Elections and Media

[Commentary] The rise of what we might call “cheap speech” has fundamentally altered both how we communicate and the nature of our politics, endangering the health of our democracy.

The path back to a more normal political scene will not be easy. In the old days, just a handful of TV networks controlled the airwaves, and newspapers served as gatekeepers for news and opinion content. A big debate back in the 1980s and earlier was how to enable free expression for those who did not own or work for a media company and wanted to get a message out. It seems cheap speech, despite its undeniable benefits, has come with a steep price for our democracy.

[Richard L. Hasen is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine]

Journalists, congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details of what happened during the 2016 election. But two new books contend that the large lines of the problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. Now, as then, just a few companies have taken control, and this concentration of power—which Americans have acquiesced to without ever really intending to, simply by clicking away—is subverting our democracy.

President Donald Trump is methodically building a 2020 reelection campaign machine, shunting aside doubts about his viability for a second term as controversy consumes the early months of his administration. President Trump is mapping out a fall fundraising tour that is expected to fill his campaign bank account with tens of millions of dollars. His team has tracked dozens of potential Democratic rivals, a list of names that ranges from Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And his administration has received political advice from a top campaign pollster from his 2016 campaign, who has urged the president to keep up his attacks on the mainstream media.

[Commentary] Standing up to racism and intolerance is a moral imperative, and those who do, like Heather Heyer, the young woman who died as she challenged the thugs in Charlottesville Aug 12, are champions of American principles. In an era when so many bedrock values are under attack, it’s important to think strategically and prioritize the ones worth fighting for. An exemplar of such strategic thinking, Martin Luther King Jr., fought on multiple fronts but prioritized one in particular: voting rights.

Today, as in the 1960s, that same fight makes sense. For in this new civil rights era, voting rights for broad swaths of Americans — minorities, the young and the old — are again imperiled and under attack. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution. “What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers e-mails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian. The request, which DreamHost made public Aug 14, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community. “What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

An advocacy group is launching an ad campaign targeting lawmakers who want to roll back the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. Fight For The Future, a pro-net neutrality advocacy group, bought billboards in six states to target Sens John Thune (R-SD) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), as well as Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Reps Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Tom Graves (R-GA). The billboards show the lawmakers’ faces with text criticizing their stance and urging the public to call their offices.

Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an e-mail to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership - Including Putin.” The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign e-mails read to The Washington Post. The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower. Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made. Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.

But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted. Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials. Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal from Papadopoulos for Trump to do so. The exchanges are among more than 20,000 pages of documents the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees this month after review by White House and defense lawyers.

Mozilla, the creators of the popular Firefox web browser, are launching a new program to counter fake news stories. Fabricated news, made to mislead or turn a profit, is a growing problem in online communities. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia used social media to propagate misinformation campaigns throughout the 2016 presidential race. "Misinformation devalues the open web," said Katharina Borchert, Mozilla chief innovation officer. "We see this as a threat to the fabric of our society."

The Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI) will increase funding for research on misinformation, the first findings to be released later in 2017. The company hopes to leverage Firefox's size and reach to get data about news browsing habits. MITI will also tailor products to amplify actual news over fake news, expand an effort to increase digital news literacy and fund designers to work on software to provide on-the-fly visualizations of the problem.

A watchdog group will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Aug 9 alleging that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) violated federal law by soliciting opposition research on the Trump campaign from a foreign government. The conservative group Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust (FACT), launched in 2014 by former U.S. attorney Matthew Whitaker, will allege that political operative Alexandra Chalupa, in her capacity as a DNC consultant, improperly sought intelligence on President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from Ukrainian officials.

“Federal law and Commission regulations prohibit any person from knowingly soliciting, accepting or receiving contributions or donations of money or other things of value from a foreign national,” the complaint reads. FACT alleges that Chalupa violated the ban by “knowingly soliciting” a “valuable in-kind contribution in the form of opposition research and information on a Trump campaign official from a foreign national on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.”

Kayleigh McEnany, who recently departed CNN as a contributor, will be the next spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. McEnany frequently defended President Donald Trump during her tenure at CNN. She began as a paid contributor in 2016. The 29-year-old Georgetown and Harvard Law School graduate began her career in television as a producer for former Gov Mike Huckabee's (R-AR) Fox News program. On Aug 6, McEnany debuted a Trump TV segment that she labeled the “real news", which was shown on Trump's Facebook page.