Earlier today, Fox News announced that it will be launching a weekly show hosted by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro that will have a limited, four-week run ahead of the midterm elections. “Ben is a rising star in conservative political commentary and we are excited to add his signature style and well thought out viewpoint to our pre-election weekend lineup,” Fox News says in the statement, which came hot on the heels of news that Shapiro was a conduit for pro-Russian propaganda cooked up by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
This is clearly Fox giving a test-run to Shapiro, who the network likely sees as capable of expanding its audience beyond its senior-citizen core. For Shapiro, a part-time Fox News hosting gig is the next step in the life cycle of right-wing punditry: He’s already a columnist and radio host, and he has side hustles hawking gold, dodgy supplements, and doomsday prepper foods, so the obvious next step is “cable news sinecure.”
What’s weird and funny about Shapiro’s Fox News audition is its transparently phony gimmick. The show is called “The Ben Shapiro Election Special,” and apparently will tap into Shapiro’s supposed expertise in elections analysis. “I am honored to partner with Fox News where we can provide in-depth analysis on the voting trends that will be leading the polls this November,” Shapiro says in the Fox News statement.
So Ben Shapiro is a hard-right Nate Silver now, I guess. It’s a strange framing to force upon a pundit whose oeuvre is mainly culture-war howling and sensationalized confrontation with ideological adversaries. Shapiro’s chief talent is getting booked for speeches at liberal arts colleges to provoke protests from left-wing student groups and then venerating himself as a warrior for free speech. The meat of his commentary encompasses fairly standard right-wing themes -- rote American exceptionalism, downplaying racial bias in American society, etc. -- dressed up with over-the-top aggressive attacks on “The Left.”
Shapiro's most significant contribution to our understanding of electoral politics is to offer some variation of “this is why Trump won” whenever a Democrat or media figure does something that annoys him. And, speaking just for myself, I don’t know that I’m quite prepared to trust the electoral analysis of someone who tries to goad candidates for federal office into debating him with bad-faith offers of campaign and/or charitable donations.
But that’s what Fox News is giving us because … well, I guess they needed something, and the election is coming up, and so sure, why not, let’s have Ben Shapiro be an elections guy now. Whatever.
It doesn’t actually matter because this is all just a pretext to test out Shapiro as a replacement Sean Hannity for a younger demographic: someone who can theoretically appeal to the youth while giving Fox News’ existing audience the angry, ideologically acceptable opinions it craves.
Fox News gave Michigan Republican Senate nominee John James an hour-long guest hosting gig on the September 11 edition of its program Outnumbered. James, who is running against Sen. Debbie Stabenow, used that time to speak repeatedly about Michigan and the need to vote out incumbents. He is now promoting his Fox News appearances and related tweets by the network to bolster his campaign.
Outnumbered typically features five hosts -- four of whom are women and the fifth is the show’s “#OneLuckyGuy.” During James’ stint as the sole man on the panel, the candidate argued that “people in the state of Michigan are sick and tired of the incumbents” and that “we have so many people in Washington trying to legislate and regulate futures that they’re not going to be a part of.” As he spoke, the bottom third of the screen read “Control of Congress at stake as a sprint to the November elections begins,” and when James concluded, one of the other hosts endorsed his statements, saying, “I’m not going to argue with that.”
James is now using that Outnumbered appearance, as well as one onFox & Friends earlier this morning, to advertise his campaign online. He has retweeted Fox News’ tweets about his appearances, including one that quotes his claim that “people in the state of Michigan are sick and tired of the incumbents.” He also shared multiplepictures and quotes from his appearance on Outnumbered along with a link to his official campaign website, and retweeted two of the show’s hosts Lisa Boothe and Harris Faulkner.
It is not at all improper, or even unusual, for candidates for office to make television appearances. But gifting a politician with a full hour to push talking points that are then repeatedly praised by network employees is entirely different, if not unheard of, for Fox. Outnumbered has a history of offering Republican political figures such airtime to push their political agendas, although the guest hosting gig has usually gone to incumbent members of Congress in the past. The network’s decision to allow a current candidate to host the show is even more ridiculous and further demonstrates that Fox News acts as little more than a media wing of the Republican Party.
A candidate for Colorado attorney general used to fill his days spewing anti-LGBTQ and sexist comments on a Denver radio show.
District Attorney George Brauchler, who announced his campaign for attorney general in November 2017 after withdrawing from the state’s gubernatorial race, was a frequent guest host on 630 KHOW-AM's The Caplis & Silverman Show over a decade ago. Brauchler hasrepeatedlypromised to be an attorney general “for all of Colorado,” but he made repeated discriminatory comments in his appearances on the show.
While guest hosting in 2007, Brauchler defended right-wing radio host Ann Coulter’s use of the slur “faggot” to refer to former U.S. Sen. John Edwards (D-NC). According to Brauchler, Coulter was simply “trying to be funny.” Later in the program, Brauchler likened a request from Elizabeth Edwards that Coulter halt personal attacks against her husband to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He also launched a sexist attack against then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, proclaiming that Clinton has “got some big ol' legs.” But don’t worry -- Brauchler clarified that he didn’t “mean to disrespect.”
On another 2007 edition of the show, Brauchler asked guest Jason Knight, an openly gay former naval petty officer, if being a gay person in the Navy is like “putting a kid in a candy shop.” Later in the show, Brauchler attempted to downplay the comments by saying that he was "insinuat[ing]" that "the Navy are the light-in-the-loafers service." Weeks later, Brauchler again demonstrated his homophobia by defending the U.S. military's former policy of barring openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from service. Brauchler maintained that the policy was acceptable because the military “discriminate[s] against people coming into the military based on height, weight, eyes, a whole list of medical things.” He also claimed that because the military does not accommodate service members’ religious needs (which, in fact, it did and does), it does not have to accept their sexual orientation: “The military asks everybody that's a part of it to make a sacrifice.”
As a guest host, Brauchler also dismissed climate change concerns. During a 2007 discussion of former Vice President Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Brauchler stated, “I don't watch communist propaganda, I don't watch Al Qaeda prop -- why would I watch Al Gore's propaganda?" He claimed there was no “scientific consensus” that “global warming exists and it's man's fault” -- a statement that was untrue even before 2007.
The campaign of Maine Republican Senate nominee Eric Brakey sponsored a message to the email list of dirty trickster Roger Stone that asked for support and donations.
Stoneworks for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network and has been a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump. Stone is a vicious racist, misogynist, liar, and conspiracy theorist whose activities are being scrutinized by special counsel Robert Mueller.
On September 6, Stone forwarded a sponsored message to his email list on behalf of Brakey, a Maine state senator who is challenging incumbent Independent Sen. Angus King. A disclaimer before the fundraising pitch stated: “We are excited to share with you a special message from one of our sponsoring advertisers, Brakey For US Senate. It is also sponsors like them that help fund Stone Cold Truth. Please note that the following message reflects the opinions and representations of our sponsor alone, and not necessarily the opinion of Roger Stone.”
The sponsored message was written by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and asked readers to “please join me in supporting Eric by chipping in a donation to help him knock off Angus King.” The end of the email stated that it was “paid for by Eric Brakey for U.S. Senate.”
Strangely, DeBono denied paying Stone or his Stone Cold Truth website for advertising and reportedly “speculated that Stone Cold Truth may have used his letter on their own because ‘they need content.’” Scott’s campaign told The Associated Press that the email “was a vendor mistake - they are not advertising with Stone or paying him to send out emails on their behalf.” By contrast, Diehl touted Stone’s endorsement of him -- which came after Diehl advertised with Stone -- on Facebook.
Brakey’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Republican nominee to represent a state House district in Kentucky previously appeared on a white nationalist show and complained about minorities supposedly conspiring against whites. He also discussed Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) interracial marriage, stating that he believes "we should maintain our people" but also suggesting that McConnell’s "marriage is not my problem" because it hasn’t produced any children.
In May, Everett Corley won the Republican nomination to represent the 43rd District in the Kentucky House of Representatives. The Republican Party of Kentucky listsCorley on its slate of “elected officials & candidates.”
In 2016, he unsuccessfully ran as a Republican and then as a third-party candidate for a U.S. House seat. In 2014, Corley also ran as a Republican for the 43rd District seat but lost in the general election (he ran then as Corley Everett but later changed his name).
During that 2014 campaign, Corley appeared on the August 8, 2014, edition of The Ethno State, a program associated with the white nationalist American Freedom Party and hosted by self-described white nationalist William Johnson. The American Freedom Party states that it is “both a political party and activist organization dedicated to the interests vital to the preservation and continuity of ethnic European communities within the United States of America.”
During the nearly hour-long show, Corley pushed white nationalist talking points and attacked minorities.
Johnson, who serves as the chairman of the American Freedom Party, began the episode featuring Corley by explaining that he named the show The Ethno State because people at his organization want to “create an ethnostate, one where our people, European Americans, can reside without the influence and all of the pullings and tuggings of the difficulties that occurred through this multicultural society that we live in now.”
Corley later said that one thing that “struck” him about the American Freedom Party was that “if you’re a minority you can belong to all these groups that champion your ethno-background but you certainly [have] very little to do as a European or a Caucasian American.” Johnson replied: “Well that’s a good point and that’s a nice plug for the American Freedom Party.”
Corley also stated that white people in his community are “completely surrounded by” minorities and he personally feels that there are “a bunch of white liberals and then minorities who've -- conspired together to cut the white working class out of power in Jefferson County.”
Toward the end of the program, Johnson complained that Sen. Mitch McConnell is “interracially married and so he is taking a stand that will destroy the white race, and so in my mind you can -- you must vote for a Black man before you can vote for someone who is going to destroy our race by interracially marrying. You must vote for anybody but a white man who is interracially married.” (McConnell is married to Elaine Chao, who is now President Donald Trump’s secretary of transportation.)
Corley responded, in part, by saying that he feels “we should maintain our people and our culture as much as anyone else, and that's a post -- and I’m not saying this in a bad way, but that’s a post, shall we say, marriage that has not born any children or anything. That’s simply a marriage of companionship, you understand what I’m saying? So, I don’t think he’s trying to make a statement about children on that marriage, I just simply think that that’s someone he relates to on an interpersonal relationship. But be that as it may, that primarily is not what I’m -- his marriage is not my problem, you know what I’m saying?" He then added, before being cut-off: "If he's capable of supporting the things I support in that situation, then that's -- if we're going to be against people --”
Johnson continued to criticize interracial dating, claiming: “Our society is dying in part because of interracial marriage.” Corley responded that he's “not trying to be too positive about this, but interracial marriage is just like -- is on the same par as what the gay agenda would be. Interracial marriage actually, Mr. Johnson, is an insignificant -- at least in Kentucky, is insignificant, it’s two, one and a half, two percent, just as the gay thing is one and a half, two percent, and it attracts enormous attention but at the end of the day, and I’m not trying to be positive, but 95 percent of people who are white, marry within their own people.”
A few months after Corley’s appearance on The Ethno State, The American Freedom Party endorsed Corley for his 2014 run.
During that race, then-Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter -- who resigned from the company this year after he used the n-word in a conference call -- donated $250 to Corley’s campaign, as the Courier Journal's Phillip M. Bailey noted. U.S. Rep. James Comer (R-KY) -- who was then the state's agricultural commissioner -- also attended a fundraiser for Corley in 2014.
Corley has continued his racist activities since his appearance on The Ethno State. In 2016, he joined an effort to stop the removal of a Confederate statue on the University of Louisville campus. He called University of Louisville professor Ricky Jones, who advocated for removing the statue, “a damn dirty black bastard” on Facebook. Corley later deleted the post and said it was “inexcusable”; lawyers who represented Corley in a lawsuit defending the statue later dropped him as a client, citing his “offensive and unwise remarks.”
*Following the publication of this piece, the American Freedom Party apparently removed The Ethno State episode with Corley. Media Matters downloaded the show beforehand; a copy of it is available here.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testified before the Senate intelligence committee this morning. Here’s what you need to know.
This morning, the Senate intelligence committee questioned Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The hearing was the culmination of a two-year investigation into Russian election interference by the committee and Congress’ best opportunity to publicly hold Facebook and Twitter accountable for their role in allowing Russian operatives to game their platforms to target Americans with propaganda. As Angelo Carusone said earlier: “The tech industry’s failure to grapple with its roles in allowing -- and sometimes even enabling -- the fake news crisis and foreign interference in American elections is a national security crisis.” Today Americans had the opportunity to hear from Sandberg and Dorsey directly what Facebook and Twitter have done to protect them since 2016.
The first time tech executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before the Senate intelligence committee last year, committee members took a hostile posture. Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) and vice chair Mark Warner (D-VA) bothscolded Facebook, Twitter, and Google for not taking election interference or the fact that their platforms were weaponized by foreign propagandists, seriously. At one point, Warner, frustrated by how little the tech companies claimed to know about what was happening on their own platforms said, “Candidly, your companies know more about Americans, in many ways, than the United States government does. The idea that you had no idea any of this was happening strains my credibility.”
Ten months later, as I watched Dorsey and Sandberg testify before the committee, it felt like relations had thawed -- perhaps not with Google, who refused to send its CEO and instead was represented by an empty chair, but certainly with Facebook and Twitter. Members of the committee continued to ask tough questions and press Dorsey and Sandberg when they weren’t forthcoming, but the atmosphere had changed. I get the sense that after nearly a year of conversations and hearings, the working relationship is perhaps in a better place.
Of course the tech companies have taken a beating in the press since that first hearing. We’ve since learned that Russian trolls got tens of thousands of Americans to RSVP for actual local events via Facebook. Americans have now seen the thousands of ads and organic content that Russian propagandists deployed on Facebook. Conspiracy theories about the Parkland shooting survivors, most of whom were still minors, spread like wildfire on social media. News broke that Cambridge Analytica had breached data of at least 50 million Facebook users. Russia is still interfering in our political conversation, and, Iran is now gaming the platforms as well.
This morning’s hearing was probably the last time we’ll hear from the tech companies or the committee before the midterm election. Here’s what we’ve learned (and what we still don’t know):
Promises made, promises kept?
Facebook and Twitter made a lot of promises to the committee in the 2017 hearing. Facebook and Twitter both promised to change their ad policies, enhance user safety, build better teams and tools to curb malicious activity, better collaborate with law enforcement and one another, and communicate more transparently with the public.
How’d they do?
Updated ads policy.Both Facebook and Twitter have announced new political and issue ad policies. Both companies have also announced their support for the Honest Ads Act. During the hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Facebook specifically about voter suppression ads which both Russia and the Trump campaign used in 2016. Sandberg said that in the future, this kind of targeting would not be allowed, though she didn’t specify if she was talking about just foreign actors or American political campaigns as well.
User safety. Perhaps the most telling moment of the hearing was Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) asked Sandberg about the real harm done when real people (not just fake accounts) intentionally spread conspiracy theories. Sandberg’s solution, rather than removing the incendiary content, was to have third-party fact-checkers look at potentially incorrect content because, according to her, Facebook isn’t the arbiter of truth, mark the content as false, warn users before they share the content and present users with “alternative facts.”
Build better teams and tools to curb malicious activity. In her opening statement, Sandberg said: “We’re investing heavily in people and technology to keep our community safe and keep our service secure. This includes using artificial intelligence to help find bad content and locate bad actors. We’re shutting down fake accounts and reducing the spread of false news. We’ve put in place new ad transparency policies, ad content restrictions, and documentation requirements for political ad buyers. We’re getting better at anticipating risks and taking a broader view of our responsibilities. And we’re working closely with law enforcement and our industry peers to share information and make progress together.” Dorsey also highlighted Twitter’s progress in his opening statement, saying: “We‘ve made significant progress recently on tactical solutions like identification of many forms of manipulation intending to artificially amplify information, more transparency around who buys ads and how they are targeted, and challenging suspicious logins and account creation.”
Better collaboration with law enforcement and with one another. Committee members asked Dorsey and Sandberg about this multiple times during the hearing. Both agreed that when it came to American security, Twitter and Facebook weren’t in competition and collaborated frequently. They also expressed a good relationship with law enforcement agencies, though Dorsey complained more than once about having too many points of contact.
Communicate more transparently to the public. Committee members pressed both Dorsey and Sandberg to be more transparent. Warner asked Dorsey if Twitter users have a right to know if the account they’re interacting with is a bot. Dorsey agreed to this, adding the caveat that “as far as we can detect them.” Warner suggested to Sandberg that most of Facebook’s users don’t know what data Facebook has on them or how that data is used. Further, Warner pressed Sandberg, asking if users had a right to know how much their data was worth to Facebook. Wyden pointed out that data privacy is a national security issue as Russians used our own data to target us, saying, “Personal data is now the weapon of choice for political influence campaigns.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) asked Dorsey if Twitter had done enough to disclose to users that they were exposed to IRA propaganda, which Dorsey admitted the platform had not yet done enough.
Questions still outstanding
For every question Sandberg and Dorsey answered during the hearing, there were plenty that they couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Most of the time, they promised to follow-up with the committee but here’s what we still don’t know and won’t likely get an answer to before the 2018 elections:
What are the tech companies doing to prepare for “deepfake” video and audio? Sen. Angus King (I-ME) asked if the companies were prepared to combat “deepfake” videos and audios, content that is digitally manipulated to look and sound extremely real. Neither Sandberg nor Dorsey had a good answer, which is worrisome given that “deepfake” audio and video are just around the corner.
Are the tech companies keeping an archive of suspended and removed accounts and will make this archive available to researchers and/or the general public? Both Sens. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and James Lankford (R-OK) asked about this. which is an important question, especially for academic researchers. Neither Sandberg nor Dorsey had a clear answer.
Anything to be done with the selling of opioids online? This question came from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) who also asked Sandberg and Dorsey if their companies bore and moral responsibility for deaths caused by opioid sales on social media.
How much did tech companies profit from Russian propaganda?Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has asked Facebook this question repeatedly both during intelligence and judiciary committee hearings. The most follow-up she’s received from Facebook is that the number is “immaterial.”
What happens next?
Burr and Warner generally close these hearings by previewing what happens next. This time there was no such preview. Given that the election is almost two months away, that’s a bit unsettling. But the reality is that with the current makeup in Congress (and the executive branch), the government isn’t going to do anything else to protect Americans. No legislation will be passed, and if social media companies are called to testify before the House again anytime soon, it will likely be another circus hearing devoted to the right’s pet issue of social media censorship. On the Senate’s part, however, holding tech companies accountable and producing reports is about as much as the intelligence committee can do right now.
Facebook, Twitter, and the absentee Google left today's hearing with questions unresolved and problems nowhere near fixed. Beyond the Senate Intelligence Committee asking pertinent questions, Congress has shown no interest in holding social media companies to account for those issues that remain outstanding.
Silicon Valley hikes back up to Capitol Hill this week. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in an open hearing on “foreign influence operations and their use of social media platforms.” Larry Page, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, was invited to testify as well but has so far refused the invitation. The committee plans to have an empty chair at the hearing to illustrate Google’s absence.
This will be the highest profile hearing on Russian interference on social media to date. Thus it’s Congress’ best opportunity to publicly hold Facebook and Twitter accountable for their role in allowing Russian operatives to game their platforms to target Americans with propaganda.
I’ve been following this committee’s investigation from its first open hearing last year. I’ve watched (and often rewatched) every public hearing the committee has held and read every statement and report it’s issued. Here’s what you need to know.
Senate intelligence: The adults in the room
The Senate intelligence committee is tasked with overseeing the 19 entities that make up America’s intelligence community. The committee began investigating possible Russian interference in 2016 elections and collusion with the Trump campaign in January of last year, months before the special counsel’s investigation began. Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) pledged from the start to conduct the investigation in a bipartisan manner, working together to uncover the truth and produce “both classified and unclassified reports.”
So far, Burr and Warner have stayed true to those principles, in stark contrast to their counterparts on the House committee, whose own investigation has become a dumpster fire. Whereas Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his Republican colleagues in the House seem mostly interested in giving the Trump administration cover, Burr actually seems to understand the gravity of the situation and works alongside Warner accordingly. The committee has produced two unclassified reports so far, the first intended to show election officials, political campaigns, and the general public what Russian attacks looked like in 2016, where government agencies failed in protecting us, and what actionable recommendations federal and state governments could take moving forward. The second reportbacked the assessment of intelligence agencies that the “Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt Secretary Clinton (Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton) and to help Donald Trump.” The committee has also produced classified reports available to federal agencies and state election officials.
To put it another way, for the most part, the committee is acting in good faith and acknowledging reality. Members have gone out of their way to avoid political theater, give the public actionable information about election interference from Russia, and demonstrate what the future could look like. Their open hearings on election interference are the most useful source of information currently available from the U.S. government.
Speaking of political theater, let’s talk about that other tech hearing on the same day
In an impressive feat of counterprogramming, the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on “Twitter’s algorithms and content monitoring,” also with Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, on the same day!
Google, Facebook, and Twitter executives are staple witnesses at congressional hearings, but most of the time we don’t learn all that much from them. This is partly because Congress overall has a severe knowledge gap when it comes to technology issues, but mostly because these hearings often become moments of political theater for members of Congress looking to create a viral moment on YouTube or a fundraising hook.
President Donald Trump and most other elected Republicans seem wholly uninterested in holding the tech companies accountable for election interference by foreign actors, opting instead to complain about censorship of conservatives on social media that doesn’t actually exist. (Trump tweeted last week that Google is “rigged” against him after Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs reported on a sketchy study about the search engine by PJ Media.)
There’s no data to back up the GOP’s claims of censorship. Media Matters studied six months of data from political Facebook pages and found that right-leaning Facebook pages had virtually identical engagement to left-leaning pages and received more engagement than other political pages. The methodology of the PJ Media Google study that Trump mentioned on Twittermakes no sense. And reporters were able to debunk Trump’s most recent claim that Google gave former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union special treatment on the homepage that it did not give to President Trump in a matter of minutes using a screenshot from the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”
Look for Republicans outside of the intelligence committee to try to derail the Senate hearing and focus instead on riling up their base around the mythical censorship issue. The right has been fairly open about the fact that this “major line of escalated attack” is its plan. Hopefully, Republicans on the committee won’t contribute to this line of attack, wasting valuable hearing minutes that should be devoted to election and national security.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to Congress earlier this year is a prime example of how easy it is to derail a hearing. Zuckerberg testified over two days before House and Senate committees. The Senate hearing, held jointly by the judiciary and commerce committees, devolved into Zuckerberg explaining how the internet works to the poorly informed senators. House commerce committee members were more up to speed, but Republican members -- following Ted Cruz’s lead from the day before -- spent most of their time grilling Zuckerberg about nonexistent censorship of social media personalities Diamond and Silk.
What tech companies will need to answer
One thing that always comes across when you watch these hearings is the frustration that members of the committee feel toward the tech industry. Facebook has taken the mostheat, but the frustration extends to Twitter and Google too. There’s a lot of blame to go around (Congress hasn’t passed one piece of legislation to protect American voters before the midterm elections), but tech companies allowed their platforms to be weaponized, missed what was happening until it was too late, and remain on the front lines of protecting Americans from attacks that game social media platforms.
Both Facebook and Twitter made a lot of promises to the committee in a 2017 hearing. Tomorrow’s hearing will give committee members an opportunity to report back on promises kept and hold Facebook’s and Twitter’s leadership accountable for promises broken.
In his opening statement at that 2017 hearing, Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, assured the committee, “We are making meaningful improvements based on our findings. Last week, we announced industry-leading changes to our advertising policies that will help protect our platform from unwanted content. We are also enhancing our safety systems, sharpening our tools for stopping malicious activity, and increasing transparency to promote public understanding of all of these areas. Our work on these challenges will continue for as long as malicious actors seek to abuse our system and will need to evolve to stay ahead of new tactics.”
Facebook vice president and general counsel Colin Stretch promised that “going forward, we are making significant investments. We're hiring more ad reviewers, doubling or more our security engineering efforts, putting in place tighter ad content restrictions, launching new tools to improve ad transparency, and requiring documentation from political ad buyers. We're building artificial intelligence to help locate more banned content and bad actors. We're working more closely with industry to share information on how to identify and prevent threats, so that we can all respond faster and more effectively. And we're expanding our efforts to work more closely with law enforcement.”
Members of the committee also pressed the tech companies to continue to share documents and relevant information with them, cross-check Russian-related accounts that the companies took down during the 2017 French election to see if they also participated in American influence operations, improve algorithms, report back on how much money they made from legitimate ads that ran alongside Russian propaganda, and confirm to the committee the total amount of financial resources they devoted to protecting Americans from future foreign influence attacks.
Beyond what’s been promised, these companies need to answer:
What’s their plan to protect Americans in 2018 (and beyond)?By now, Americans know what Russian interference in 2016 looked like. We also know that Russian meddling hasn’t stopped and that other hostile foreign actors (Iran) are waging their own campaigns against us. The committee should ask Dorsey and Sandberg to walk Americans through their plan to protect their American users from foreign interference and to pledge accountability.
How are they combating algorithmic manipulation on your platforms?Algorithmic manipulation is at the heart of Russian interference operations. Russia weaponized social media platforms to amplify content, spread disinformation, harass targets, and fan the flames of discord. This manipulation warps our social media experience, most of the time without our knowledge. Americans need to know what the tech companies are doing to fight algorithmic manipulation and what new policies have been put in place.
Are their new ad policies effective?Facebook, Google, and Twitter have all rolled out changes in their advertising policies meant to curb the ability of foreign entities to illegally buy ads. It’s time for a report back on how those policies are working and whether any more changes are necessary for the midterm elections.
What support and resources do they need from government? As Facebook’s former chief security officer recently pointed out, “In some ways, the United States has broadcast to the world that it doesn’t take these issues seriously and that any perpetrators of information warfare against the West will get, at most, a slap on the wrist.” As hard as I’ve been on the tech companies, government’s failures to protect us and the current administration’s complete indifference to the issue are just as abysmal. Americans should know where tech executives believe government is failing and what resources they need to better fight back against foreign interference.
Do they have the right people in the room? Russia used America’s issues with racial resentment in its influence operations. Members of Congress have made the point in past hearings that tech companies’ lack of diversity in their staffs likely contributed to their inability to recognize inauthentic content from Russians posing as, say, #BlackLivesMatter activists online. In fact, #BlackLivesMatters activists attempted to alert Facebook about potentially inauthentic content and were ignored. Americans need to know if Facebook and Twitter have the right team of people in place to fight foreign interference and if those teams include diverse voices.
How are they protecting Americans’ data? Facebook’s record is particularly abysmal here. The company failed to protect user data from being exploited by Cambridge Analytica and still can’t tell us in full what data the company had or what other entities had access to it. Given how common data breaches are and that Russia used data to target Americans, we need to know what steps tech companies are taking to protect us from data theft and the resulting harm.
Twitter and Facebook are American-born companies that make a lot of money from their American users. Having top executives testify on election interference, in an open hearing, is long overdue. As Burr and Warner warned us just a few weeks ago, time is running out. Burr invoked the famous “this is fine” meme to illustrate his point, saying that Congress is “sitting in a burning room calmly with a cup of coffee, telling ourselves ‘this is fine.’”
As any American who uses the internet can tell you, it isn’t.
Joe Arpaio lost his bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona this week, earning just under 19 percent of the statewide vote and finishing third behind Kelli Ward and primary winner Rep. Martha McSally. In Maricopa County, where he served as sheriff for over 20 years until he was voted out in 2016, Arpaio got crushed, pulling in just 17.5 percent of the vote. The fact that Joe Arpaio is no longer even a distant threat to win election to the Senate is an unalloyed good, given that he is a pernicious racist, persistently corrupt, an inveterate conspiracy theorist, and an authoritarian cretin.
But while he lost badly, Arpaio was still the first choice of nearly 95,000 Arizona Republicans, including a slim plurality of GOP voters in Yuma County, which he won by about 250 votes. That Arpaio was even considered a remotely plausible threat to win the nomination is a fact that must be reckoned with, given that he was convicted on criminal contempt charges in 2017 stemming from his defiance of a federal court order to stop profiling Latinos as sheriff.
A good measure of blame for Arpaio’s continued relevance lies with President Donald Trump and his administration. Arpaio dodged jail time because Trump pardoned him in a flagrant act of cronyism, and just a few months ago Vice President Mike Pence celebrated this many-times-disgraced former lawman as a “tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law.” Arpaio is useful to Trump both as a symbol of grievance (his indictment came during the Obama administration, which implicitly makes him a martyr of “political correctness”) and a champion of draconian immigration policy (the suspected undocumented immigrants Arpaio detained were forced to wear pink underwear in a sweltering tent prison that he himself described as a “concentration camp.”) Arpaio, for his part, says Trump is his hero.
At its core, however, the Joe Arpaio phenomenon is a creation of conservative media generally, and Fox News specifically. Arpaio first became a national figure during his tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County -- an office whose powers he grossly abused in order to illegally target minority populations. He was able to spin his own flamboyant lawlessness and racism into an image of “toughness” thanks to an accomplice right-wing media apparatus that celebrated his degrading and criminal mistreatment of immigrants and Latinos.
Arpaio was a constant presence on Fox News for years and he was frequently celebrated on the network with his preferred moniker of “America’s toughest sheriff.” Back in July 2000, Arpaio swung by Hannity & Colmes to defend his new policy of installing publicly accessible webcams in his jail. Hannity loved the idea and introduced Arpaio as “my favorite sheriff,” telling him: “No bigger fan than me right here.” (Arpaio’s webcams showed female inmates using the bathroom and were found to be degrading by a federal court.)
Whenever Arpaio came up with a new gimmick -- forcing inmates to listen to patriotic songs, installing a hotline so county residents could report suspected undocumented immigrants, having the public vote online on inmates’ mugshots -- you could expect to see him on Fox posturing as an immigration tough guy who was happy to incarcerate as many immigrants as space would allow. When the Obama administration launched its investigation into Arpaio’s racial profiling and mistreatment of prisoners, Fox heralded him as a victim of federal persecution. “There is another case of bullying -- this time, the government bullying the police, or, in this case, the sheriff,” Glenn Beck told his viewers in June 2009.
When Arpaio glommed onto the racist conspiracy theorizing about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and formed a “Cold Case Posse” to investigate, it did nothing to diminish his credibility or popularity at the network -- the “results” of his inquiry were featured on Fox News’ flagship “straight news” program, Special Report, as were Arpaio’s ensuing gripes that his ludicrous investigation wasn’t being taken seriously by the press.
In 2016, as Arpaio’s scandals multiplied and his political standing eroded, he was still enjoying softball interviews on Fox, where he’d advocate for then-candidate Trump’s immigration policies. Arpaio appeared on the May 30, 2016, edition of Hannity -- just two weeks after a federal judge found that Arpaio had “engaged in multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty, and bad faith with respect to the plaintiff class (Latinos) and the protection of its rights” -- where he was introduced by Hannity as “Mr. Pink Underwear himself, Joe Arpaio, our favorite sheriff.”
Even Arpaio’s pardon by Trump flowed through Fox News; a Fox legal analyst discussed the idea with Trump and then reported that the president was “seriously considering” issuing a pardon. When the pardon came down, the network celebrated and defended the action. And after Arpaio declared his intention to run for the Senate, Fox treated him to still more soft-coverage publicity.
While Arpaio himself looks to be through as a political figure, the legacy he crafted will endure. He forged the template for low-rent authoritarian public officials who use conservative media as a path to national stardom (this strategy was emulated by former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a Fox regular who promoted his brand on TV while inmates died in his jail). The popularity among conservatives that Arpaio built up through his years of punditry helped to spare him from accountability for the manifold crimes and abuses he committed while in office.
Joe Arpaio figured out how to break the law, violate the public trust, abuse minorities, spout off racist conspiracy theories, and get off scot-free while also enjoying venerated status as a martyr and quasi-folk hero. All he had to do was go on Fox News.
UPDATE (8/31 12:20 p.m.): Corey Stewart and Daniel Crenshaw are no longer listed as administrators and moderators of the Facebook group “Tea Party.” Stewart is a neo-Confederate who is running to represent Virginia in the Senate. Crenshaw is running to represent Texas’ 2nd Congressional District.
All five of the Republican candidates who were listed as administrators and moderators of the group at the time of publication have left the Facebook group. Rep. Jim Renacci and Rep. Ron DeSantis left the group prior to publication of this post.
UPDATE (8/31 9:12 a.m.): Danny Tarkanian, who is running to represent Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District in the House of Representatives, and his wife Amy Tarkanian are no longer listed as administrators and moderators of the Facebook group “Tea Party.” Matt Rosendale, who is running to represent Montana in the Senate, is also no longer listed as an administrator and moderator of the group.
UPDATE (8/30 5:10 p.m.): Patrick Morrisey, who is running to represent West Virginia in the Senate, is no longer listed as an administrator and moderator of the Facebook group “Tea Party.” And in July, Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH), who was named as the Republican nominee for a Senate seat representing his state in May, was listed as an administrator of the group.
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) recently came under harshscrutiny for his involvement in the same Facebook group, where he was listed as an administrator until August 29. A former employee of the anti-Muslim ACT for America was brought on as an administrator to campaign for DeSantis in the group about a week ago.
Administrators and moderators of the group have been campaigning for all six candidates since as early as September 2017. The candidates are:
Daniel Crenshaw, running to represent Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives;
Danny Tarkanian, running to represent Nevada in the House;
Corey Stewart, running to represent Virginia in the Senate;
Matt Rosendale, running to represent Montana in the Senate;
Patrick Morrisey, running to represent West Virginia in the Senate.
Daniel Crenshaw has been a member of the Tea Party group since May 2018. He has shared Facebookvideos from his congressional campaign page twice, with the most recent share coming on August 13. A fewotheradministratorshave promoted Crenshaw’s candidacy and shared his Senate campaign’s Facebook page. Some of these posts identified Crenshaw as an administrator for the group.
Danny Tarkanian and his wife, Amy Tarkanian (a former chair of the Nevada Republican Party), are both listed as administrators of the group. Administrators of the group have been promoting Danny Tarkanian since2017, when he was running for Dean Heller’s Senate seat in Nevada (he later withdrew). Administrators have alsopromotedTarkanian’s2018run for the House. Although Danny has not posted in the group, Amy Tarkanian promoted his Senate campaign in thegroupmultipletimes in 2017. In 2018, she also shared a post attacking Oprah for her weight and family life.
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