Advertising

FEC moves toward potentially regulating AI deepfakes in campaign ads
AP
“The FEC’s unanimous procedural vote on Thursday advances a petition asking it to regulate ads that use artificial intelligence to misrepresent political opponents as saying or doing something they didn’t — a stark issue that is already being highlighted in the current 2024 GOP presidential primary.”

Campaigns

Revealed: The criteria for the second Republican primary debate
Politico
“Additionally, the committee has raised the benchmark for the number of donors each candidate must have in order to get on the stage for the second debate. Candidates must have a total of at least 50,000 unique donors, with at least 200 unique donors from at least 20 states or territories. The threshold must be reached no later than 48 hours before the debate.”

The 2024 Race Is Built on Pumping Small Donors, and Trump Is Dominating
The Messenger
“The former president has poured almost one-fifth of his $13.4 million campaign spending into maintaining that lead among small donors, outspending all other candidates, according to a review of the latest FEC filings.”

Transparency in Digital Campaign Spending
Wall Street Journal
“In ‘The High Cost of Losing Elections’, Andy Kessler claims there is little transparency to digital spending in political campaigns. On the contrary, with many campaigns raising the majority of funds from online grassroots donations, spending for digital fundraising is one of the most scrutinized line items for any campaign.

Content

“Pink slime” news sites turn to print ahead of Ohio referendum
Nieman Lab
“On some occasions, Metric Media turns to print. Ahead of a Tuesday ballot initiative that could lead to abortion rights being blocked in the state, Ohio voters have received print copies of the Buckeye Reporter. It has a Chicago return address, was postmarked from Dallas, and includes a publisher’s note that reads, in part, ‘We’ve been publishing the Buckeye Reporter online for three years. This is our inaugural print edition.’”

Data

Biden's new data trove boosts Dems for 2024
Axios
“The database, run by an independent firm called Democratic Data Exchange (DDx), allows Democrats and allied groups — campaigns, state parties, super PACs and hundreds more — to bridge a longtime inability to share information.”

Fundraising

‘Whistling past the graveyard’: Dem fear grows over massive grassroots fundraising hit
Politico
“That’s among the findings of an analysis of fundraising for the first half of the year through ActBlue, the party’s primary donation processor. Small-dollar giving at the federal level totaled $312 million in the first half of 2023 — a drop-off of more than $30 million compared to this point in the 2020 cycle. The platform also had 32 percent fewer donors in the second quarter this year compared to four years prior, although its total fundraising increased slightly due to several factors, including more recurring donors and greater giving to non-federal groups.”

Have We Finally Hit "Peak Email"?
The Connector
“Well, maybe we’ve just hit Peak Email, as the number of new people who are susceptible to pleas for their donations stops replacing the number of people who have decided to tune out.”

International

Switzerland Resumes i-Voting Trials Ahead of Federal Election
Democracy Technologies
“Statistics show that in the three cantons where e-voting was available in May and June, participation rates among Swiss citizens living abroad were between one and four percent higher than the national average. And when i-voting was last discontinued in 2019, the canton of Geneva reported a decline of nine percent in voting from abroad.”

Social Media

What Meta’s New Studies Do—and Don’t—Reveal About Social Media and Polarization
Wired
“Two of these studies asked: Are we trapped in filter bubbles, and are they tearing us apart? The results suggest that filter bubbles are at least somewhat real, but countering them algorithmically doesn’t seem to bring us any closer together.”

Technology

For Democratic Platforms
Networked Leviathan
“The insights from the research in political science and allied disciplines leads inexorably to the conclusion that governments and companies should collaborate to build democratic institutions for platform governance.”