Elections and Media

The decisions by networks to go all-in on Donald Trump in 2016 may sound a distant echo today. But it’s one that is still being heard and felt in the wake of the networks’ decision to air President Donald Trump’s Jan 8 speech about a border crisis that doesn’t exist and a wall that the vast majority of US taxpayers don’t want to pay for. News outlets need to have a deeper reckoning about their role in enabling President Donald Trump’s lies and spreading his racist propaganda.

Facebook said it is investigating whether an organization backed by Internet billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman violated the social media giant’s policies when it set up several misleading news pages in a bid to target US voters with left-leaning political messages. The probe focuses on News for Democracy, whose Facebook ads and affiliated pages about sports, religion, the American flag and other topics were viewed millions of times during the 2018 midterm elections, according to an analysis of the company ad archive conducted by New York University.

Facebook will stop displaying political campaign ads in Washington State in order to comply with campaign finance laws, and will pay more than $238,500 to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of those rules. Google was also alleged to have violated state laws by failing to maintain records of election ads on its platform, and ceased its political ads this summer, after Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed suit against the companies. The lawsuits will end without an admission of guilt from either Facebook or Google.

The Trump campaign funneled money to ad buyers alleged to have facilitated illegal coordination between the campaign and the NRA by routing funds through a secretive LLC that appears to be little more than a shell company. While the Trump campaign stopped reporting payments to ad buyers alleged to have facilitated illegal coordination between the campaign and the NRA after the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s 2020 campaign has continued to deploy the same individuals working for the firms at the center of the contro

The Trump administration slapped new sanctions on 18 Russian intelligence agents for a variety of activities, including interfering in the US presidential election, the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain, and hacking international agencies that combat chemical weapons and doping. The latest round of sanctions bring the total of Russian individuals and entities the Trump administration has sanctioned to 272. Nine officers for Russia’s Main Intelligence Director (GRU) were sanctioned for playing a role in undermining the election.

The attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, to gain access to the names, "likes" and other personal data about tens of millions of the social site's users without their permission. The lawsuit filed by Karl Racine marks the first major effort by regulators in the US to penalize the tech giant for its entanglement with the firm. It could presage even tougher fines and other punishments still to come for Facebook as additional state and federal investigations continue.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), one of several Democratic lawmakers mulling a 2020 presidential bid, thinks Democrats could “run on” and even “win on” wonky-but-important talk about issues like rural broadband. Sen Klobuchar told The New Yorker that while the issue might not be on the radar for “most people in urban areas … a lot of parts of our rural countryside can’t even access cell-phone service, much less broadband.” But would that matter as a campaign issue in the age of Trump, who has not commented extensively on issues like broadband?

The researchers behind the blockbuster reports detailing a sweeping online influence campaign by Russia during and after the 2016 election offer what to expect ahead. Bharath Ganesh of Oxford University said trolls are likely to move into the background and “embed” themselves among activist groups critical of US institutions in order to amplify their voices.

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) – led by Chairman L. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), and Congressional Black Caucus Diversity Task Force Co-Chairs, Reps Barbara Lee (D-CA) and GK Butterfield (D-NC) – issued the following joint statement in response to a new report prepared for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which reveals Russia targeted African American voters in attempts to suppress the vote in the 2016 election:

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Donald Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office. The report is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (VA), its ranking Democrat.