Elections and Media

Twitter recently rolled out a new policy aimed at “manipulated media.” Its first target: a 13-second clip tweeted by Dan Scavino, White House director of social media, featuring Joe Biden. The Biden campaign quickly denounced the video as “disinformation” and pressured both Twitter and Facebook to take it down. Twitter slapped the manipulated-media label on it. Facebook put a “partly false” screen over it. The debate that followed helped earn the clip millions of views. Imagine going after President Lyndon B.

If we have to suspend or otherwise modify political campaigning because of coronavirus, social media will become even more important and the fissures it creates even more painful. We should expect the platform companies such as Facebook and Google to step up to this national emergency—but can we?

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg broke no law when he paid campaign workers $2,500 a month to promote his candidacy from their personal social media accounts without requiring them to disclose this sponsorship. After Twitter suspended 70 of these accounts for “platform manipulation,” his campaign voluntarily asked its workers to identify themselves on their social media accounts.

The internet was supposed to be the great gift to democracy because everyone would be free to express themselves without the interference of editors or other filters. Instead, the business model of the internet—collecting and manipulating personal information to sell targeting services—has created the tool for attacking the democratic imperative to seek Unum. Our foreign adversaries have proven especially talented in exploiting this capability.

Campaign reform groups are telling the Federal Communications Commission to reject broadcasters' petition to 'clarify' the FCC's disclosure requirements for third-party political ads and follow the National Association of Broadcasters' "rationally tailored approach." NAB and others asked the FCC to narrow its definition of non-candidate ads on “any political matter of national importance" (i.e.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pledged that her campaign would not share falsehoods or promote fraudulent accounts on social media, part of a new plan to battle back disinformation and hold Facebook, Google and Twitter “responsible” for its spread.

President Donald Trump's reelection campaign has run more than 200 misleading political advertisements on Facebook in the past day claiming the "Fake News media" will attempt to block the campaign's upcoming Super Bowl ad — despite federal regulations that require the TV spot be aired.

A new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments. Overall, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view many heavily relied on sources across a range of platforms as untrustworthy. At the same time, Democrats and independents who lean Democratic see most of those sources as credible and rely on them to a far greater degree. Evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years.

If Democrats are able to wrest control of the White House and Senate in November, dramatic changes could come to the Federal Communications Commission and US communications policy. Net neutrality would be the major issue revisited. A Democratic-controlled FCC might seek to re-establish a role for the FCC in ISP privacy regulation, especially if Congress does not enact a federal consumer privacy law covering ISPs.

[Ari Fitzgerald is a partner at Hogan Lovells]