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      in US Politics

      The Constitution of Knowledge review: defending truth from Trump

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      Jonathan Rauch is among America’s more thoughtful and rigorously honest public intellectuals. In his new book, he addresses the rise of disinformation and its pernicious effects on democratic culture.Through an analogy to the US constitution, he posits that the “values and rules and institutions” of “liberal science” effectively serve as “a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.”What he calls the “reality based community [is] the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms … objectivity, factuality, rationality: they live not just within individuals’ minds and practices but on the network”. This community includes not only the hard sciences but also such fields as scholarship, journalism, government and law, in a “marketplace of persuasion” driven by pursuit of truth under clear standards of objectivity.Rauch puts the Trump era at the heart of the challenge, as Trump felt no “accountability to truth”, telling reporter Lesley Stahl that he did so to “demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you”.To Rauch, “Trump and his media echo chambers [lied] because their goal was to denude the public’s capacity to make any distinctions.” Thus “every truth was met not just with denial but with inversion … to convey … that the leader was the supreme authority”.The result is a crisis of democracy. As Senator Ben Sasse warned, “A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” What emerges, in Rauch’s term, as “epistemic tribalism” effectively denies “the concept of objective knowledge [which] is inherently social”.There is much here and the diagnosis is superb, with clear explanations of how and why disinformation spreads. Rauch finds glimmers of hope and positive change, as digital media act “more like publishers … crafting epistemic standards and norms”. Solutions, though, involve self-regulation rather than government action. Rauch cites Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in noting “that the battle against misinformation and abusive online behavior would be won more by product design than by policy design”.True, yet Rauch admits there are “no comprehensive solutions to the disinformation threat”, instead hoping for reactions that will promote “something like a stronger immune system … less vulnerable”.Rauch is a “radical incrementalist”. Hearty praise for John Stuart Mill makes clear that he seeks solutions principally from within classical liberalism, which the analogy to a social network reinforces: individuals working as a community, not a collective. Thus he shies from using government to enforce adherence to the Constitution of Knowledge.“Cause for alarm, yes,” Rauch writes. “Cause for fatalism – no.”Surely there is a third perspective. Referring to a director of the National Institutes of Health known for rigorous science and deep faith, Rauch states that “a person who applied the Constitution of Knowledge to every daily situation would be Sherlock Holmes or Mr Spock: an otherworldly fictional character. In fact, when I compare Francis Collins’s worldview with my own, I think mine is the more impoverished. He has access to two epistemic realms; I, only one.”It shows Rauch’s generosity of spirit and intellectual integrity that he recognizes the validity and worth of other epistemic realms. They may, in fact, be a clue to solving the broader problem.Does the constitutional order contain sufficient self-correcting mechanism? Rauch’s response, in a forceful and heartfelt final chapter, is to renew engagement in defence of truth. This is right so far as it goes. Waving the white flag, or silence (as Mill, not Burke noted) enables and ensures defeat in the face of attacks on the concept of truth. It’s good that “Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online”, but that only works with a presumed universal acceptance of truth, a challenge in an era where a 2018 MIT study found falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truths.One may heartily agree with Solzhenitsyn (whom Rauch quotes) that “one word of truth outweighs the world” and yet note with horror (as Rauch does) that a few powerful algorithms can overwhelm it in the heat of a tech-amplified campaign.Does individual action mean fervent defence in response to every inaccurate social media post? How to judge? (The individual rational response is generally to ignore the false post, hence the collective action issue.) And would that defence guarantee success when disinformation has destroyed trust in institutions and in the concept of truth itself?Rauch’s optimism is infectious but it may fall short. The reality-based community seems no longer to have a hold on the common mind, weakening its power in the face of organized and mechanical opposition.Shorn of an appeal to what Lincoln termed the “mystic chords of memory” – itself not subject to empirical verification – how does the reality-based community avoid consignment to the margins? If a pandemic hasn’t convinced many people of the truth of science, what will?Calling for “more truth” may not be enough when people don’t want to know the truth or cannot tell what it is. If “Trump was waging warfare against the American body politic”, why should that body not respond collectively? Lincoln’s appeal – a strong use of political savvy and rhetoric to call his hearers to something beyond ourselves – can help.That is Rauch’s challenge – and ours. One may agree with him about the progress of science and support its extension to fields of social and political science. But the very urgency of the situation demands wise prediction on whether that will be sufficient. Rauch states his case as well as possible, but repairing the breaches in the body politic may require more than he is willing to endorse.Rauch begins with Socrates (“the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher”) and describes continued debate towards truth in Socrates’ words: “Let us meet here again.”Indeed, and with Rauch, we will. In the meanwhile, less Mill, more Lincoln. More

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      in US Politics

      A leaked S&M video won’t keep Zack Weiner out of politics – and nor should it | Arwa Mahdawi

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      You have to be something of a masochist to want to get into politics – and Zack Weiner is an unapologetic masochist. Last week, the 26-year-old, who is running for a place on the city council in New York, was something of a nonentity: he had zero name recognition and his campaign had raised just over $10,000 (£7,200), most of which he had donated himself.Perhaps the most notable thing about Weiner was the fact his dad is the co-creator of the kids’ TV show Dora the Explorer. But that changed when a video of a man engaged in consensual sadomasochism was posted on Twitter by an anonymous account that claimed the man was Weiner. On Saturday, the New York Post ran a story about the video, complete with salacious screengrab. Pretty soon it made international headlines.Why would anyone care about the sex life of an unknown twentysomething running for local office? Well, because a lot of people are pervs, for one thing. But the main reason the story has become so popular is because of how Weiner responded. Instead of going on the defensive, he owned it. His own campaign manager was the one who tipped off the New York Post about the video and Weiner told the paper that he is a “proud BDSMer”, who has nothing to be ashamed of.“Whoops. I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are,” Weiner later wrote on Twitter. “Like many young people, I have grown into a world where some of our most private moments have been documented online. While a few loud voices on Twitter might chastise me for the video, most people see the video for what it is: a distraction.”Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show BillionsThe frank and dignified way in which Weiner handled this episode has, quite rightly, earned him a lot of praise. It is, in many ways, a masterclass in how to respond to revenge porn.There was some speculation that the video was a publicity stunt. Releasing a sex tape of yourself in order to kickstart a political career might once have been unthinkable, but in today’s attention economy it is all too plausible. Donald Trump taught the world that any idiot can get into politics as long as you find a way to keep your name in the headlines.Then there’s the fact that Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show Billions. “I’m a masochist,” the character Chuck Rhoades announces in a press conference after a political rival threatens to leak pictures of him enjoying sadomasochistic sex in an attempt to derail his campaign for state attorney general for New York. Rhoades’s speech is a huge success: he goes on to win the election.So is it possible that Weiner’s campaign, inspired by Billions, might have leaked the video itself? Absolutely not, Joseph Gallagher, Weiner’s campaign manager, told me. He added, for good measure, that neither he nor Weiner, who is also an actor and screenwriter, had ever watched the TV show. The reason he flagged the video to the Post, he clarified, was in order to control the narrative and get ahead of the story. Which makes sense.Ultimately, what’s important is the fact that, as Weiner pointed out, a generation of young people who have documented every part of their lives are starting to enter politics. Revenge porn, which has already helped derail the political career of the former congresswoman Katie Hill, is going to become a common political weapon. And I suspect female politicians will have a far harder time surviving the weaponisation of their personal lives than men. More

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      in Elections

      Iran Activists Urge Election Boycott. Raisi Likely Winner.

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      In a soft pleading voice, the white-haired woman in the video implores, “For the sake of my son, Pouya Bakhtiari, don’t vote.” She holds the young man’s photo, and continues, “Because of the bullet they shot at his head and shattered his dreams, don’t vote.” In a second video, another mother, sitting next to a gravestone, echoed the same message: “At 30, my son lies under a huge pile of dirt.” A third woman described her 18-year-old son as full of hope, until Nov. 17, 2019, when a bullet pierced his heart.“Voting means betrayal,” she added.Videos like these, circulating on Iranian activists’ social media accounts with the hashtag that in Persian means #notovoting, have been appearing in increasing numbers in the weeks and months leading up to Iran’s presidential election on Friday. Some of the videos have been made by parents who say their children were shot dead during antigovernment protests over the last few years. Others are by the parents of political prisoners who were executed by the regime in the 1980s, as well as by the families of those who died in the Ukrainian passenger plane that crashed last year shortly after takeoff from Tehran. (Iran’s military said it mistakenly shot down the plane).What’s remarkable about the videos is their audacity: that Iranians are speaking up, seemingly without fear, about boycotting an election in an authoritarian country whose leaders rarely tolerate open displays of dissent. Iranians have had enough. And besides, what’s the point of voting when the result is predetermined?The call for an election boycott seems to be resonating: a recent poll by the state-run Iranian Student Polling Agency predicts that turnout will be as low as 40 percent — the lowest since the 1979 revolution.A low turnout in Friday’s election would certainly signal a rejection of the Islamic regime. But not voting will also give the regime exactly what it wants: a near-certain assurance that its handpicked candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric who is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, will win.Of course, the regime has done its part as well for Mr. Raisi. Last month, the Guardian Council, the body that vets election candidates, rejected all the potential candidates except for Mr. Raisi and six relatively unknown figures.Even insiders to the regime were reportedly stunned that the council had gone so far as to bar a current vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, and a former speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani.To be sure, the Guardian Council has rejected other presidential hopefuls over the past four decades. But this time it’s especially significant because the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 82, which raises the issue of succession. Hard-liners within the Revolutionary Guards are grooming Mr. Raisi to take his place, making his election into office even more important. The ayatollah’s support for Mr. Raisi is no secret. After Mr. Raisi failed a bid for the presidency in 2017, Ayatollah Khamenei made him head of the judiciary two years later.The tightly controlled process has led many Iranians to question the entire exercise. And institutions such as the Guardian Council, which is controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei, have stymied any democratic change and crippled the efforts of presidents who have tried to introduce political and social freedoms. (Two presidential candidates during the 2009 race, Mehdi Karroubi and the former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who campaigned on a platform of delivering democratic reforms, remain under house arrest. The regime at the time suppressed massive protests in the aftermath of what was seen as a widely disputed election.)The campaign to boycott the election highlights the rising levels of both anger and apathy toward the regime, at a time when the economy has been suffering under the weight of U.S. sanctions, as well as mismanagement and corruption by Iranian officials. The government also badly botched the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving more than 82,000dead so far. In addition, the regime has brutally cracked down on protests that have erupted since 2009, mostly over worsening economic conditions.Those boycotting the vote include a wide group of people inside and outside Iran, including many who formerly used to be sympathetic to the regime, such as the former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Mousavi and Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Last month, over 230 prominent activists signed an open letter calling for an election boycott and stated that their goal is to bring “nonviolent transition from the Islamic Republic to the rule of the people.”Unsurprisingly, Ayatollah Khamenei has branded those pushing for a boycott as enemies and has urged Iranians to go to the polls. Here lies the regime’s dilemma: Iran’s leadership wants just enough turnout to legitimize Mr. Raisi’s victory, but not so much that the result might demonstrate how unpopular he really is.During his campaign trips in recent weeks, Mr. Raisi has sought to cast himself as a man of the people and has promised to fight corruption. He talked to people who approached him about pending court cases, depicting himself as an accessible man. But his past as head of the judiciary is testament to what may lie ahead under his rule. Young activists were tried behind closed doors and executed. As a young cleric, he signed off on the executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.Boycotting the elections, for a population that is deeply scarred, is understandable. But sadly, a boycott this time may cement the hard-liners’ grip on power for many years to come.Nazila Fathi is the author of “The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran.” She is a fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. She lives in Maryland.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

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      A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020, earning a permanent ban from Facebook.“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws. APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.” Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.The intention here is clearly to mislead usersHoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.Facebook did not take any enforcement action against Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action or Kirk with regard to the Phoenix operation. Facebook also did not disclose Rally Forge’s connection to America Progress Now and the deceptive Green Party ads.A forestalled investigationIn September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”, writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Anthony Weiner’s Not Coming Back. But He Has Nowhere to Go.

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      The man who was almost New York’s mayor talks about the current campaign, selling tweets and why he feels bad for the media.Anthony Weiner doesn’t pay the kind of attention to New York politics that he did back when he was running for mayor, twice, before the exchange of messages with a 15-year-old that sent him to federal prison.He was good on the campaign trail, though. He was the one Mike Bloomberg worried about and spent millions trying to deny the nomination in 2009. Mr. Weiner was a kind of test subject, too, for the sort of media and social media storms that destroyed his 2013 mayoral campaign, and are now just how politics is.So I was curious what he thought of the current campaign, which is entering its final weeks. It is, as always, a brutally revealing moment for the candidates, for the media, for the psyche of the city. I persuaded Mr. Weiner to watch last Wednesday’s debate after his twice-weekly hockey game. By the time we met last Thursday at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square, he had the energy of a star on the bench who knows what he’d do if he were back out there.First, he said that if he were onstage, he’d break with the escalating sense of panic about New York’s future that has consumed the campaign.“All right, let’s dial down the apocalypse. Let’s relax, everybody,” he’d say. “It’s going to be all right if we make some smart decisions.”And then he’d throw some punches. He said he was “surprised at how relatively undisciplined the candidates were.” He watched Eric Adams meander through an attack on Andrew Yang and thought about what candidate Weiner would have said: “Are you from Philadelphia?”He has also been surprised about how little heat the former aides to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, have taken. “How come no one says, ‘Anyone who worked for that administration should have to shower for four years to clean this thing off.’”He was also puzzled by how an unverified allegation against Scott Stringer derailed his campaign, and about the way the claim seemed to break out ahead of any attempt to verify it.“This is not a thing I’m in any position to be commenting on,” Mr. Weiner said. But “that doesn’t feel right.” (He was speaking before Katie Glueck, of The New York Times, reported a second allegation on Friday.)But Anthony Weiner, now 56, isn’t in politics any more. The barista at the third-floor cafe didn’t even recognize him. “I’d be really good as a campaign manager,” he said, but of course no politician would be caught dead even speaking to him. He said he had given some informal advice to mayoral campaigns, though, “I don’t talk about which ones, because it would hurt them.” They won’t even take his money.Ten years ago Mr. Weiner was a new kind of public figure, a congressman who had become a national star in the hyperpartisan terrain of cable news, and who used social media fluently for authentic, direct connections with supporters and the media. My former colleague at BuzzFeed News Matt Berman called him the most important politician of the 2010s, a man who “helped create social media politics, fully embraced it, and was quickly swallowed by it.”Then Mr. Weiner became a character out of a Philip Roth novel. His scandals all played out through digital media, driven by an inexplicable compulsion to exchange sexts with women who liked him for his politics.He resigned from Congress in 2011 after conservative media, led by Andrew Breitbart, caught him at it. He was leading in the polls in 2013 when I brought him the news that a young woman in Indiana, Sydney Leathers, was sharing their explicit photos and messages, and his campaign fell apart as she literally pursued him around Manhattan, all under the watchful eye of a documentary crew.Sydney Leathers, who was involved in a sexting scandal with Mr. Weiner, turned up at his election night party on primary day, Sept. 10, 2013.Michael Appleton for The New York TimesHe says that, even at the time, he knew in the back of his head that the 2013 campaign was doomed. “I was famous for being famous, and I was a candidate because I had been a candidate, and I had all this money from past campaigns,” he said. But, he said, he had “too many struggles, too much self-loathing.”Lately, the news that Mr. Weiner said he has been following “with some interest” is the story of Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is currently trying to brazen out allegations that he paid young women, possibly including an underage girl, for sex. Mr. Weiner said that people tell him all the time that, in 2011 and again in 2013, “you never should have quit.”But the sort of media and social media storm he was in the middle of felt new then. “We didn’t know what we were working with at the time, and I was lying to everyone around me,” he said.And after he left public life in 2013, he slipped from compulsion into crime, and the saga broadened from damage to his own life to the nation’s. In January 2016, he began exchanging explicit messages with a 15-year-old girl. After the texts were reported in September 2016, prosecutors seized his laptop computer. And then, 11 days before the presidential election, the F.B.I. director, James Comey, wrote a letter to Congress saying that new emails discovered on Mr. Weiner’s computer had prompted him to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.Weeks later, as Democrats tried to understand how Donald J. Trump had been elected president, Mr. Weiner came in for some of the blame. He was the butterfly who flapped his, er, wings and led to the election of Mr. Trump. Mr. Weiner said he believes, in retrospect, that there were larger forces at play in that campaign and that if it hadn’t been the emails, Mr. Trump’s supporters would have seized on something else. And indeed, Trump-like figures have been elected all over the world. It wasn’t just Mr. Weiner.But his own skepticism that he was the fatal butterfly “is complicated by the fact that that’s what Hillary thinks,” he said. (“I wouldn’t call it a net positive,” a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, told me.)His life hit bottom in 2017, when he was sentenced to 21 months in prison for transferring obscene material to a minor. He served 15 months in a federal prison in Massachusetts, and three more in a Bronx halfway house. His compulsion destroyed his career and his marriage to Huma Abedin, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton. And it has left him nearly unemployable, and officially labeled a sex offender.Mr. Weiner has spent most of the last year running a Brooklyn company called IceStone, which makes environmentally sustainable countertops. He put in place a policy of offering job interviews to formerly incarcerated people. He’s now in the process of stepping down as chief executive, he said, to try to turn the company into a “worker-run cooperative.” He and Ms. Abedin, who still works for Mrs. Clinton, are finalizing their divorce, but they live down the hall from each other in the same apartment building. Mr. Weiner is in a 12-step program for sex addiction, and one of its conditions is that he not talk about it. His life, he said, largely revolves around their 9-year-old son..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Sometimes people tell him he should try to “change the narrative” about himself. But there’s no point. There’s no route back to public life for him. “‘The narrative’ implies you’re telling a story,” he said. “To what end?” The exception, he said, is that his agent has shopped a book about sex addiction, which he said he hoped could help other people in his position.Mr. Weiner’s notoriety, and his sex offender status, will make it pretty hard for him to find another job. “It’s very narrow — the places that I can work without having The New York Post just make everyone’s life miserable,” he said.Mr. Weiner enters the federal court in New York for his sentencing hearing in September 2017.Andres Kudacki/Associated PressBut he said he has also been wondering whether he can parlay his notoriety into something new. People sometimes yell at him from passing cars (and on Twitter), “Where’s your laptop?!” The device, which is in his closet, was ultimately not found to contain anything incriminating about Mrs. Clinton. But it retains a certain infamy.“I’m wondering if I should call up the MyPillow guy and offer to sell him the laptop,” he mused, referring to Mike Lindell, the bedding entrepreneur and Trump loyalist who has promoted wild theories about the Clintons.He is thinking more seriously — really seriously — about the 2021 version of that transaction: getting into the booming business of digital collectibles, known as nonfungible tokens or NFTs, and starting with some of his own holdings.“If you do believe in this butterfly effect, I’ve got the butterfly’s wings and its antennas,” he said. He could make an NFT, he said, of the errant tweet that began his long spiral in 2011. He could make an NFT of the search warrant for his laptop, or of the email his old friend, the comedian Jon Stewart, wrote to apologize for making fun of his troubles, or of the check that Mr. Trump wrote to one of his earlier campaigns.“Cashing in would be nice,” he said. But he also wonders if he could make a career of it — “to sell my own stuff but also to create a new category that lets people buy and sell political collectibles as a form of political fund-raising and contributing.”(I was a little incredulous, but bounced the idea off a few cryptocurrency enthusiasts at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami this weekend. They liked the idea.)And why not? It’s not really clear what else Anthony Weiner can do. We don’t live in a moment with much room for redemption — even if, like Mr. Weiner, you’ve served hard time for your sins. It’s hard to know what society wants from someone like him.I played my own small part in Mr. Weiner’s demise. After calling to tell him we’d identified Sydney Leathers, I edited the story that named her and helped end his mayoral campaign. Three weeks later, I interviewed Mr. Weiner onstage at a raucous bar in Chelsea. I asked him mischievously why he hadn’t used Snapchat for his sexting, so the messages would have disappeared. He winced; the audience laughed. In retrospect, I wince a little, too. The guy was obviously suffering, as the judge would later say at his sentencing, from “a very strong compulsion.” I asked him what he made of the lack of empathy he found in journalists like me when his life fell apart.“Journalists, even in their best moments, are what their readers are and what their readers want. Any momentary thing — there’s got to be a lot of pressure on you to be writing it,” he said.“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Mr. Weiner said, invoking the Yiddish word that can mean empathy or pity. “I have rachmones for you guys.” More

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      Facebook to suspend Trump’s account for two years

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      Facebook is suspending Donald Trump’s account for two years, the company has announced in a highly anticipated decision that follows months of debate over the former president’s future on social media.“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, said in a statement on Friday.At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s account. “We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” Clegg wrote. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”He added that once the suspension was lifted, “a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions” would be triggered if Trump violated Facebook policies.Friday’s decision comes just weeks after input from the Facebook oversight board – an independent advisory committee of academics, media figures and former politicians – who recommended in early May that Trump’s account not be reinstated.However the oversight board punted the ultimate decision on Trump’s fate back to Facebook itself, giving the company six months to make the final call. The board said that Facebook’s “indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension” for Trump was “not appropriate”, criticism that Clegg wrote the company “absolutely accept[s]”.The new policy allows for escalating penalties of suspensions for one month, six months, one year, and two years.The former president has been suspended since January, following the deadly Capitol attack that saw a mob of Trump supporters storm Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The company suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts over posts in which he appeared to praise the actions of the rioters, saying that his actions posed too great a risk to remain on the platform.Following the Capitol riot, Trump was suspended from several major tech platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat. Twitter has since made its ban permanent.The former president called Facebook’s decision “an insult to the record-setting 75m people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” in a statement. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win.” Trump received fewer than 75m votes in the 2020 election, which he lost. He also hinted at a 2024 run.Facebook also announced that it would revoke its policy of treating speech by politicians as inherently newsworthy and exempt from enforcement of its content rules that ban, among other things, hate speech. The decision marks a major reversal of a set of policies that Clegg and Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, once championed as crucial to democracy and free speech.The company first created the newsworthiness exemption to its content rules in 2016, following international outcry over its decision to censor posts including the historic “napalm girl” photograph for violating its ban on nude images of children. The new rule tacitly acknowledged the importance of editorial judgment in Facebook’s censorship decisions.In 2019, at a speech at the Atlantic festival in Washington, Clegg revealed that Facebook had decided to treat all speech by politicians as newsworthy, exempting it from content rules. “Would it be acceptable to society at large to have a private company in effect become a self-appointed referee for everything that politicians say? I don’t believe it would be,” Clegg said at the time.Under the new rules, Clegg wrote Friday, “when we assess content for newsworthiness, we will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else”.The newsworthiness exemption is by no means the only policy area in which Facebook treats politicians differently from other users. The company also exempts politicians’ speech from its third-party fact-checking and maintains a list of high-profile accounts that are exempted from the AI systems that Facebook relies on for enforcement of many of its rules.Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about whether those policies remain in effect. More

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      An ‘Army of 16-Year-Olds’ Takes On the Democrats

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      Young progressives are an unpredictable new factor in Massachusetts elections. They’re ardent, and organized, and they don’t take orders.BOSTON — Dana Depelteau, a hotel manager, had just gone public with a long-shot candidacy for mayor in Boston when he noticed that someone in city politics was going after him online.The effect of this attack, he said, was lightning-fast and pervasive. The morning after he announced his candidacy on Twitter, he showed up at his local barbershop and, while staring at himself in the mirror, overheard a customer describing his views as white supremacist.“I’m thinking, ‘Man, politics is dirty,’” recalled Mr. Depelteau. He rushed home to fire back at his critic, a sharp-edged progressive who had dug up some of Mr. Depelteau’s old social media posts and was recirculating them online. But that, he discovered, was a big mistake.“I didn’t know how old she was,” he explained. “I just knew she was a prominent person.”That is how he became aware of Calla Walsh, a leader in the group of activists known here as the Markeyverse. Ms. Walsh, a 16-year-old high school junior, has many of the attributes of Generation Z: She likes to refer to people (like the president) as “bestie.” She occasionally gets called away from political events to babysit her little brother. She is slightly in the doghouse, parent-wise, for getting a C+ in precalculus.She is also representative of an influential new force in Democratic politics, activists who cut their teeth on the presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.The full strength of these activists — many of whom are not old enough to vote — did not become clear until last fall, when they were key to one of the year’s most surprising upsets, helping Senator Edward J. Markey defeat a primary challenge from Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, who had been heavily favored to win.In conversation, Ms. Walsh tends to downplay her movement, describing them as “Markey teens” and “theater kids” who “formerly ran, like, Taylor Swift or K-pop stan accounts.”Canvassers for Ms. Wu in May. One test of the young progressives’ clout will come in the upcoming Boston mayoral race.Philip Keith for The New York TimesYoung progressive people are an unpredictable new factor in Massachusetts elections.Philip Keith for The New York TimesBut the Markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of Senator Markey as a left-wing icon and Representative Kennedy as challenging him from the right. They carried out ambitious digital organizing, using social media to conjure up an in-person work force — “an army of 16-year-olds,” as one political veteran put it, who can “do anything on the internet.”They are viewed apprehensively by many in Massachusetts’ Democratic establishment, who say that they smear their opponents and are never held accountable; that they turn on their allies at the first whiff of a scandal; and that they are attacking Democrats in a coordinated effort to push the whole party to the left, much as the Tea Party did, on the right, to the Republicans.Ms. Walsh, for one, is cheerfully aware of all those critiques.In a podcast this spring, she recalled the day last summer when the Kennedy campaign singled her out in a statement, charging that negative campaigning online had created a vicious, dangerous atmosphere.“I won’t lie, I was terrified,” she said. But then, she said, the fear evaporated.“That’s when I realized I had a stake in this game: They are scared of me, a random teenager on the internet who just happened to be doing some organizing with her friends,” she said. “I think that made us all think, ‘Hey, they’re scared of us. We have power over them.’”The next roundAfter Mr. Markey beat Mr. Kennedy in the primary, Ms. Walsh taped a copy of his victory speech to the wall of her bedroom in Cambridge and turned her attention to down-ballot races.In his speech, Senator Markey had specifically thanked the Markeyverse for helping him beat Representative Kennedy. During a cycle in which campaigning moved almost entirely online, the young activists had done more than rebrand the candidate.They seemed to have affected long-established voting patterns: In Massachusetts, the turnout among registered voters between 18 to 24 had shot up to 20.9 percent in the 2020 primary from 6.7 percent in 2018, and 2.1 percent in 2016, according to Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.The race had left them with a heady sense of power. Tristan Niedzielski, 17, a high school senior from Marlborough, decided to skip Model U.N. this year and instead signed up to work on two campaigns, one for a seat in the state House of Representatives, and one for a regional school committee.He applied digital approaches he had picked up in the Markeyverse, using chat groups, direct messages and texts to convert friend networks into a volunteer work force. Both of his candidates lost, but narrowly, and he said he had learned something bigger: Outside of major cities, Massachusetts Democrats are not running sophisticated grass-roots campaigns.Tristan Niedzielski, 17, at rally in Boston on Saturday. Mr. Niedzielski, a high school senior from Marlborough, decided to skip Model U.N. this year and instead signed up to work on two campaigns.Philip Keith for The New York Times“It’s this lax culture of ‘Who do you know?,’” he said. “A lot of the state has never really seen any type of campaign political structure.”Some of what the young progressives have done can best be described as opposition research, targeting Democrats whom they consider too far right.In December, Ms. Walsh dug up off-color Twitter posts by Valentino Capobianco, a Kennedy supporter and candidate for a State House seat. (A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct emerged against Mr. Capobianco, who would not comment for this article. He lost the support of leading Democrats, and won 8 percent of the vote.)Then she went after Mr. Depelteau, 36, a self-described “centrist Democrat,” recirculating social media posts he had made criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. (Mr. Depelteau, who withdrew from the race in April, said it was not because of Ms. Walsh’s criticisms. He then left Twitter, which he called “toxic.”)She maintains a detailed spreadsheet on the declared candidates for mayor in Boston, monitoring donations from developers, police and energy companies. She runs trainings for young activists, entertaining her Twitter audience with juicy nuggets from campaign finance records, like a state representative who used campaign funds to expense AirPods.Her father, Chris Walsh, the director of Boston University’s college writing program, said her political enthusiasms have drifted over the last few years, from the existential cause of climate change to an exceedingly detailed focus on government and policy.Plus, he said, “Calla is also a 16-year-old. Like most, and maybe more than most, she’s not particularly communicative.”“Some of what I say is informed by looking at her Twitter,” he said.Senator Ed Markey during a news conference held to reintroduce the Green New Deal at the Capitol in April. Progressives embraced his candidacy, which focused heavily on his record on climate.Sarah Silbiger/Getty ImagesThe surge of grass-roots activism has come as a jolt in Massachusetts, which, because it is so firmly in the grip of one party, does not have a history of competitive primaries.“The old guard, the consulting class, hasn’t figured out a way of combating it,” said Jordan Meehan, 29, who turned to Ms. Walsh to organize digital outreach for a campaign last year, when he challenged a 34-year incumbent for a State House seat. He lost, but credits Ms. Walsh with devising a creative approach, reaching out individually to his social media followers and recruiting them for events and volunteer shifts.“It really does threaten the whole consultant-industrial complex,” he said.Numerous political strategists in Massachusetts refused to comment for this article. This is in part because, as one of them put it, “I don’t want to be bashing high schoolers on the record,” but equally, perhaps, because they are wary of becoming targets online.The Kennedy-Markey race left a bitter aftertaste for much of the state’s political class, who say the young activists overlooked much of Mr. Markey’s 44-year congressional record and unnecessarily vilified Mr. Kennedy.“Either Kennedy or Markey would have been good for the things they care most about,” said Matt Bennett, the co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank based in Washington, D.C. “The idea that Joe Kennedy wouldn’t have been good on climate change is ridiculous. The notion that he wasn’t pure enough is a thing we have to be careful about.”And he warned against overestimating the power of the Markeyverse, noting that since that primary, many challenges to moderate Democrats have fallen short. Even in Massachusetts, he noted, Joe Biden won the presidential primary, beating out Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren.“Everyone pays far too much attention to Twitter,” he said. “It’s a fun-house mirror. It’s not real. It’s why so many journalists fell into the Bernie-is-inevitable trap. This is not where Democratic voters are.”One test of the young activists’ clout will come in the upcoming Boston mayoral race, in which many former Markey volunteers have thrown their support behind Michelle Wu, a Warren ally who has proposed major changes to policy on climate, transportation and housing. City elections in Boston have, traditionally, been decided by middle-aged and elderly voters. But the surge of youth activism has thrown all those assumptions into the air.Michelle Wu, a mayoral candidate, gathered with teenage canvassers in Copley Square in Boston earlier this month.Philip Keith for The New York Times“It’s energy from the bottom up, it’s not some Watertown committee chair telling people how to vote,” said the political strategist Doug Rubin, who is advising the campaign of Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey. “Previously, all the insiders used to find out who was going to win, and then they would want to be with the winners.”He said he welcomed the change. If it makes consultants nervous, Mr. Rubin added, it’s meant to.“People who say, ‘I can’t control it, I don’t understand it,’ well, that’s the whole point — you can’t control it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If you’re good on the issues they care about, they’re going to be with you. If you’re not, they’re not.”Markeyverse vs. MarkeyThat became clear last week when the Markeyverse went on the offensive.Their target, this time, was Mr. Markey himself, who on Tuesday had put out a carefully worded Twitter thread on the mounting violence in Israel, apportioning some blame on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.This was a disappointment for many of the young progressives, who had been hoping for a sharp rebuke of Israel, like the ones that came from Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, or from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Though Mr. Markey’s voting record on foreign policy was no secret — he voted to authorize the occupation of Iraq in 2002, for example — it had faded into the background in their embrace of his candidacy, which focused heavily on his record on climate. Now, the group chats and Slack channels that comprise the Markeyverse were flooded with emotion, disappointment and betrayal.“It’s horrible to watch, and it’s disappointing,” said Emerson Toomey, 21, one of the authors of Ed’s Reply Guys, a Twitter account that helped establish Mr. Markey as a progressive star.Ms. Toomey, a senior at Northeastern University, was computing, with some bitterness, the “hundreds of thousands of hours” of unpaid labor she and her friends had provided to the senator. It made her question the compact she had assumed existed, that, in exchange for their support, he would accommodate their views on the issues that mattered.“Maybe he just said those things to us to get elected,” she said.Ms. Walsh, for her part, had shifted into full organizational mode, circulating a letter of protest that, she hoped, could induce Senator Markey to revisit his positions on the conflict.“He owes us much of his victory,” she said, “so we do have leverage over him.”Over the days that followed, Mr. Markey’s office was buffeted with calls from young volunteers. Twitter was brutal. John Walsh, who had been Mr. Markey’s campaign manager and is now his chief of staff, said he understood that they were disappointed and sounded regretful. (He is no relation to Calla.)Some of what the young progressives have done can best be described as opposition research, targeting Democrats whom they consider too far right.Philip Keith for The New York Times“I can tell you, Senator Markey loves these people,” he said of the young organizers. “He fought very hard for everything he told them he would fight for.”The Markeyverse, he said, now faced a key moment in their movement, determining whether they were willing to bend to preserve a relationship with an ally.“If compromising is not in your toolbox, that’s a hard thing,” he said. “Finding that balance is something, I think, anybody who stays at this for a long period of time figures out.”Late on Friday evening, Mr. Markey’s office offered a second statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This time, it called on Israel to seek an immediate cease-fire, and invoked “defenseless Palestinian families who are already living in fear for their lives and the lives of their children.” Mr. Walsh said the statement was a response to Israel’s plans to deploy ground troops.It could have been recorded as a win for the Markeyverse, a sign that the senator had to pay attention to their views. But Ms. Walsh wanted to push further, pointing to a list of four policy demands that volunteers had sent to the senator’s office. The moment had become about proving something different: that the young progressives care more about issues than alliances. She concluded that they had been somewhat naïve last year. “We were politically infatuated with Ed during the campaign, which caused us to have those blind spots,” she said. “Looking back, I think we should not have developed those blind spots.”She said that, in the future, she would probably never support another candidate whose views on the Middle East did not line up with hers. Then she ticked off a laundry list of legislation she would be happy to work on with Senator Markey, like climate change and universal health care.She sounded, for better or for worse, like an experienced political hand.“It was never about him as an individual,” she said. “We will always have this community, whether or not he is the figurehead. We have moved beyond this being about one candidate.” More

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      Facebook Ban Hits Trump Where It Hurts: Messaging and Money

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      Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, and few had tapped into its potential for advertising and fund-raising as aggressively as Mr. Trump’s.The decision by Facebook on Wednesday to keep former President Donald J. Trump off its platform could have significant consequences for his political operation as he tries to remain the leader of the Republican Party, thwarting his ability to amplify his message to tens of millions of followers and hampering his fund-raising ability.Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, with its ability to juice small-dollar online-fund-raising numbers into the millions, expand and acquire contact information, help build out data on a campaign’s voter file and provide the most sophisticated advertising platform available.Few campaigns had tapped into Facebook’s potential for advertising and fund-raising as aggressively as Mr. Trump’s. His successful 2016 campaign said its prolific use of Facebook had allowed it to send millions of different, hyper-targeted political ads to small slices of the population.“Facebook was the method,” Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager in 2020 and digital director in 2016, told “60 Minutes” in 2017. “It was the highway which his car drove on.”That continued in 2020, as his re-election operation devoted a nine-figure budget to Facebook advertising. And much like he did with his Twitter account, Mr. Trump often turned to Facebook’s advertising platform in times of political crisis.During Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial in September 2019, his campaign began flooding Facebook with ads criticizing the impeachment as a hoax and subversive effort by far-left Democrats.Though Mr. Trump is out of office and living at his resort in Florida, he retains broad influence over the Republican Party. But his platform for reaching Americans has diminished greatly without access to big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which has permanently suspended the former president. Some Trump aides think that the absence of Facebook, which was crucial to his success in 2016, will hinder him if he decides to run again in 2024, which he has told several advisers is his plan.Facebook’s ruling was delivered by an oversight board, which also said the company’s indefinite suspension was “not appropriate’’ and gave Facebook six months to come up with a final decision on whether Mr. Trump would regain access.His Facebook ads proved a useful tool to draw out big crowds to his signature rallies. Days before the president was scheduled to arrive in a given city, Facebook users around the region would begin seeing ads about the rally, with a link to sign up for a free ticket.The decision by Facebook does not immediately hamper Mr. Trump’s fund-raising ability — he still maintains control of a large number of supporter email addresses and phone numbers. But fund-raising lists must be continually refreshed, and Facebook has proved a crucial place for Mr. Trump to do so.“He has the best fund-raising list, but that decays over time if you’re not adding back into it,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist. “So because they don’t have the ability to run ads on Facebook, they’re losing out on petitions to grow their email list, surveys, things like that — the tactics that every campaign has to be doing 365 to really maintain their fund-raising.”Throughout 2020, the Trump campaign would run ads asking users to “take this SOCIALISM poll” or “Wish Melania a Happy Birthday,” which would help both with keeping lists current while occasionally expanding or adding new names to their lists, or getting a direct donation from the ad.In recent days, Mr. Trump’s operation has begun to more aggressively solicit supporters for cash via text message — including one reacting to the Facebook decision on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s team announced he would begin posting his thoughts on political developments to his own website, trying to brand it as “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But the power of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements on social media had been their ability to ricochet quickly across the web and into the streams of his supporters — something far harder to achieve while being deplatformed.But even without Facebook, some Republican strategists note that Mr. Trump still has one of the largest megaphones in the world, simply because of the public interest in his plans, which might lessen the impact of Facebook’s ban.“I compare it to somebody who has a sprained ankle,” said Tim Cameron, a Republican digital strategist. “It’s kind of hobbling for a little bit, and he’s not going to be at the strength that he would be with the ability to reach people on Facebook and other social platforms, but it’s certainly not something that’s going to stop him.”Even with the Facebook spigot turned off since January, Mr. Trump began the spring with more than $85 million in his various political committees, according to an adviser, after banking tens of millions of dollars that he raised after the election.But perhaps most immediately, the ban against running any political ads hampers one of Mr. Trump’s most current prized roles: Republican primary kingmaker.“He’s really committed to settling scores and making sure his allies get boosted,” Mr. Wilson said. “They won’t have access to Facebook to help the candidates he wants to support in the primaries in 2022.” More