Elections and Media

President Donald Trump accused Google of favoring negative news stories about him in the 2016 presidential election, apparently in response to a report on Fox News. In a series of three tweets on Aug 6, President Trump said he had met in the Oval Office with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who told him the company didn’t boost Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, wouldn’t interfere with the 2020 election, and wasn’t involved with the Chinese military. “We are watching Google very closely!” Trump said in a tweet on Aug 6.

Despite broad efforts to crack down on misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, the primary season so far has been chock full of deceptive messages and misleading information.  More sophisticated tactics that have emerged since 2016 threaten to derail the democratic process by further polluting online debate. And the seemingly unending influx of fakery could plant enough suspicion and cynicism to throw an otherwise legitimate election into question. "Far more people have gotten the idea that you can throw a U.S.

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter. Since Jan, President Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.

For people pondering the potential effects of foreign interference in the 2020 elections here in the United States, it is worth understanding what other democracies are doing to confront the same problem and what lessons can be learned from their experiences. As a 2018 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put it: "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s Kremlin employs an asymmetric arsenal that includes military invasions, cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, and the weaponization

Political groups on both sides of the aisle are throwing money and resources at propping up local, partisan websites that are often designed to appear as straight news. Some of these sites are leveraging Facebook advertising to boost their content.

The Democratic anger over Facebook is the most potent sign yet of the peril Silicon Valley faces if the party regains full power in Washington: Investigations could become more intrusive, and the online industry could face punishments that have never realistically been on the table — including a ban on the kind of behavior-based advertising that supplies Facebook's fortune. Such repercussions could go even beyond the backlash that tech is experiencing under the Trump administration.

The Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint against data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, and filed settlements for public comment with Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive and an app developer who worked with the company, alleging they employed deceptive tactics to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting.

Craig Newmark, the 66-year-old founder of Craigslist, has many contradictions, and his dedication to journalism is just one. He's credited by some with single-handedly taking down the newspaper classifieds industry and strangling local papers of revenue. In Feb, he gave $15 million to projects that support journalism at a time of deep political divide over where and how we get our information, and how trustworthy those sources may be. "So far, I've given over $90 million for this combined effort of trustworthy journalism, cybersecurity, countering information warfare," Newmark says. 

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg sat down to talk with a popular country music radio host in an attempt to reach voters outside the “traditional political media bubble,” according to his campaign — so why did his interview never air? Cumulus Media, parent company for the “Blair Garner Show,” cited the Federal Communications Commission “equal time rule” as rationale for the decision to withhold the interview.