The Courts

Austin American-Statesman: US appeals court rejects mayoral candidate’s challenge to Austin campaign limits

By Chuck Lindell

A federal appeals court has rejected mayoral candidate Jennifer Virden’s attempt to overturn an Austin ordinance that limits campaign fundraising to the year before an election.

Virden, an unsuccessful candidate for Austin City Council last year, argued that the fundraising limit violated her First Amendment rights as she campaigns for mayor in the November 2022 election.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument, upholding a July ruling in Austin’s favor by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman.

“The temporal restriction at issue does not prevent Virden from spending her own money to disseminate speech, nor does it prevent her from speaking,” the appeals court said in a Monday evening opinion. “Virden, however, seeks money to speak ‘more robustly.’ But the First Amendment does not provide her that right.”

FEC

Axios: Progressives target Taylor Greene

By Lachlan Markay and Alexi McCammond

A progressive group is using Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as a test case for a law that’s supposed to restrict the use of outside money in shaping the legislative process, Axios has learned.

New complaints against Greene by End Citizens United have broader implications for a new breed of conservative lawmakers whose identity is built around their reputations as provocateurs rather than achievements as legislators…

ECU has filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Congressional Ethics. They point to a series of ads run by Greene’s campaign and her leadership PAC, which encourage supporters to call members of Congress to oppose infrastructure funding legislation.

The Save America Stop Socialism PAC has spent between $15,000 and $20,000 running the ads on Facebook and Instagram, where they’ve been viewed as many as 4.6 million times, according to Facebook’s political ad archive.

ECU says this practice runs afoul of a federal law banning the use of any outside money to conduct official congressional business.

“Using her leadership PAC in an attempt to get around federal law and regulations is both unethical and illegal,” the group said in a statement.

Online Speech Platforms

Washington Post: Facebook knew ads, microtargeting could be exploited by politicians. It accepted the risk.

By Cristiano Lima

A separate literature review of outside research on “Targeted Political Content” dated Oct. 15, 2020 — just weeks before the 2020 elections — outlined the potential benefits and risks of allowing political material to be narrowly tailored to a subset of users in ads and other political content. 

The document identified four potential benefits, including helping civil society groups organize efficiently, allowing groups to mobilize voters and increasing the diversity of information online. But it also outlined seven potential harms: “Targeted political content can potentially harm people by narrowly delivering divisive appeals to vulnerable audiences; inciting violence; intimidating, discouraging, or misleading voters; creating echo chambers; and decreasing accountability for politicians.” It did not distinguish between organic content and ads.

The review also noted that targeting “can divide communities or even incite violence by delivering outrage-inducing or fearmongering content to susceptible audiences that will have an outsized negative reaction,” such as people who exhibit “politically extreme beliefs,” an “authoritarian” personality or believe in “racial conservatism.”…

The concerns around political ads and microtargeting have been subject of intense interest not only externally but internally, documents show. 

Reason: The Facebook Papers Are a Big Fat Nothingburger

By Robby Soave

There are, to be clear, some decent reasons in here to criticize Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Washington Post reports that he was intimately involved with the company’s decision to comply with the Vietnamese government’s demand for greater censorship of political dissidents. Though even then, it’s debatable what Zuckerberg should do when authoritarian governments demand content moderation. Should Facebook pull out of Vietnam, depriving the country of the site entirely? Is a censored version of Facebook worse than no Facebook at all?

Note as well that bowing to the Vietnamese government’s demand for greater censorship is being treated as a bad thing by some of the same outlets that are shaming Facebook for not bowing to the U.S. government’s request for greater censorship. The site’s failure to take down extremism, hate speech, and misinformation related to U.S. presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic is considered a grave moral failing. U.S. senators scream at Facebook for doing the bidding of other governments while engaged in the very act of trying to compel Facebook to do the bidding of the U.S. Senate.

Politico: How Facebook users wield multiple accounts to spread toxic politics

By Julia Arciga and Susannah Luthi

Facebook has known for years about a major source of political vitriol and violent content on its platform and done little about it: individual people who use small collections of accounts to broadcast reams of incendiary posts.

Meet SUMAs: a smattering of accounts run by a single person using their real identity, known internally at Facebook as Single User Multiple Accounts. And a significant swath of them spread so many divisive political posts that they’ve mushroomed into a massive source of the platform’s toxic politics, according to internal company documents and interviews with former employees.

Glenn Greenwald: Pierre Omidyar’s Financing of the Facebook “Whistleblower” Campaign Reveals a Great Deal

Omidyar’s central role in this latest scheme to impose greater control over social media is unsurprising because he and his multi-national foundation, the Omidyar Network, fund many if not most of the campaigns and organizations designed to police and control political speech on the internet under the benevolent-sounding banner of combating “disinformation” and “extremism.” Though one could have easily guessed that it was Omidyar fueling Frances Haugen and her team of Democratic Party operatives acting as lawyers and P.R. agents — I would have been shocked if he had no role — it is still nonetheless highly revealing of what these campaigns and groups are, how they function, what their real goals are, and the serious dangers they pose.