In the News
Washington Examiner: Facebook takes the muzzle off Georgia Senate races, but is it too late?
By Tiffany Donnelly
For over six weeks, Facebook held two Senate races hostage, blocking four candidates from reaching Georgia voters with ads before next month’s election. On Wednesday, it finally decided to take the muzzle off.
Excuse me while I golf clap.
Facebook shouldn’t have banned ads in the first place. The company buckled under pressure from politicians and activist groups pushing new speech restrictions on social media. Insisting that “disinformation” is destroying democracy, they urged Silicon Valley to protect our fragile little minds from words and ideas supposedly capable of dismantling our centuries-old republic. And Facebook fell for it.
State Policy Network: Week In Review: December 18, 2020
The US Senate confirmed Institute for Free Speech Legal Director Allen Dickerson to fill a vacancy on the Federal Election Commission. Dickerson has led the Institute’s litigation team since 2011 and is one of the nation’s top experts in campaign finance law.
ICYMI
All I Want for Christmas Is Lawmakers to Respect Privacy
By Tiffany Donnelly
He’s making a list and checking it twice. But he’s not Santa – he’s Congressman Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat who plans to name and shame New Yorkers who donate to candidates he doesn’t like. Nothing shouts holiday spirit more than a personalized political enemies project.
Rep. Suozzi wants to repeal the federal cap on write-offs for state and local taxes (SALT). Even if you disagree, you probably respect his right to express his views, but the Congressman won’t grant you the same courtesy. In early December, he told reporters, “No New Yorker should contribute to a politician who is undermining our state.” If you dare disobey, he’ll add you to his naughty list – one with serious, real world consequences, like potential harassment and retaliation. His plan? Use the FEC’s donor database to publish the private information of New Yorkers who give to candidates opposing repeal of the SALT cap.
FEC
By Colin Kalmbacher
The Senate campaign of twice-failed candidate Amy McGrath illegally coordinated with a Democratic Party Super PAC in violation of federal campaign finance law, according to a complaint recently filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)…
“Super PACs are not supposed to act as arms of campaigns,” [Campaign Legal Center] said in a press release.”The FEC should make that clear by enforcing the law here. To reduce political corruption, we need real transparency about who is spending big money on elections so that politicians can no longer receive unlimited secret money from wealthy special interests to support their campaigns.”
According to CLC’s 161-page complaint and supporting exhibits, McGrath’s campaign and the Ditch Fund illegally coordinated on up to $8 million worth of spending during her unsuccessful bid to unseat Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Meanwhile, [Democrat Mike] Espy’s failed effort at replacing pro-lynching Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith (R-Miss.) allegedly violated federal law by coordinating with the March On PAC to the tune of some $50,000 according to a separate, 281-page complaint and supporting exhibits.
Independent Groups
Capital Research Center: Political and Policy-Oriented Giving After Citizens United: An Update to CRC’s 2017 Analysis
By Shane Devine and Michael Watson
CRC researchers find that the left-wing advantage in election funding through public policy and “dark money” groups increased in the 2018 elections. In the 2018 election cycle, liberal grantmakers increased their public policy 501(c)(3) giving by nearly 10 percent to $8.1 billion while conservative giving remained stable at $2.2 billion-increasing the imbalance from nearly 3.4 to 1 in 2014 to 3.7 to 1 in 2018. “Dark money” funding through 501(c)(4) groups flipped from a 3.6 to 1 advantage for conservatives to a nearly 2 to 1 ($81 million to $42 million) advantage for liberals.
Online Speech Platforms
Glenn Greenwald: Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms
A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.
Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” …
While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House – one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign – Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”
Reclaim the Net: After ruining mainstream social media platforms, media targets podcasting for the next wave of censorship
By Didi Rankovic
Podcasting may easily become a “new frontier” to be conquered by online censorship advocates, now they feel that large centralized social networks have mostly been whipped into shape.
As if to confirm this, podcasting as a medium is singled out in a piece published by The Guardian as one that remains “largely” unmoderated while giving voice to creators who are seen as spreading “misinformation.”…
The tactic that The Guardian piece then brainstorms, through the comments of one random person called “Amelia” (no last name provided) who is worried about her conservative father’s podcast listening habits, might be to limit exposure of shows like those hosted by Joe Rogan or Steve Bannon by basically kicking them off the largest podcast directory provided by Apple, getting video episodes off YouTube, and preventing audio snippets from being shared on Facebook…
The entire article smacks of vilification of podcasting, with it described not as an emerging powerhouse media genre that it is, but essentially as praying on the naive and isolated people due to the “intimacy” and directness of the media.
Cato: Section 230 and the Whole Internet
By Will Duffield
Because online real estate is an unlimited resource, for those who find a given ruleset ill-fitting, exit is cheap. Section 230’s intermediary liability protections keep the cost of exit low by preventing platforms from being held liable for their users’ speech. While The Atlantic staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany calls this capacity for exit “the internet’s structural penchant for hate,” it prevents any single set of platform rules from creating a universal prohibition. Unlike legal speech restrictions, unwanted platform restrictions are intended to be avoided through the creation of competing jurisdictions.
This is particularly important for explicitly dissident alternatives to mainstream platforms. Both TheDonald.win and Ovarit were created as off-platform alternatives to banned subreddits. For these burgeoning, essentially moderator-run forums, the fact that they regularly host speech deemed impermissible by Reddit would serve as a magnet for litigation in the absence of Section 230.
Indeed, at a time when traditional media gatekeepers have deemed migration to Parler “a threat to democracy,” and treat podcast apps as the next front in an unending War on Disinformation, intermediary liability protections are vital speech protections. Advocates of liberal speech governance should refrain from reading expectations of uniformity into Section 230. Undermining protections for diverse approaches to content moderation will serve only to nip alternatives to mainstream platforms in the bud.
Candidates and Campaigns
Roll Call: At the Races
By Kate Ackley, Bridget Bowman, and Stephanie Akin
The campaign finance overhaul group End Citizens United has hammered Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat, for backtracking on her pledge to reject donations from the political action committees of companies. Now another group is piling on, the liberal-leaning Patriotic Millionaires, which favors higher tax rates for wealthy Americans. “Rep. Luria may have forgotten why corporate PAC money is so damaging to democracy and her constituents, but we haven’t,” the group said. CQ Roll Call first reported that Luria planned to start taking corporate PAC money in the next cycle.
The States
Bangor Daily News: Maine regulator can get financial records from anti-CMP corridor group, judge rules
By Caitlin Andrews
Maine’s campaign finance watchdog can request financial records from a dark-money group opposing Central Maine Power’s proposed $1 billion corridor project as part of a broader investigation, a judge ruled on Monday in state court.
Stop the Corridor sued the Maine Ethics Commission in June aiming to shield its donors from public view after the commission voted to require the group to disclose financial information to the commission as part of an investigation into whether Stop the Corridor had to register as a political committee after it gave $85,000 to another anti-corridor group.
But Cumberland County Superior Court Justice Thomas Warren disagreed with the anti-corridor group’s argument that the state agency had no jurisdiction to do so, denying a delay of the ethics commission’s order by finding the group was unlikely to succeed and that the information requested was relevant to the Ethics Commission’s investigation.
The Mercury News: Bay Area Assemblymember Alex Lee pushing bill to ban corporate donations to candidates
By Joseph Geha
On his first day in office Dec. 7, Assemblymember Alex Lee introduced a bill that proposes to ban businesses from donating to any political candidates in the state and opens the door for public financing of election campaigns…
But some political observers question whether the bill, dubbed The Clean Money Act of 2021, would significantly change anything if it passes and suggest it could result in less transparency behind political contributions.
“The very real or perceived influence of big money in politics is detrimental to democracy,” Lee said in an interview Tuesday…
Lee’s bill…would amend the Political Reform Act of 1974 to ban any “business entity” from making a direct contribution to a candidate. It wouldn’t ban such contributions from unions or trade associations…
“What this bill is doing is making sure we can close as many windows as we can. It’s kind of like playing a game of whack-a-mole with corporate special interest money,” Lee said.
But Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor who studies money in politics, said Lee should be cautious about cutting off direct contributions, which can be more easily tracked by voters through campaign finance filings than PAC money…
“We know, unfortunately, time and time again, if you limit the contributions, it doesn’t just make the money disappear, it goes into another, typically less transparent place, like an independent expenditure,” she said.
Ballotpedia News: Ballotpedia releases year-end analysis of statewide ballot measures
By Josh Altic
On December 15, Ballotpedia released its year-end analysis of statewide ballot measures in 2020…
Committees supporting and opposing the 129 statewide measures this year reported raising a combined $1.20 billion in contributions. In 2016 and 2018, ballot campaigns raised $1.01 billion and $1.19 billion, respectively. The average amount raised in 2020 was $9.3 million, compared to $6.2 million and $7.1 million in 2016 and 2018.
The 43 citizen-initiated measures accounted for about 78% of ballot measure fundraising in 2020. Support campaigns raised 63.1% of contributions, and opposition campaigns raised 36.9%.
California had 61.5% of all ballot measure campaign finance activity in 2020. Of the 10 most expensive measures in 2020, eight were citizen-initiated measures and two were legislatively referred measures. Six were in California. The other four were in Illinois, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Alaska.
