In the News
Wall Street Journal: Honest Ads Act Is False Advertising
By Bradley A. Smith, Lee E. Goodman, and Michael E. Toner
A Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election recommends that Congress consider mandating “paid for by” tags for online political advertisements. In response, Democrats are renewing a push to pass a bill misleadingly called the Honest Ads Act. The legislation has some bipartisan support; its co-sponsors include Sen. Lindsey Graham and 18 House Republicans. But the bill, which goes far beyond the Senate report’s recommendation, wouldn’t prevent foreign meddling and it would harm First Amendment rights.
The FEC already requires online advertisers to identify themselves on ads that support or oppose candidates. As former FEC chairmen, we know these rules need updating, but a rule-making to do so, which we support, is already before the FEC…
Advocates of the bill argue that television and radio are regulated, so why not the internet too? But regulation of broadcast outlets evolved around the limited nature of the spectrum. That’s not an issue with the internet, and the speech-related burdens of regulating online advertising are much greater because of the sheer volume of content.
When states have implemented similar restrictions, the liability has scared platforms out of the political ad-business entirely. Maryland and Washington state created extensive regulations for online political ads in 2018. Google simply stopped accepting state and local political ads in those states, and Facebook wouldn’t take political ads in Washington. If major platforms exit the market nationally, political speech on the internet will be sharply reduced.
A coalition of press organizations, including the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, sued to challenge the Maryland law, and a federal district court rightly ruled in January this year that it violated the First Amendment.
Congress
The Hill: Reddit, Google to testify before House panel on tech’s legal protections
By Emily Birnbaum
The public hearing scheduled for Wednesday marks the latest sign that the House Energy and Commerce Committee is seriously looking at the possibility of tweaking or even partially pulling back the industry’s liability shield.
Reddit chief Steve Huffman will testify at the hearing alongside Katherine Oyama, Google’s global head of intellectual property policy, as well as leading experts on the law that protects tech – including Danielle Citron, a law professor at Boston University School of Law, and Corynne McSherry, the legal director of top privacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation…
At issue is a provision called Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms from being sued over content posted by users and how it chooses to moderate those user-generated posts.
Increasingly, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in both chambers have hammered Section 230 as a “sweetheart deal” that protects Big Tech from dealing with issues on their platforms including hate speech, terrorist content and disinformation…
[T]he Energy and Commerce Committee has primary jurisdiction over Section 230, and over the past several months, top members of the panel have expressed interest in various proposals to hold platforms “accountable” for their content moderation decisions.
“This hearing will explore whether online companies are appropriately using the tools they have – including protections Congress granted in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – to foster a healthier Internet,” Pallone said in the statement with Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)
Washington Times: House set to vote on bill requiring political campaigns to report foreign offers of assistance
By Andrew Blake
In a Dear Colleague letter addressed to fellow Democrats, Rep. Steny Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, said the chamber will consider the legislation during the week of Oct. 21.
Called the Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for a Lasting Democracy (SHIELD) Act, the bill contains several provisions meant to protect the U.S. electoral process from foreign meddling as related concerns linger ahead of next year’s presidential contest.
Among the bill’s language is a requirement for political campaigns, parties and political committees to report attempts by foreign governments, foreign political parties and their agents to influence U.S. elections by offering assistance.
Political campaigns and candidates who fail to disclose any offers of foreign help would be subject to criminal and civil liabilities if the bill becomes law as written.
The Hill: House Dems introduce bill to fight social media disinformation
By Maggie Miller
A group of House Democrats on Friday introduced legislation intended to increase media literacy among Americans in order to combat social media disinformation campaigns.
The Digital Citizen and Media Literacy Act would establish a $20 million grant program at the Department of Education to help fund K-12 media literacy curricula. The funds would be available to local education agencies to create programs on media literacy and to state agencies to create “advisory councils” to establish state-wide media literacy guidelines.
The bill was introduced days after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its bipartisan report on Russian social media disinformation efforts in the run-up to the 2016 elections…
The committee also included a set of recommendations for Congress, the Trump administration and social media companies in order to prevent future foreign disinformation efforts, including the idea of creating a “public initiative” aimed at promoting “critical thinking skills” to help Americans identify disinformation online.
“Addressing the challenge of disinformation in the long-term will ultimately need to be tackled by an informed and discerning population of citizens who are both alert to the threat and armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to protect against malicious influence,” the committee wrote. “A public initiative-propelled by federal funding but led in large part by state and local education institutions-focused on building media literacy from an early age would help build long-term resilience to foreign manipulation of our democracy.”
FEC
Washington Post: Power Up: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg.’ FEC chair warns charges against Giuliani associates highlight big dark money problems
By Jacqueline Alemany
FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub warns that the charges brought against two associates of President Trump’s personal lawyer highlight the flow of dark money in the U.S. political system — which she says is just the “tip of the iceberg.”
“There may well be a lot of money that is slipping into our system that we just don’t know about,” Weintraub said in a Friday interview, a day after prosecutors accused Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman of scheming to funnel foreign money to U.S. politicians…
She wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the charges against Parnas and Fruman, who also assisted in Rudolph W. Giuliani’s shadow agenda on behalf of the president in Ukraine, but she stressed that “the ban on foreign money, obviously, is needed to make sure we have American elections for Americans.”…
“The ban on contributions in the name of another … is at the core of the FEC’s mission to ensure that the voters are informed about where the money is coming from and where it’s going and who politicians are indebted to.”…
Weintraub also refused to answer whether Trump’s calls for governments to investigate Biden actually broke any rules: “I’d rather not answer that question because it’s too close to the facts of an actual thing that could come before the commission in an enforcement context,” she said.
But she says the laws surrounding foreign national cases are clear: “It is certainly illegal to solicit, accept or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election,” Weintraub told us. “That’s just black letter law.”…
Last week, the ranking Republican on the House Administration Committee requested an ethics investigation into Weintraub…
Weintraub, who originally responded that she would “not be silenced,” told Power Up: “It’s really remarkable how these supposedly deregulatory advocates suddenly don’t like it so much – free speech isn’t so appealing when they don’t like what you’re saying.”
Online Speech Platforms
By Jeanine Santucci
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has been in a feud with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and now she’s using his own platform against him with a new ad calling out the Facebook policy against fact-checking politicians.
“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election,” the ad begins.
“You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking, ‘how could this possibly be true?'” it continues. “Well it’s not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.”
Warren is referring to a Facebook advertising policy that allows for politicians to present false or misleading information in ads due to the belief that any statement from a political figure is important to the public interest…
“Facebook holds incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. They’ve decided to let political figures lie to you-even about Facebook itself-while their executives and their investors get even richer off the ads containing these lies,” Warren tweeted Saturday about her new Facebook ad.
CNN: Elizabeth Warren targets Facebook’s ad policy — with a Facebook ad
By Brian Fung
On Saturday, Warren explained her ad was meant “to see just how far” the policy goes.
“We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved,” she tweeted. “It got approved quickly.”
Facebook’s willingness to run the ad, she said, shows how the company prioritizes profits over protecting democracy.
Warren’s escalating criticism of Zuckerberg highlights the backlash Facebook has faced as it has defended its policy on political advertising. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another Democratic candidate, tweeted on Thursday that online platforms like Facebook need a “truth standard for paid ads.” And Biden’s campaign has compared Trump’s ads to Russian-backed disinformation.
“Whether it originates from the Kremlin or Trump Tower, these lies and conspiracy theories threaten to undermine the integrity of our elections in America,” Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said on Tuesday.
In a statement Friday responding to Warren’s ad, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company believes political speech should be protected.
“If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech,” Stone said.
Facebook’s policy on truthfulness in political ads has been in place for over a year, according to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications…
Other analysts say Facebook has made the right decision not to involve itself in regulating political speech. Lee Goodman, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Elections Commission, told CNBC Thursday that he believed Facebook’s policy is “fair” because it “doesn’t want to be the arbiter and doesn’t want to take sides in these political debates.”
The Hill: Warren turns up heat over Facebook’s ad rules
By Emily Birnbaum
Democrats and prominent tech critics have clamored to force Facebook’s hand, claiming the company enables – and profits off of – political disinformation when it does not take action against high-profile instances of falsehoods in advertisements. And Facebook has faced heat across the political spectrum, including from conservatives who allege that social media companies are biased against them.
But the company has held tightly to its position, even doubling down in a tweet at Warren on Saturday night.
“Broadcast stations across the country have aired this ad nearly 1,000 times, as required by law,” Facebook’s public relations Twitter account tweeted to Warren, referring to the Trump advertisement she has been criticizing. “FCC [Federal Communications Commission] doesn’t want broadcast companies censoring candidates’ speech. We agree it’s better to let voters-not companies-decide.”
The tweet drew Facebook deeper into the contentious debate over its role in handling political speech, reinvigorating long-standing questions over whether Facebook should be subject to regulations similar to those imposed on public radio and television stations.
Wall Street Journal: The Warren-Zuckerberg Clash
By Editorial Board
Ms. Warren enjoys having a high-profile corporate foil. Yet she also is no doubt sincere when she says she wants Facebook to suppress ads by her political opponents, and if elected she would have more tools to make the platform comply with her wishes.
Ms. Warren says her objection is to “lies,” but such a blanket prohibition would immediately force Facebook to adjudicate purely political disputes. The website TechCrunch, in backing Ms. Warren’s argument, cites as an example of Mr. Trump’s false advertising a claim that Democrats “want” to repeal the Second Amendment. Many Democrats certainly want to repeal the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling that the right to bear arms resides with individuals. The Second Amendment means different things to different people, and different Democrats want different things. Ms. Warren expects friendly social-media speech regulators to embrace her worldview, but they could also censor her own controversial claims…
Conservatives have listened to many lectures that they are abetting America’s supposed descent into autocracy. Yet these same lecturers don’t seem to mind that Ms. Warren wants to rewrite the First Amendment to limit political speech (see her campaign-finance positions) and join with America’s largest corporations to take her opposition off the air.
TechCrunch: Facebook should ban campaign ads. End the lies.
By Josh Constine
Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia.
That’s why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don’t want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can’t be distributed safely, they shouldn’t be distributed at all.
No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them…
Surely, there would be some unfortunate repercussions from blocking campaign ads. New candidates in local to national elections would lose a tool for reducing the lead of incumbents, some of which have already benefited from years of advertising. Some campaign ads might be pushed “underground,” where they’re not properly labeled, though the major spenders could be kept under watch.
The Verge: Why Facebook can’t stop politicians from lying
By Casey Newton
Certainly it would be nice if politicians stuck to the truth in their campaign advertising. And we live in a nation that has truth-in-advertising laws, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. But like Facebook, the FTC also declines to weigh in on the truth of political advertising. And in a case earlier this decade where a state attempted to mandate truth in political advertising, the law was struck down by a federal judge…
Facebook’s decision not to determine the merits of political speech in advertising seems to me to come from the same sensible place. If you don’t want the state making calls on political speech, you probably don’t want a quasi-state with 2.1 billion daily users making calls on political speech, either…
And yet it strikes me that some of the same people mad at Facebook for failing to police the claims in political ads are the same people complaining that the company is too big, too powerful, and lacks any real accountability to the public or its shareholders. To worry about Facebook’s vast size and influence – and I do! – while also demanding that it referee political speech seems like an odd contradiction.
DOJ
New York Times: Giuliani Is Said to Be Under Investigation for Ukraine Work
By Michael S. Schmidt, Ben Protess, Kenneth P. Vogel and William K. Rashbaum
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.
The investigators are examining Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to undermine the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, one of the people said. She was recalled in the spring as part of Mr. Trump’s broader campaign to pressure Ukraine into helping his political prospects.
The investigation into Mr. Giuliani is tied to the case against two of his associates who were arrested this week on campaign finance-related charges, the people familiar with the inquiry said. The associates were charged with funneling illegal contributions to a congressman whose help they sought in removing Ms. Yovanovitch…
Federal law requires American citizens to disclose to the Justice Department any contacts with the government or media in the United States at the direction or request of foreign politicians or government officials, regardless of whether they pay for the representation…
Mr. Giuliani said that federal prosecutors had no grounds to charge him with foreign lobbying disclosure violations because he said he was acting on behalf of Mr. Trump, not the Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, when he collected the information on Ms. Yovanovitch and the others and relayed it to the American government and the news media.
“Look, you can try to contort anything into anything, but if they have any degree of objectivity or fairness, it would be kind of ridiculous to say I was doing it on Lutsenko’s behalf when I was representing the president of the United States,” Mr. Giuliani said…
The lobbying disclosure law contains an exemption for legal work, and Mr. Giuliani said his efforts to unearth information and push both for investigations in Ukraine and for news coverage of his findings originated with his defense of Mr. Trump in the special counsel’s investigation.
Wall Street Journal: Indicted Donors Spread Campaign Cash Widely
By Julie Bykowicz
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 six of their donations involved either a shell company used to hide the men’s identities or foreign money meant to curry favor with U.S. politicians. The pair made numerous contributions between February and July, many of them to umbrella political groups that then parceled out money to dozens of GOP politicians, a Wall Street Journal review of state fundraising and Federal Election Commission records found.
“It appears that Fruman and Parnas made their political contributions in order to buy access and advance their own interests, and in some instances the interests of foreign officials,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a complaint with the FEC in July 2018 about the fundraising activities of Messrs. Parnas and Fruman. “Every single one of these contributions is suspect because they were made with an ulterior motive.”
Candidates and Campaigns
Vox: Warren issues a challenge to other 2020 candidates: name your donors
By Ella Nilsen
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is issuing a challenge to her fellow 2020 competitors with hours to go before the fourth Democratic debate: be extremely transparent about who is funding their campaigns.
Warren – who has made getting money out of politics the centerpiece of her presidential campaign – has published a new plan to tighten campaign finance laws. She also vowed not to accept donations over $200 from executives at large tech companies, including Google and Facebook, as well as big banks, private equity firms, or hedge funds. Former Vice President Joe Biden released his own wide-ranging campaign finance and ethics plan on Monday.
“If Democratic candidates for president want to spend their time hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, it is currently legal for them to do so – but they shouldn’t be handing out secret titles and honors to rich donors,” Warren wrote in a Medium post revealing her plan…
Warren’s and Biden’s campaign finance plans certainly have some similarities. They both ban federal candidates taking corporate PAC money, and ban lobbyists from donating to candidates. They restrict the influence of candidate super PACs, and – as progressive candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders has also promised – they cut down on corporate influence on party conventions.
Fundraising
Wall Street Journal: Elizabeth Warren Limits Donations From Some Bank, Tech Execs
By Joshua Jamerson
Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign will no longer accept contributions of more than $200 from executives at certain tech companies or financial firms, her latest move to keep big business at bay.
Her new pledge, announced in a Medium post, comes after she swore off big fundraisers. It adds to a debate among Democrats about whether the party’s White House nominee can take on President Trump with primarily small contributions.
Ahead of a presidential debate Tuesday evening, the Massachusetts senator challenged her rivals to be more transparent about how they are raising money, including the dates and locations of their fundraising events.
“I’m proud to be running a grassroots-funded campaign for president, and I hope my fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination will do the same,” Ms. Warren said in the post Tuesday morning. “But however we choose to fund our campaigns, I think Democratic voters should have a right to know how the possible future leaders of our party are spending their time and who their campaign is rewarding.” …
Ms. Warren’s campaign plans to cross-check individual contributions with leadership teams posted on certain corporate websites. The policy is retroactive to past contributions.
