In the News
CommonWealth Magazine: A question of money and speech (Podcast)
By Jack Sullivan
[U]nlike the other ballot questions which seek to create or maintain state laws, Question 2 would launch that most typical Bay State of creatures, a commission to talk about changing the US Constitution. But while the referendum is about process, the underlying motive is the hot button issue of campaign finance and, more specifically, overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision…
If voters approve the question, the state would form a citizens commission to review both the Supreme Court ruling and the Constitution. They would then propose changes that would take away recognition of “corporate personhood,” which the court has historically recognized…
Bradley Smith, the former head of the Federal Elections Commission who also appeared on the Codcast, says it’s a slippery slope in changing the First Amendment and giving government control over whose voice can be heard.
“It’s not just about the corporation to speak, it’s about the right for voters to hear different views and to act on views they hear,” said Smith, a law professor and founder of the nonprofit Institute for Free Speech in Virginia…
Smith acknowledged more money gives some advocates a louder voice than others. But he says the constitution wasn’t designed to make everyone equal in anything except rights.
“Sure, people who have money have a bigger megaphone to get their message out,” said Smith, who pointed out his job allows him to travel the country and get paid to offer his opinion on issues. “Lots of people have lots of differences that enables them to do different things… We’re not all equal.”
Free Speech
Washington Post: Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab world needs most is free expression
By Jamal Khashoggi
I was recently online looking at the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as “free.” That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of “partly free.” The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as “not free.”
As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche…
The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011. Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective countries. They expected to be emancipated from the hegemony of their governments and the consistent interventions and censorship of information. These expectations were quickly shattered…
There was a time when journalists believed the Internet would liberate information from the censorship and control associated with print media. But these governments, whose very existence relies on the control of information, have aggressively blocked the Internet. They have also arrested local reporters and pressured advertisers to harm the revenue of specific publications…
The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices.
Online Speech Platforms
New York Times: The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading
By Editorial Board
Social media misinformation is becoming a newsroom beat in and of itself, as journalists find themselves acting as unpaid content moderators for these platforms…
The internet platforms will always make some mistakes, and it’s not fair to expect otherwise. And the task before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and others is admittedly herculean. No one can screen everything in the fire hose of content produced by users. Even if a platform makes the right call on 99 percent of its content, the remaining 1 percent can still be millions upon millions of postings. The platforms are due some forgiveness in this respect.
It’s increasingly clear, however, that at this stage of the internet’s evolution, content moderation can no longer be reduced to individual postings viewed in isolation and out of context. The problem is systemic, currently manifested in the form of coordinated campaigns both foreign and homegrown. While Facebook and Twitter have been making strides toward proactively staving off dubious influence campaigns, a tired old pattern is re-emerging – journalists and researchers find a problem, the platform reacts and the whole cycle begins anew. The merry-go-round spins yet again…
The companies have all the tools at their disposal and a profound responsibility to find exactly what journalists find – and yet, clearly, they don’t. The role that outsiders currently play, as consumer advocates and content screeners, can easily be filled in-house. And unlike journalists, companies have the power to change the very incentives that keep producing these troubling online phenomena…
Social media platforms are doing society no favors by relying on journalists to leach the poison from their sites. Because none of this is sustainable – and we definitely don’t want to find out what happens when the merry-go-round stops working.
Washington Post: I fell for Facebook fake news. Here’s why millions of you did, too.
By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Fake news creators “aren’t loyal to any one ideology or geography,” said Tessa Lyons, the product manager for Facebook’s News Feed tasked with reducing misinformation. “They are seizing on whatever the conversation is” – usually to make money.
This year, Facebook will double the number of humans involved in fighting constantly morphing “integrity” problems on its network, to 20,000. Thanks in part to those efforts, independent fact-checkers and some new technologies, Facebook user interaction with known fake news sites has declined by 50 percent since the 2016 election, according to a study by Stanford and New York University…
Facebook and other social media companies deserve some of the blame. It’s easy to grow an audience for outlandish stories when publishing doesn’t require vetting, and algorithms are tuned to share the stuff that garners the greatest outrage. I saw that crazy video because Facebook decided I should…
On Sept. 17, a few days after it was posted, the video was detected by Facebook’s machine-learning systems…
Why does the fake plane video remain up at a time when Facebook is making headlines for taking down other posts? Facebook said deletion is for violations of its community standards, such as pornography. “My job is to prevent misleading and false information from going viral,” Lyons said. “Even if something is false, we don’t prevent people from sharing it. We give them context.”
That comes in the form of a label. Now when the video appears in a News Feed or someone attempts to share it, up pops “Additional Reporting On This,” with a link to reports from fact-checking organizations.
Fundraising
The Hill: Small-dollar donations explode in the Trump era
By Max Greenwood
An explosion of small-dollar donations has become an increasingly powerful force in campaign politics…
Unlike higher-dollar contributors, small donors don’t have to be disclosed individually.
Democrats point to the surge in low-dollar contributions as evidence that the party has shifted the paradigm for campaign fundraising away from a reliance on the coterie of wealthy donors and outside groups that have leveraged outsize influence in politics for years.
In turn, they say, the party has effectively mapped out a new model for funding campaigns…
Trump’s campaign in 2016 also unleashed a deluge of low-dollar contributions, and that trend appears to be continuing for the president this year…
Michael Caputo, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, said that slew of small donations is fueled by the president’s populist brand of politics.
But also driving the contributions is a sense among the president’s supporters that his administration’s achievements and agenda are imperiled by Democrats, Caputo said…
Caputo said Trump, with his campaign’s aggressive digital operation, has now set an example for the Republican Party moving forward.
“The party is learning from the president’s fundraising,” he said. “A lot of the president’s fundraising is coming from email appeals and as every day goes by, Republican candidates are emulating his appeals more and more.”
FEC
Daily Wire: Sen. Heitkamp Makes Her Massive #MeToo Mistake Even Worse With Possible FEC Violation
By James Barrett
Democrat Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota published a full-page ad in every major newspaper across the state Monday that took the form of an open letter telling her opponent Kevin Cramer that he is “wrong” about the #MeToo movement that was signed by scores of women the letter describes as “survivors of domestic abuse, sexual assault, or rape.” But some of the names listed as signees say they never agreed to have their names publicly outed and others say they are not even “survivors.”
Amid reports that some of the women now fear retaliation from their abusers and some are taking legal action against Heitkamp for publicly outing them without their permission or knowledge, the embattled senator ran a brief apology in the Minot Daily News that may come back to haunt her.
In a piece for the Say Anything Blog, Rob Port explains why that ad might prove to be an additional problem for the senator: it fails to provide the FEC-required disclaimer listing the ad as paid for by the Heitkamp campaign…
The FEC requires all campaign-related public communications to include a disclaimer telling the audience that it was paid for by the campaign (see full requirements below).
Port reached out the Minot Daily News to see if the ad was indeed paid for by the Heitkamp campaign; the paper said yes. “It was paid for by the campaign committee and it came to us through NDNA [North Dakota Newspaper Association],” Dan McDonald, the paper’s publisher, told Port Friday.
“It would seem this apology ad, which has already been criticized for being tiny compared to the full-page size of the original ad being apologized for, also runs afoul of FEC rules,” writes Port.
Independent Groups
Sports Illustrated: Meet the New York Teenager Who Created the ‘Mets Are a Good Team’ Super PAC
By Emma Baccellieri
As Ben grew more interested in politics, he grew increasingly suspicious of political money. Approaching this year’s midterm elections, he thought he’d try to get involved, even though he’s not old enough to vote. “I sort of was interested in using the idea that I could form a Super PAC as being a point against Super PACs,” he said…
At first, though, he didn’t know what to do with his handiwork. He’d made the point that he was trying to prove-that anyone, even a teenage boy, can form a political action committee about anything, even a baseball team. Should he just accept that, and let it fade out? Find a way to use it to push the team for success in free agency? Support local candidates who shared his fandom?
It took a few days-and a check-in with his uncle, a lawyer, to make sure that he had everything straight-but he got it. Aybar wants to embrace the team’s traditional status as an underdog by advocating for what he deems their political equivalent: new candidates, operating without the backing of large corporate donations.
“It was just sort of a joke. But we want it to be, at least, less of a joke,” Aybar said. “Because we think we can do something serious with it.”
He wants to see more oversight for the creation of PACs, he said, and he wants to support candidates who will work against corruption without large war chests of their own.
“He really wants to make a difference,” Susie said. “It’s hard as a 15-year-old boy to enact change when you can’t vote.”
Ben thinks he’s found his strategy to counter that. He’s still sifting through all of the technicalities, and the whole thing is all a little inside baseball. But, of course, that’s the point.
Candidates and Campaigns
NBC News: Ben and Jerry churn out tv ads for 5 Democratic House hopefuls
By Ben Kamisar
Ben & Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, in partnership with the progressive MoveOn.org, are running television ads to help five Democrats…
In an interview with NBC News, Cohen said that the goal is to “bring a national spotlight and national name recognition” to candidates that exemplify “Ben & Jerry’s values.”
“We are lending what we can, which happens to be ice cream, to highlight their races and hopefully send the message to people around the country that if you want to support someone in this upcoming election, these are some really good candidates to support,” he said.
“These candidates exemplify those Ben & Jerry’s values of compassion, economic justice social justice. If that’s what you’re into, these are the guys to vote for.”
The new spots are similar for all five candidates – Cohen and Greenfield are briefly shown on camera talking about the importance of this election, sharing praise of each candidate. The ads start airing Monday on MSNBC, CNN and Comedy Central.
The ice cream moguls had already endorsed the five candidates, as well as two others … by creating limited-edition ice cream flavors to help raise money for their campaigns.
Cohen told NBC News that the pair still supports those two candidates but that they were unable to secure enough funding for an “efficient” ad buy in each of those two districts…
The campaign is not Cohen’s first foray into politics. He was a vocal supporter of Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid, for which he also created a special-edition ice cream flavor. He’s also been a vocal proponent of campaign finance reform.
The States
Orange County Register: The FPPC finally lowers the boom
By Jon Coupal
The free speech clauses of the federal and state Constitutions prohibit the use of governmentally compelled monetary contributions (including taxes) to support or oppose political campaigns since “Such contributions are a form of speech, and compelled speech offends the First Amendment.” Smith v. U.C. Regents (1993) 4 Cal.4th 843, 852.
Moreover, “use of the public treasury to mount an election campaign which attempts to influence the resolution of issues which our Constitution leaves to the ‘free election’ of the people (see Const., art. II, § 2) … presents a serious threat to the integrity of the electoral process.” Stanson v. Mott (1976) 17 Cal.3d 206, 218.
While taxpayer organizations have been successful in several lawsuits involving these illegal expenditures, that hasn’t stopped either the state or local governments from continuing to push the envelope into political advocacy…
[W]hen government agencies engage in illegal political activity under First Amendment grounds, unless they have reported the costs of the activities to the FPPC as campaign contributions, they have violated separate campaign finance laws as well.
In March 2017, Los Angeles County placed Measure H… [T]he county’s use of nearly a million dollars of public funds for the political campaign unquestionably crossed the line into political advocacy…
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association filed a complaint with the FPPC shortly after Measure H passed – by a slender margin – and this past week the FPPC finally took action. Specifically, the FPPC found probable cause to charge L.A. County, as well as the individual members of the Board of Supervisors, with 15 counts of campaign finance violations… [L]ocal governments up and down California are illegally using taxpayer funds for political advocacy and failing to report the same as political contributions.
Boise State Public Radio: Idaho Legislators Propose Updates To State’s Campaign Finance Laws (Audio)
By Richard Copeland
Idaho State Representative Mat Erpelding (D-Boise) discusses campaign finance reform efforts with Idaho Matters…
A legislative committee has been meeting to address Idaho’s lax campaign finance laws. On Friday’s Idaho Matters, we look at efforts to bring more clarity to the state’s campaign codes.
Oregonian: Editorial endorsement: Vote ‘yes’ on Portland campaign finance reform
By Editorial Board
Measure 26-200, which seeks to impose limits on campaign contributions in Portland city elections, is all about the long game.
The measure would bar companies and unions from donating to candidates, limit individual or political committee donations to $500 for candidates and levy other restrictions on spending. And yet those key parts of the proposal aren’t even constitutional under Oregon Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. A similar measure passed by Multnomah County voters has already been partially invalidated by a Multnomah County court and is on appeal.
But the measure is part of a larger strategy unfolding on multiple fronts. The proponents hope that legal challenges eventually lead to the Oregon Supreme Court overturning the decades-old ruling that bars limits on campaign contributions. They aim to put a constitutional amendment on the 2020 ballot to specifically allow for contribution limits. And they hope that approval of the measure will persuade candidates to voluntarily abide by campaign limits. Portland voters should support the effort and vote “yes” for the measure.
