Great event coming up, but you’ve got to sign up by Wed. to watch. Details. I’ll be presenting my paper, Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy). … Continue reading
Category Archives: campaigns
Brendan Nyhan and Yusaku Horiuchi for the Monkey Cage: One promising approach is summary fact-checking — an increasingly popular format that presents an overview of fact-checking ratings for a politician. This is distinct from focusing on whether a single statement is true or false; rather, … Continue reading
Wired reports. See my earlier Politico piece, Why Banning Russian Facebook Ads Might Be Impossible. … Continue reading
Brendan Nyhan for NYT’s The UpShot: Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook has taken a number of actions to prevent the continued distribution of false news articles on its platform, most notably by labeling articles rated as false or misleading … Continue reading
Editorial. … Continue reading
AP: Johnson has been the face of the NAACP since then as the organization has refocused its work on supporting its local chapters and tried to retool in the face of rising organizations like Black Lives Matter. Currently as a … Continue reading
Politico: Nick Ayers, a senior adviser to Pence during the presidential race and now his chief of staff, joined the 2016 team as a volunteer and never took a dime in salary from the Trump-Pence campaign even as he crisscrossed … Continue reading
Bloomberg: In the final weeks of the 2016 election campaign, voters in swing states including Nevada and North Carolina saw ads appear in their Facebook feeds and on Google websites touting a pair of controversial faux-tourism videos, showing France and … Continue reading
NYT: Senator John McCain and two Democratic senators moved on Thursday to force Facebook, Google and other internet companies to disclose who is purchasing online political advertising, after revelations that Russian-linked operatives bought deceptive ads in the run-up to the … Continue reading
Daily Beast: The co-authors of McCain-Feingold’s House companion bill, Reps. Christopher Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA), were not pleased. They sued the FEC in part due to that omission, and successfully invalidated 15 FEC regulations. In response, the commission … Continue reading
Daily Beast: Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign. The Twitter … Continue reading
Weigel: Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for Senate in Alabama, gained then lost thousands of apparently fake Twitter followers in the space of a few hours — a situation that his campaign blamed on Democrats. “We highly doubt that reporters … Continue reading
Politico: Efforts to pry loose President Donald Trump’s tax returns at the state level have hit a wall, stalling in statehouses across the country including in California, a hotbed of anti-Trump resistance. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation late Sunday … Continue reading
WaPo: President Trump’s reelection committee spent more than $1 million on legal bills last quarter as investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election pressed on through the summer, according to a disclosure filed Sunday with the Federal Election Commission. The … Continue reading
CPI: New financial disclosures President Donald Trump’s re-election committee filed Sunday with the Federal Election Commission tell a story of two Trump campaigns. On one end, Trump, both by choice and circumstance, remains tethered to his 2016 presidential election effort. … Continue reading
NYT: For more than an hour, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, sheepishly pledged to “do better” — over and over — as stern-faced members of the Congressional Black Caucus grilled her on Thursday about Russian ads aimed at exploiting … Continue reading
Politico: Google and Facebook are looking to make an early imprint on legislation being drafted in the House and Senate that would force them and other online networks to disclose information about the buyers of political ads. Lobbyists from the … Continue reading
Business Insider: Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Axios’ Mike Allen on Thursday that the company would not have removed the political ads purchased by accounts operating out of Russia if they had been posted by real people rather than fake accounts…. Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance … Continue reading
NYT. One of the questions Facebook did not answer: 12.Your advertiser website lists “success stories” of political campaigns that have used Facebook advertising to increase turnout and win elections. Knowing that Facebook could be used to influence election results, why did you … Continue reading
Ciara Torres Spelliscy: As much as fun as it is to beat up on Facebook, the problem lies far deeper than any social media platform, no matter how ubiquitous. Simply put, 20th century law is being used to regulate 21st technology. The … Continue reading
Politico: Democratic senators such as Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana — who hail from states President Donald Trump won in 2016 — know they’re already facing stiff reelection challenges. Now they’re … Continue reading
Today’s must-read: A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across … Continue reading
Recode reports: Microsoft is currently reviewing its sales records to determine whether trolls aligned with the Russian government purchased ads on Bing or other company products during the 2016 U.S. presidential race. I’ll be interested indeed to see whether Russians … Continue reading
It spreads beyond Facebook: Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company’s investigation. The Silicon Valley giant … Continue reading
An interesting profile on Parscale, including a bit on his interaction with the leading social media companies. UPDATE: here’s a page with the transcript of the video as well. More here at NBC, with a tantalizing headline: Trump’s digital campaign director … Continue reading
And the issues for social media companies around political ads don’t get any easier. The Hill reports: Twitter took down a campaign ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) that referenced “baby body parts,” the congresswoman’s campaign said on Monday. . … Continue reading
CNN covers the expanding GOP civil war. … Continue reading
Reuters: Feinstein is the oldest U.S. senator but among several octogenarians, including Republicans Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Richard Shelby, Jim Inhofe, Pat Roberts and John McCain. … Continue reading
The Star-Tribune gives local flavor to the campaign incentives under ranked choice voting, with an intriguing contrast of races in which there’s an incumbent and races without. … Continue reading
Axios: Facebook is going to require ads that are targeted to people based on “politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues” to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an email sent to advertisers and obtained by Axios. That’s … Continue reading
CNN: A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in … Continue reading
WaPo: Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say … Continue reading
NYT: The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page … Continue reading
Senator Amy Klobuchar WaPo oped. … Continue reading
NYT reports. … Continue reading
WaPo editorial. … Continue reading
Nate Cohn for NYT’s The Upshot: Democrats often lament that the House electoral playing field is stacked against them, but that’s not their only problem. The Republican structural edge in the House is fully realized only with the added advantage … Continue reading
In a careful 41-page opinion in Silberberg v. Board of Elections, a federal district court in New York has upheld against First Amendment challenge a New York law that bars photographing and displaying one’s marked ballot. The court held that … Continue reading
NYT: For three weeks, a harsh spotlight has been trained on Facebook over its disclosure that Russians used fake pages and ads, designed to look like the work of American activists, to spread inflammatory messages during and since the presidential campaign. But there … Continue reading
CNN: At least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, sources with knowledge of the ads told CNN. … Continue reading
Details and RSVP. … Continue reading
Politico: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was the beneficiary of at least one Russian-bought ad on Facebook that federal government officials suspect were intended to influence the 2016 election. Other advertisements paid for by shadowy Russian buyers criticized Hillary … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Politico magazine. It begins: Lost amid the debate over whether Facebook can be trusted to police itself to stop Russian and other foreign interference in future U.S. elections or whether new legislation is necessary … Continue reading
WaPo: Billions of dollars are spent every election cycle on advertising, which accounts for the lion’s share of the money in U.S. politics. Campaigns also spend countless hours organizing voter contacts in hopes of winning over would-be supporters. A new study suggests … Continue reading
WaPo: The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and … Continue reading
Karen Hobert Flynn oped. … Continue reading
Wired reports. … Continue reading
WaPo: Democratic lawmakers are pushing for new legislation that would require greater disclosure of political ads that run on Internet platforms, despite a pledge by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that the company will voluntarily pull back the curtain on political advertising … Continue reading
Chris Elmendorf, Ann Ravel and Abby Wood in SF Chronicle: Micro-targeted political advertising raises two sets of concerns: It’s likely to exacerbate political polarization, and the erosion of broadly shared norms against hateful ideologies such as white supremacy. Political scientists … Continue reading
Paul Blumenthal for HuffPo: In what looked like a presidential address with a distinct Silicon Valley aesthetic, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed his private online nation of 2 billion users on Thursday from his glass-walled office space. He went live … Continue reading