In the News
Office of Senator Wicker: Wicker, Hyde-Smith Cosponsor the ‘Don’t Weaponize the IRS Act’
U.S. Senators Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., today announced their support for legislation to prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from again being used as a political weapon against conservative non-profit groups.
Wicker and Hyde-Smith are original cosponsors of the Don’t Weaponize the IRS Act (S.1777). The bill would codify a Trump rule that prevents the IRS from publicly revealing personal information about donors who give to certain non-profit groups. The protections apply regardless of a group’s political ideology or beliefs…
The bill is endorsed by American Commitment, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Association of Mature American Citizens, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Club for Growth, Freedom Works, Heritage Action for America, Institute for Free Speech, National Taxpayers Union, and People United for Privacy. (Read endorsement statements here.)
New from the Institute for Free Speech
Benefits of “Microtargeting”: Why Online Ad Targeting Tools Are Good for Free Speech and Democracy
By Alex Baiocco
Ad platforms unheard of not long ago give the average person a new way to speak to other Americans at low cost. Now, some propose, including through legislation, that government ban Americans from reaching specific audiences online when speaking about candidates and policy issues. This practice, often called “microtargeting,” describes efforts to concentrate communication efforts on those most likely to be receptive to a speaker’s message. The accessibility of digital targeting tools has been a boon to civic engagement and political association, particularly at the grassroots level. A ban would favor wealthier persons and groups as well as the status quo.
Targeted online ads are an essential tool for Americans seeking to join forces with fellow citizens to make their voices heard. In other words, microtargeting facilitates democracy in action.
The Truth About “Microtargeting” and Political Speech: Why a Ban Is a Bad Idea
By Alex Baiocco
Banning Microtargeting WOULD…
Force campaigns and groups to devote more of their limited resources to less effective forms of communication…
Protect incumbents…
Benefit wealthy and celebrity candidates…
Inhibit small-dollar and grassroots fundraising…
Laws Prohibiting Microtargeting Would…
NOT address foreign interference…
NOT enhance the quality or truthfulness of speech…
NOT enable more counterspeech…
NOT reduce divisiveness or promote national unity.
Congress
CNBC: Facebook’s Nick Clegg calls for bipartisan approach to break the deadlock on internet regulation
By Nick Clegg
Here are four areas where I believe progress could be made quickly with a bipartisan approach.
First, reform of Section 230…
Platforms should only be granted continued protection from liability for the content they carry if they can demonstrate that they have robust practices for identifying illegal content and quickly removing it…
Second, Congress could do more to protect against influence operations. Companies can and do take steps to root out organized networks seeking to mislead people and undermine public trust. But Congress can create deterrence that no industry effort can match. Our teams have published recommended principles for regulation in this space, with a focus on imposing cost on the people behind these campaigns, and creating clarity on the boundary between deception and advocacy. Congress could act now to mandate platform transparency, enable lawful information sharing and impose liability directly on the people and organizations behind malicious influence operations. Congress could also update the rules around the use of social media in elections — rules which haven’t changed meaningfully to account for the internet era. For example, we’ve supported regulation like the Honest Ads Act and the Deter Act to prevent election interference.
New York Times: Klobuchar to Propose Ban on Prechecked Boxes in Political Donations
By Shane Goldmacher
The chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, is set to introduce legislation on Monday to ban political campaigns from guiding online donors into recurring donations by default, a practice that has drawn criticism for luring supporters into making unintended gifts that sometimes total in the thousands of dollars.
The bill’s planned introduction follows a bipartisan recommendation from the Federal Election Commission that Congress act to rein in the practice of prechecking boxes that automatically enlist donors into making repeated donations. The F.E.C. voted unanimously, 6-0, to recommend the change, after a New York Times investigation into the practice showed it led to a surge of refunds and fraud claims from contributors to former President Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Klobuchar, who leads the rules committee that oversees the administration of federal elections, is calling the bill the RECUR Act for “Rescuing Every Contributor from Unwanted Recurrences.” For now, she has only Democratic co-sponsors, including Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate leadership and the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But Ms. Klobuchar said she was hopeful that she could lure Republican co-sponsors after the F.E.C.’s three Republican commissioners joined Democrats in recommending the practice be banned — a rare moment of agreement at an agency often defined by partisan gridlock.
Fundraising
Campaigns & Elections: Are Email Fundraising Practitioners Ready for a Federal Crackdown?
By Sean J. Miller
Amid signs the Department of Justice may ramp up scrutiny of political email fundraising practices, some consultants say they’d welcome expanded regulation…
[O]ne top campaign finance attorney told C&E practitioners should cease using [false promises of matching donations]as its tantamount to fraud.
“You can do that if it’s true, but usually fundraising professionals who send out that type of message know it’s not true, and if you intentionally misrepresent something to take somebody’s money away from them that’s going to be fraud,” Jan Baran, now a partner at Beltway firm Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky Josefiak PLLC, told C&E.
“As a practical matter you ought to stop using that language because it’s almost impossible to honor the language — unless they’re saying, ‘look, we’ve got a contributor who’s promised to donate $5,000 and if you’re one of the people in the next hour to give us fifty bucks, this guy will match that contribution.’”
Baran, who has been a part of high-profile campaign finance cases such as McConnell v. FEC and Citizens United, added: “I think that the increased activity of Justice Department prosecutors should be a concern for all professionals. This is just the latest manifestation of a trend that started three years ago.”
Axios: Scoop: Pelosi doesn’t deliver matching donations
By Lachlan Markay
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s campaign committee has repeatedly promised her donors she would personally match their financial contributions, but as of the last reporting period she hadn’t provided a dime of her own money, records show.
Deceptive political fundraising tactics are under scrutiny, and few are more popular than donation-matching pledges. Pelosi’s campaign has gone a step further than most — promising that she herself would put up those matching funds. It hasn’t reported any such contributions.
Free Speech
The Atlantic: A Culture of Free Speech Protects Everyone
By Conor Friedersdorf
Some on the right have always been antagonistic toward independent universities that guarantee academic freedom to scholars and protect free speech and encourage viewpoint diversity among students. But as universities waver in upholding liberal values or embrace illiberal successors to them, they are finding fewer defenders when progressives’ right to free expression comes under threat.
By taking principled, consistent stands for academic freedom and free speech, people on the left and the right can protect everyone. In 2006, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education produced a scathing report about unconstitutional policies in place in the UNC system. In subsequent years, most UNC campuses changed their policies and came to earn FIRE’s “green light” rating on free-speech policies. Those improvements are due in part to legislative intervention, namely a 2017 bill that strengthened free-speech protections in that state-university system, underscoring the complicated relationship between public universities and the lawmakers to whom they are accountable. But the Hannah-Jones case suggests that written policies achieve only so much without a larger culture that defends free speech for all.
The States
New York Times: Florida, in a First, Will Fine Social Media Companies That Bar Candidates
By David McCabe
Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state.
The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook’s and Twitter’s bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories.
Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill, which is likely to face a constitutional challenge, meant that Floridians would be “guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites.”
“If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable,” he said in a statement…
The Florida law makes it illegal to bar a candidate for state office for more than 14 days, in a move that would seem to outlaw the kind of permanent ban the social media platforms applied to Mr. Trump’s accounts. Companies would be fined $250,000 per day for cases where they barred a candidate for statewide office…
The law says the platforms cannot take down or otherwise prioritize content from a “journalistic enterprise” that reaches a certain size…
A late amendment to the bill exempts companies from the law if they own a theme park or an entertainment venue larger than 25 acres. That means the law is unlikely to apply to websites owned by Disney, which operates the Walt Disney World Resort, and Comcast, which owns Universal Studios Florida.
PEN America: Closing Ranks: State Legislators Deepen Assaults on the Right to Protest
By Nora Benavidez, James Tager, and Andy Gottlieb
In the wake of the mass protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, a flood of legislation has been introduced in statehouses across the United States that would restrict protest rights. From June 1, 2020, through March 15, 2021, state policymakers have introduced at least 100 proposals in 33 states. Anti-protest bills were being introduced at an alarming rate even prior to last year’s protests, but as a point of comparison, from January to May of 2020, PEN America identified only 15 such proposals. The rate at which such legislation is being introduced has significantly increased since the protests sparked by Floyd’s murder began.
