🔥NEW!: @FEC GOP commissioners are so eager to grease the skids for corporate spending in US elections that they don’t seem to care where the money comes from, including, in a matter just released, money from – I kid you not – *Russian oligarchs.* This is, in a word, alarming. 🧵
@FEC The Republicans ignored an @FEC investigation that revealed that a US corporation that spent on a number of US elections was overwhelmingly owned by Russian oligarchs and had nothing but Russian funds in the bank.
@FEC Worse, when they went to explain themselves, the Republicans disregarded decades of Commission precedent, governing law, legal logic, and the interests of the United States.
Their misrepresentations demanded a direct response, and they’re getting one:
Sad to report: @FEC announced today the dismissal of a slew of important cases on key issues like dark money, soft money & coordination. Several of us had worked hard over the past few years to keep these matters alive in the face of obstructionist colleagues and bad caselaw. 🧵
@FEC These efforts involved a activating a previously unused, alternative enforcement path that Congress wrote into our governing statute.
There is still hope that the American people's interests can be vindicated, at least in these matters.
@FEC This path allows those who file complaints to sue those they allege have violated the law when @FEC fails to act. The strategy was working. Today's dismissals should not affect those existing lawsuits – the dismissals have not cured the injury that allowed those suits to proceed.
🧵 The @FEC gave @Google what it asked for last Thursday: Permission to launch a program exempting political email from Gmail's spam filters.
The legal ship has now sailed, but the policy question remains: *Should* Google flood Gmail users' in-boxes with spammy political email?
@FEC@Google I voted against allowing Google to pursue its plan, not because of the public's huge and breathtakingly hostile reaction to the program, but because I believe that, legally, what Google proposed was prohibited in-kind corporate contributions to federal political campaigns.
@FEC@Google But I think the commenters had the policy issue right. Google's unofficial motto is "Don't be evil." I'm not sure dumping spam into in-boxes counts as "evil," but it does run counter to the guiding principle to "make Google more useful for all our users."
This morning at the @FEC's open meeting, Commissioner Trey Trainor (@txelectionlaw) decided to "pass judgment" on a requestor asking the Commission about childcare rules.
He called the requestor’s need for childcare "abhorrent."
Video:
@FEC@TXElectionLaw The discussion concerned an advisory opinion request from @RepSwalwell that asked whether he could use campaign funds to pay for overnight childcare when traveling on congressional or political business.
@FEC@TXElectionLaw@RepSwalwell Verbatim: “To be real honest with you, I'm actually going to pass judgment on it. I think it's abhorrent that Congressman Swalwell would have such a young child and want to leave them in the care of someone else for a weeklong trip overseas."
Not only was the GOP @FEC commissioners' blocking of a $781.6 million complaint against Trump & his campaign contrary to law and not only did it carry the unmistakable stench of partisanship….
…it was also just the latest attempt to discredit U.S. news media as appropriate sources of information for @FEC complaints.
When Complainants or our lawyers cite news reports, the Commission evaluates the overall credibility of those news reports and, necessarily, the news organizations that produced them. Make no mistake: that is what our Republican colleagues rejected in this matter.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” says @elonmusk, @Twitter’s likely new owner.
One of Twitter’s challenges in supporting democracy is to avoid spreading disinformation like wildfire. And content moderation isn't the only way to slow disinformation down. 🧵
@elonmusk@Twitter A wildfire requires not just a spark to start the fire but also wind to fan the flames. On Twitter, algorithms are the wind. Musk says he wants to open-source Twitter's algorithms. But algorithms' effects don't depend on whether you can find their source code on Github.
@elonmusk@Twitter It's how they're tuned. At the moment, social media companies' algorithms "exploit the basic human compulsion to react to material that outrages," as I wrote in the Georgetown Law Technology Review in 2020.