Elections and Media

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Rep James Hines (D-CT) testified before the House Judiciary Committee about alleged online censorship of conservative speech. The hearing was on "Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms" and stemmed in part from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress recently.  The first two panelists were members of Congress, and as such only presented statements and were not questioned afterward.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told House Democrats that former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon used the firm's research to discourage Democrats from voting in the 2016 election. Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked Wylie whether Bannon had specifically talked about voter disenfranchisement or disengagement. "Yes," Wylie responded, according to the transcript released by the Democrats.

A coalition of news organizations asked a federal court to unseal materials used by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to obtain search warrants in his investigation of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and others indicted in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The news organizations are seeking to compel disclosure of affidavits, records of seizures and the warrants themselves that Mueller filed in bringing indictments against such figures as Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, among others.

The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.  The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found ther

One of the brothers who control Sinclair Broadcasting has donated more than $10,000 to Rep Greg Gianforte (R-MT), the congressman who assaulted a journalist and then lied to police about it. Robert E Smith, whose company is the biggest owner of television stations in the US, gave a maximum $5,400 campaign contribution to Rep Greg Gianforte. He did the same in 2017.

Late in 2015, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin met with a reporter from American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that Donald Trump, who had launched his Presidential campaign five months earlier, may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties. Sajudin declined to comment for this story.

President Trump has long had ties to the nation’s major media players. But his connections with the country’s largest tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., run deeper than most. A former top executive of Trump’s casino business sits on AMI’s four-member board of directors, and an adviser joined the media company after the election. The company’s chairman, David J. Pecker, is a close friend of the president’s.

[Commentary] We are in a brave new world. Facebook and 'Big Tech' have contributed to the erosion of our democratic discourse. We need to have these new titans assume responsibilities on par to the influence they have over our information ecosystem. We need to address this bug in our democracy. Short-term policy solutions can help curb some of Facebook’s harmful effects, but the larger task before policymakers -- and all of us -- is to critically examine the long-term health of our democratic discourse.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before Congress turned into something of a pointed gripe session, with both Democratic and Republican senators attacking Facebook for failing to protect users’ data and stop Russian election interference, and raising questions about whether Facebook should be more heavily regulated. Of specific interest were the revelations that sensitive data of as many as 87 million Facebook users were harvested without explicit permission by a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, which was connected to the Trump campaign.

Several Republicans with knowledge of Cambridge’s business said that fallout from the Facebook scandal — combined with widespread doubts about the accuracy of Cambridge’s psychological profiles of voters — had effectively crippled the firm’s election work in the United States. “They’re selling magic in a bottle,” said Matt Braynard, who worked alongside Cambridge on the Trump campaign, for which he served as the director of data and strategy, and now runs Look Ahead America, a group seeking to turn out disaffected rural and blue-collar voters. “And they’re becoming toxic.”