practical realities: Facebook is incapable of vetting political ads effectively … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
NYT: Twitter said on Wednesday that it would ban all political ads, putting a spotlight on the power and veracity of online advertising and ramping up pressure on Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to reverse his hands-off stance.Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief … Continue reading
AP: Russia interfered in the 2016 election and may try to sway next year’s vote as well. But it’s not the only nation with an eye on U.S. politics.American officials sounding the alarm about foreign efforts to disrupt the 2020 … Continue reading
WaPo: Billing himself as one of President Trump’s top fundraisers, Michael Hodges told fellow payday lenders recently that industry contributions to the president’s reelection campaign could be leveraged to gain access to the Trump administration.“Every dollar amount, no matter how … Continue reading
NYT: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network’s recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted — even false ones — in ads on the site. It asked … Continue reading
WaPo: Thousands of Facebook users in Arizona may have been startled to see a strange warning appear in their social feeds earlier this month.“Official records show that your voter registration is incomplete,” began the post. “Follow the link below to … Continue reading
WaPo: Several Democratic presidential campaigns targeted by a Russia-based operation on Facebook’s popular Instagram app said they had been unaware of the new foreign disinformation efforts until the tech giant announced them publicly last week, raising alarms that American democracy remains … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy column. … Continue reading
CNN: A left-leaning PAC ran a Facebook ad falsely claiming that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham endorsed the Green New Deal. The ad came after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week about the company’s policy of allowing politicians … Continue reading
Dave Levinthal for CPI: Basking in the sunny side of the corporate political disclosure spectrum are household names such as AT&T, HP Inc., Capital One Financial Corp., General Electric Co. and Google parent Alphabet Inc.Comparatively slinking through the shadows? Netflix … Continue reading
NYT explainer. … Continue reading
Houston Chronicle: Mayor Sylvester Turner has called for the district attorney to open a criminal investigation into Tony Buzbee’s campaign over a television ad that appears to show edited photos of Turner and an allegedly fake text between the mayor … Continue reading
At the Lectern reports. … Continue reading
AP: Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has generally been seen as two separate, unrelated tracks: hacking Democratic emails and sending provocative tweets. But a new study suggests the tactics were likely intertwined.On the eve of the release of … Continue reading
NYT dispatch. … Continue reading
Vanita Gupta: After Facebook was implicated in the 2016 election wreckage, the company made strides to shore up the platform against future harms to our democracy. But now, Facebook is sabotaging its own efforts through a new policy: the explicit exemption … Continue reading
WSJ reports. At least 14 Republican candidates and groups directly received a total of $675,500 in campaign contributions last year from Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the Soviet-born Florida businessmen indicted this week on campaign-finance violations.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan say … Continue reading
NYT reports. … Continue reading
Trevor Potter and Delaney Marsco: Rudolph W. Giuliani is not the secretary of state. In fact, he has no official position in President Trump’s Cabinet or administration. Yet he is traveling the world holding himself out as a U.S. government operative, … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: The news of Thursday’s indictments of two associates of Rudy Giuliani’s, who according to their lawyer (and former Trump lawyer) John Dowd, assisted Giuliani “in connection with his representation of President Trump” shows that foreign … Continue reading
Timely exploration by Tim Mooney at NPQ. … Continue reading
WaPo: Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015 had no pollster, rapid-response team or fundraiser. A bare-bones staff fueled by pizza and energy drinks toiled in a makeshift office at Trump Tower. His opponents vastly outspent him — and lost.But as … Continue reading
Yahoo: With deepfake technology producing realistically modified digital content at a steeply increasing rate, California’s governor Gavin Newsom is taking a series of legal steps to avoid such technology from damaging the state’s political integrity and protect residents from having their faces placed … Continue reading
Marketplace: Most of us can identify a standard commercial and we usually know someone is trying to sell us something. But what happens when the “product” is a political candidate and the “ad” is a tweet, or Facebook post?In her … Continue reading
CNN: The federal government warned state election officials Thursday it suspects Russia may focus on voter suppression as a means to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.The joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security document, obtained by CNN and marked … Continue reading
You can find the court’s rather cursory discussion of the issues in this opinion (via BAN). I expect this will now go on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which could well reverse, and to the Supreme Court, which I expect … Continue reading
Watch. … Continue reading
WSJ: National Rifle Association funds paid for lodging and travel of Russian nationals throughout 2015 and 2016, as part of a relationship that allowed foreign actors looking to influence the U.S. election, including now-convicted Maria Butina, to infiltrate the gun-rights … Continue reading
Peter Baker news analysis in the NYT. … Continue reading
Press release. … Continue reading
NYT: President Trump acknowledged on Sunday that he raised corruption accusations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a phone call with Ukraine’s leader, a stunning admission as pressure mounted on Democrats to impeach Mr. Trump over allegations … Continue reading
Judd Legum: The “I Love America” Facebook page boasts 1.1 million fans, with viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States. A typical post is a celebration of the U.S. … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins: President Donald Trump may well have committed a new campaign finance crime if he, as reported, pressured Ukraine into providing dirt on a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and … Continue reading