More from The 2024 election
An interesting look at how Snap has diverted from other platforms in its handling of former President Trump:
Unlike other major tech platforms, Snap has not lifted the ban on Mr. Trump’s personal account, which has drawn angry pushback from his campaign. Despite not allowing Mr. Trump to post personally, the company has said it would sell his campaign political advertisements, which must all go through an internal fact-check.
[The New York Times]
A bandwidth-hungry tracking app is apparently kicking users with slow internet into a barely functional offline mode. Maybe rural broadband access matters after all:
The Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.
While campaigning for the US Senate in 2021, Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance filmed a Facebook Live using his smartphone’s selfie camera, which mirrored the image, and therefore his campaign signs.
That can be fixed, but Vance’s idea — rotating the phone — is not it. (I recommend waiting a moment to turn on the volume, unless you’re a fan of TikTok’s text-to-speech voices.)
Earlier this summer, SCOTUS ruled that Trump is “absolutely immune” for any official acts on January 6. In an October Non-Surprise, prosecutors are arguing that Trump is being charged for unofficial acts.
A partly-unsealed brief asserts, among other things, that Trump used his Twitter in a personal capacity while attempting to overturn the 2020 election, by tweeting and retweeting conspiracy theories and attacks on public officials. Although Trump sometimes tweeted about official White House business,
... he also regularly used the account to post on unambiguously private matters — for example, when he posted a picture of himself golfing with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, and re-tweeted a Trump Organization post about the Trump New York hotel being “named the # 1 ‘Best Hotel in the World!’”
[The New York Times]
It is not the Supreme Court test. The SCOTUS case the quote is from was overturned in 1969, when the court replaced the “clear and present danger” test with the Brandenburg test.
Perhaps most incredibly, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance followed up and uncritically repeated the “fire in a crowded theater” phrase.
Impressively, it took nearly 30 minutes to actually happen. Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) tried to respond to additional context moderator Margaret Brennan gave on Haitian immigrants’ legal status in Springfield, Ohio, accusing her of breaking the rules about fact-checking. “Thank you for describing the legal process,” Brennan told Vance before moving on after producers cut the candidates’ volume.
This profile goes from a donation by Jobs to Harris’ first DA run in 2003, through personal trips together, and into their joint interview in 2017 at AllThingsD.
It also reports on Jobs’ role in mobilizing donors against Joe Biden’s continued presidential campaign:
One of her top aides, David Simas, a former Obama staff member who oversees her political research, circulated focus-group and polling data to other donors that painted a dire portrait. Several said that Mr. Simas’s research was influential in encouraging them to mobilize against Mr. Biden.
[The New York Times]
No, an Autocomplete Interview isn’t going to answer all of our policy questions. But it does produce these 10 minutes of the presidential candidate answering the internet’s most searched queries in Wired’s now-standard format.
A joint statement from ODNI, FBI, and CISA follows up on last month’s reports about Iranian Election Influence Efforts, which Iran’s government has denied.
Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails. There is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.
NBC News reports the following statement from an unnamed Meta spokesperson:
After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.
The move follows warnings by the Biden administration that RT is part of Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 US election and a State Department notice last week saying, “[W]e now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”
