Elections and Media

With a White House and Senate under Democratic control, passing sweeping legislation may be a challenge for House Republicans, but it’s likely that they will apply pressure on the current and forthcoming tech policy goals of the Biden-Harris administration. Despite Republicans’ concerns with the current administration’s spending, closing the digital divide should be an area of opportunity for bipartisan action, especially since many Republicans have constituents in severely underserved rural areas.

I no longer believe, and haven’t for years, that our current commercialized and consolidated media is capable of curing its own ills. I applaud what remains of community and independent media. These folks struggle mightily to maintain sufficient resources needed to do their jobs, but it becomes more difficult each year as newspapers are bought up by huge non-community chains, local stations go off the air, newsrooms are shuttered, reporters are fired en masse, and local, regional, and statehouse coverage diminishes. It’s not working; something else is needed.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has dismissed a complaint from Republicans that Google’s Gmail app aided Democratic candidates by sending GOP fundraising emails to spam at a far higher rate than Democratic solicitations. The Republican National Committee and others contended that the alleged benefit amounted to unreported campaign contributions to Democrats. The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee complained to the FEC in 2022, citing 

With Rep Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally getting enough votes to be elected Speaker of the House and that body cleared for the takeoff of Republican committee leadership, look for that leadership to launch Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) oversight hearings.

There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election.

Mark Zuckerberg considered disclosing in 2017 that Facebook was investigating “organizations like Cambridge Analytica” alongside Russian foreign intelligence actors as part of an election security assessment before ultimately removing the reference at his advisers’ suggestion, according to a 2019 deposition conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The push to tank [Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate] Gigi Sohn’s nomination for the Federal Communications Commission has been bolstered by conservative groups taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads. In the past year, two conservative nonprofits — the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) and the Center for a Free Economy (CFE) — have placed at least $246,000 in Facebook ads opposing Sohn, according to a review of digital ads archives.

The most significant effect on political parties this year was the $16 billion estimated to have been spent on these elections, further entrenching the ability of big business and the special interests to have their way in Congress, the state houses, judgeship elections, and local community races. If we cannot find our way—very soon—to significantly reduce or eliminate the polluting and destructive power of money in our politics, democracy’s days are numbered. The US Senate is hardly poised to lead us to significant democratic reforms.

Nothing new Twitter owner Elon Musk has done and undone is nearly as concerning as his decision to suddenly reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. As someone who has been studying Trump’s Twitter use since before he was elected president, I believe that his return would mean the heightened spread of both misinformation and disinformation, the proliferation of degrading and dehumanizing discourse, the further mainstreaming of hate speech, and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions.

Many election deniers on the ballot, particularly for the crucial secretary-of-state roles, lost their races. This is because platforms, governments, and the media took countermeasures that were at least partially effective, based on their lessons from 2016, 2018, and 2020.  Though misinformation remains present in large quantities, this time it had less reach, was more spread out, and was harder to find.