Elections and Media

A Q&A with Phil Weiser, a professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado, about the state of online political advertising. 

Among the list of banned advertising on Facebook you’ll find the usual suspects: guns, drugs, porn etc. Also, on that list? Bad grammar, and recently added, cryptocurrencies. When it comes to political campaign ads however, the rules are few and far between. Unlike television, radio and print ads, online campaign ads don’t face federal regulations.

The Kremlin’s political warfare against democratic countries has evolved from overt to covert influence activities. But while Russia has pioneered the toolkit of asymmetric measures for the 21st century, including cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, these tools are already yesterday’s game. Technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and machine learning, combined with the growing availability of big data, have set the stage for a new era of sophisticated, inexpensive, and highly impactful political warfare.

At a time when the US Congress seems paralyzed by partisanship — and either too reluctant or distracted to take on Silicon Valley’s most powerful players — Maryland is among a growing roster of states trying to remedy some of the most pressing ills of the digital age. Along with Maryland, leaders from New York to Washington state have pitched new bills that would make more information about online political ads available to local voters.

Apparently, special counsel Robert Mueller's team is asking witnesses pointed questions about whether Donald Trump was aware that Democratic e-mails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their strategic release. Mueller's investigators have asked witnesses whether Trump was aware of plans for WikiLeaks to publish the e-mails. They have also asked about the relationship between GOP operative Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and why President Trump took policy positions favorable to Russia.

[Commentary] While the academic jury is still out on whether a person getting their news from social media makes them any more or less partisan than those who sought out right-wing talk radio or lefty political journals a generation ago, there exists another filter bubble that, while it’s received relatively little public attention, affects the majority of people reading this article: The average producer of online content is far more internet-savvy than the average consumer of online content.  While it’s always been expected that journalists and intellectuals be more knowledgeable about th

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) launched an attack on the market power of large tech companies. "I’m not looking for a lot of regulation, I’m looking for responsibility," Chairman Walden said. "If responsibility doesn’t flow, then regulation will." Chairman Walden raised multiple areas for possible regulation:

According to Facebook, during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign actually paid higher rates to advertise on the platform overall than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. But, Facebook's chart does not show what the Clinton and Trump campaigns would have paid for an apples-to-apples ad buy.

A majority of Americans are now concerned that the government won't do enough to regulate how US technology companies operate, according to an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll. Across the board, concern about government inaction is up significantly — 15 percentage points — in the past three months. In a previous Axios-SurveyMonkey poll in November, just after Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before Congress, only about four in 10 Americans were concerned that the government wouldn't do enough to regulate the tech companies. Now that number has jumped to 55 percent.

[Commentary] Voqal has long funded media content and distribution, spending millions of dollars annually. It seemed prudent for us also to support ways to measure the effects of that funding. Though we believed that our grants were having a significant impact, it’s a big step forward for us and for our grantees to be able to measure results.

National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers said that the United States hasn’t done enough to deter Russian meddling in national politics, even as he acknowledged that President Donald Trump hasn’t directed cybersecurity officials to take more aggressive offensive actions against Moscow.  “I believe that President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion that, there’s little price to pay here and therefore I can continue this activity,” Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee.  Rogers’ testimony was a reminder of the gap between the president, who has downplayed Russian interferen