Free Speech
Reason: When the Government Says You’re Fake News
By Scott Shackford
Last November, at the urging of President Emmanuel Macron, the French parliament passed a law allowing judges to order the removal of what they deem “fake news” during the three months before an election. It also gave the country’s national broadcasting agency the authority to suspend foreign television channels that distribute allegedly false information that might affect a French election. State-run Russia Today interpreted that part of the law as explicitly targeting itself and complained about the censorship. Then Russia put into place even harsher laws.
A third component of Macron’s policy recently bit the French government on the derriere. The country now requires media companies to disclose who paid for political advertisements and to maintain a database showing who is responsible for sponsored political messages being promoted through their platforms. Rather than deal with these new obligations, Twitter stopped accepting political advertisements in France altogether. As a result, the company decided in April it would not run government ads encouraging citizens to vote in May elections for the European Parliament.
Eventually, Twitter decided to make an exception, tweaking its policy to allow the French government to run its voting advertisements. But the company is otherwise refusing to run paid campaign ads on Twitter in France.
This single exception is not enough for some officials, who are upset that their own political advertising needs are being affected by the blanket ban. Three French ministers said in a public statement that Twitter should simply accept the government’s transparency demands (regardless of the additional financial or labor commitments the company might have to take on to do so) and run their ads.
That France, Russia, and Singapore are all on the same page is a stark reminder that governments almost universally want to stop the distribution of some political messages while mandating the distribution of others.
Congress
Bloomberg: Democrats Turn Mueller Frustration Into Election Security Focus
By Erik Wasson and Laura Litvan
The Democratic-led House of Representatives passed the first of a series of bills aimed at securing U.S. elections before 2020…
The bills are an attempt to pressure Senate Republicans into joining efforts to protect state voting systems and punish foreign actors that try to interfere…
Lofgren said she’s working on another package of bills to act on next month, possibly including sanctions on Russia and creating a duty to report offers of campaign help from foreign intelligence agencies…
In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown little interest in advancing the legislation and has committed only to a briefing by the administration for all senators about efforts to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 elections…
Still, some Republicans have said they’re interested in passing a bill.
“I feel very strongly that we should pass an election security bill,” said Maine Republican Susan Collins. “If you look at the ongoing efforts by the Russians and other foreign adversaries, they are not giving up.”
Collins said she’s talking to Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, about supporting his bill that requires campaigns to notify the FBI about any attempts by a foreign government to interfere in U.S. elections…
Klobuchar, Warner and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have a bipartisan “Honest Ads Act” that would ensure ads on platforms like YouTube and Facebook are covered by the same rules as TV or radio, allowing the public to know who is paying for them and how much was spent…
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill that would implement sanctions if Russia interferes in the 2020 elections. Graham and Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, also proposed a separate sanctions bill.
FEC
Washington Examiner: Groups claim Clinton campaign broke campaign laws over Fusion GPS and Steele funding
By Jerry Dunleavy
Two watchdog groups filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission alleging the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee broke campaign laws by filing reports meant to conceal their hiring of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
And one has now filed a lawsuit in federal court.
The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit, filed its complaint with the FEC in 2017, alleging that Clinton and the DNC “failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law.”
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, filed its complaint with the FEC a year later against Clinton, the DNC, Steele, and the Perkins Coie law firm…
The foundation alleged the Clinton campaign “conspired” with foreign nationals by hiring Steele, who says he gathered information from sources close to the Kremlin…
The foundation filed its lawsuit in D.C. District Court in May, hoping a judge will force the FEC to rule on its complaint…
Following remarks from Trump earlier in June that he’d be open to accepting foreign information, FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub released a viral statement on Twitter, saying, “Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation.”
Brendan Fischer, an FEC expert for the center, told the Washington Examiner that the “payments by the DNC and Clinton campaign for opposition research were legal, but hiding those payments was not.” Fischer also said although it was doubtful that Steele’s hiring broke the law, “whether Steele’s subsequent engagement with Russian sources might run afoul of the law would really depend on the facts.”
Online Speech Platforms
Wall Street Journal: I Compete With Facebook, and It’s No Monopoly
By Mark Weinstein
I’m chief executive officer of a social network that competes with Facebook , so you might expect I’d agree with those seeking to break up Facebook in the name of fair competition. In fact, I strongly oppose the idea. I don’t believe Facebook is a monopoly.
Regulatory officials, presidential candidates and even a Facebook co-founder are among those who’ve asserted that Facebook has become so big and powerful that it stifles all competitors, leaving social-media users nowhere else to turn. Yet my company, MeWe, is not only surviving but thriving. The free market is alive and kicking.
One reason Facebook is vulnerable to competition is that its business practices are off-putting to social-media users. According to a 2018 Pew survey, 44% of users 18 to 29 deleted Facebook the prior year…
Those advocating Facebook’s breakup cite antitrust enforcements throughout American history as precedents. But they don’t square with today’s realities…
In the 1970s, AT&T was the sole telephone provider in most of the U.S., and most phone equipment was produced by an AT&T subsidiary, Western Electric. This screamed monopoly, which is why the government forced AT&T to split into seven “Baby Bells” in 1984. A clear difference between the old AT&T and Facebook is that the former left consumers with no options. If you wanted to phone your aunt, you had to use AT&T. This is not the case with Facebook; there are other social networks to choose from.
Some have argued that Facebook’s ability to outspend smaller social networks makes it impossible for them to compete. I’ve seen firsthand that this is not a competitive barrier. MeWe has achieved breakout growth from word-of-mouth alone.
By Kristin Lam
Facebook is “thinking through” its policies on deepfakes, Zuckerberg said, adding that he believes it is sensible to treat them differently from other false information…
“I just think you want to be very careful about what you’re defining as misinformation, because this is a topic that can be very easily politicized,” Zuckerberg said. “People who don’t like the way something was cut often will kind of argue it did not reflect the true intent or was misinformation, but we exist in a society where people value and cherish free expression.” …
“If it’s misinformation, we say, ‘OK, we don’t think it should be against the rules to say something that happens to be false to your friends,'” Zuckerberg said. “But we don’t want it to spread and go viral, right? People get things wrong.”
When it comes to protecting election integrity, Zuckerberg said Facebook can only do so much. He detailed the 30,000 employees who work on content safety review and technical artificial intelligence systems that can detect improper activity.
The networking site also has strategies to remove bad actors from systems before they can spread misinformation, Zuckerberg said, as well as a requirement for political advertisers to validate their identity with a government-issued ID. Political ads also go into an archive that will be viewable for about seven years to support transparency, he said…
“As a private company, we don’t have the tools to make the Russian government stop,” Zuckerberg said. “We can defend as best as we can, but our government is the one that has the tools to apply pressure to Russia, not us.”
While he described election integrity one of Facebook’s highest priorities, he said there is a need for an international Honest Ads Act, which was introduced in Congress last month.
Candidates and Campaigns
Center for Responsive Politics: Where the 2020 Democrats stand on campaign finance reform
By Reid Champlin
As the primary kicks off with 20 candidates taking part in the first debates in Miami, OpenSecrets is breaking down how each of the 2020 Democrats promise to change the campaign finance system.
There’s broad consensus that the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC needs to be undone, with most supporting a constitutional amendment to undo the court’s majority opinion that independent political expenditures are free speech and cannot be subjected to spending limits.
Thirteen candidates have publicly said they want to expand public financing of federal elections, raise limits of public matching of private donations or ban large private, corporate or PAC donations entirely.
The candidates who currently serve as members of Congress have all backed campaign finance reform and ethics bills like the For The People Act, which proposes a ban on contributions from companies with significant foreign investments, a disclosure requirement for dark money groups and a six-to-one matching system for small dollar donations to federal elections. The bill passed the House with on a party-line vote and was blocked by Republican leadership in the Senate.
All of the candidates are rejecting contributions from corporate PACs in what is mostly a symbolic gesture to reject corporate influence as they lay out their policy proposals. Every 2020 contender is hoping to capture small-dollar contributions in part to help bolster the image that they are not beholden to wealthy donors.
Some candidates go beyond these measures to introduce changes to campaign finance law related to dark money groups, lobbying and foreign money. Here’s what each candidate is proposing, with the candidates listed in alphabetical order…
Center for Public Integrity: Debating Democrats Tackle – And Dodge – How Money Influences Politics
By Laura Zornosa
During the first Democratic presidential debates this week – in an election that will easily be the nation’s most expensive ever – several notable candidates never addressed “dark money” in elections, campaign propaganda sponsored by Russians or the political influence of corporate and special interests…
The scant discussion over political money issues is notable in that qualifying for the debates themselves were in part contingent on candidates’ fundraising prowess with small-dollar donors. Many of the candidates have pledged to reject money from various sources, from corporate PACs to fossil fuel interests. And many also want to limit the influence of secret and unlimited money in politics, arguing it erodes American democracy…
But some candidates did tackle political influence issues in one form or another. Among those who did, here’s what they had to say: …
Foundations
By Brian Doherty
This month, David Austin Walsh published a report for the Urban Institute called “Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education” purporting to chart the power of right-wing philanthropy in academia.
What does it do analytically to be worthy of the Urban Institute imprimatur? It names the achievements of some scholars who received support from foundations with free market or small government goals…
Now, it would make sense for people trying to valorize such foundations to blithely credit anything that happened with any free market thinker, scholar, or apparatchik to the money they received from such foundations. But to implicitly presume that none of their achievements would have happened without such money is to fall back on a frequently unstated background presumption of non-free market oriented institutions and thinkers: that belief in strong government action and mistrust of free markets is natural and normal and correct.
And if you think that, than any idea or scholar outside that consensus is a strange aberration, requiring some sort of interesting explanation (other than that some smart people studying the world could possibly conclude that free market ideas are correct), and couldn’t be expected to occur without ill-meaning plutocratic manipulators. It seems unlikely on its face, though, that scholars with the power and reach of Posner or Becker only got anywhere in intellectual culture because of right-wing paymasters…
The perspective that Walsh writes from (and expects his readers to read from) is that anything outside that leftist perspective is suspicious and requires some special explanation outside of the simplest explanation-that free market ideas, to some people, seem to explain the world well, and that applying such ideas can make the world richer and more efficient. Walsh’s baseline presumption is that, in a world not corrupted by big money, such ideas would appear nowhere and convince no one. The bias underlying that presumption requires no examination of big-money funders to grasp.
Independent Groups
Forbes: ‘What’s Not Wrong With The Government?’ Asks Activist With A Plan to Fix It
By Devin Thorpe
When I asked Josh Silver, co-founder and director of RepresentUs, to tell us what is wrong with politics in America, he responded with a question of his own.
“Devin, what’s not wrong with the government?” …
Silver has greater faith in state and local government than in the Federal government. He takes heart in knowing that states run Federal elections. That means that changing the rules at the state level can have an impact in Washington.
He argues that until we fix our democracy, we can’t fix much else. “People who care about taxation, do care about the environment, do care about education or inequality–these people are starting to realize that their issues are stuck until we fix this.” …
RepresentUs is focused on two major areas: fighting corruption and fixing broken election laws…
While he decries money in politics, he is not fixated on the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 decision on Citizens United, which extended free speech protections to corporations, effectively opening the floodgates for special interest money in elections. To overturn the ruling, a constitutional amendment is required. “It’s a long road ahead.”
Within the arena of fighting corruption, RepresentUs works to “close the revolving door” that allows politicians to leave office and immediately launch a lobbying career. The organization also works to reform campaign finance and ethics rules…
Like candidates, RepresentUs works on a donation model. Split into two nonprofits, a 501(c)(3) charity and 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.
The States
New Jersey Star-Ledger: N.J.’s new ‘dark money’ law has serious flaws, Brennan Center for Justice says. Needs a quick fix fast.
By Ian Vandewalker
The Brennan Center for Justice supports transparency and disclosure in our electoral process. Voters deserve to know who is financing elections.
That is why we supported the legislation when it was first introduced…
However, amendments to the legislation shortly before passage have inserted troubling new provisions that force us to oppose the law.
These provisions raise serious First Amendment concerns.
They require unprecedented levels of financial disclosure for public-interest and citizen-based organizations that are not involved in the electoral process but that are instead simply trying to advocate for policy change in Trenton.
Hundreds of these organizations would be forced to publicly provide extensive donor lists and other financial information to state election and lobbying authorities.
These onerous requirements will be difficult for smaller non-profit organizations to comply with and would force national advocacy organizations to disclose information about their out-of-state activities.
Taken together, this law is the most intrusive in the country and will have a chilling effect on citizen participation in government…
We are asking lawmakers to quickly send a clean-up bill to the governor’s desk for signature.
