It’s just the beginning of the week, and already a major presidential candidate and his staunchest ally in Silicon Valley have shown they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the First Amendment works.
Yesterday, Donald Trump responded to a critical New York Times piece depicting the self-sabotage of his campaign:
It is not “freedom of the press” when newspapers and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016
Today, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel said in an op-ed in the Times that he was proud of the court battle he funded against Gawker, a privacy lawsuit that pushed the site into bankruptcy. Gawker, he said, published “thinly sourced, nasty articles that attacked and mocked people” to make money.
What seems to be beyond both Trump’s and Thiel’s grasp is that the First Amendment does not protect someone from protest or criticism. Of course, the whole point of protecting a free press is to ensure the right to protest and criticize publicly.
In the op-ed, Thiel said he had suffered at the hands of Gawker when a 2007 post on the site’s Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag “made choices for him” on how and when he came out to the public as a gay man. Thiel said journalists shouldn’t fear his campaign against Gawker, which included funding the Hulk Hogan sex tape privacy lawsuit that led to the site’s bankruptcy and several others. “It’s not for me to draw the line,” Thiel writes, “but journalists should condemn those who willfully cross it.” Yet drawing the line is exactly what Thiel has done, and he’s going to spend his fortune to make sure others don’t cross it, even if that means he financially destroys journalists and publications.
Ironically, even as Thiel sought to frame his issues with Gawker as concern over the broader question of privacy on the Internet, much of his fortune comes from investing in companies whose own practices raise serious privacy questions themselves. Thiel says Gawker was “willing to exploit the Internet without moral limits,” but gossip and tabloid journalism are hardly a new invention of online publishing. There’s nothing uniquely “Internet-like” about people’s desire to click on a headline to satisfy their curiosity. Meanwhile, Facebook—on whose board Thiel sits—is developing a new kind of monopoly over our personal data and preferences, turning astronomical profits in the process. Facebook’s power over users’ attention spans has itself means the company has powerful influence over the future of journalism, pushing publishers to create content that Facebook users will like and share. It’s not resource-strapped media companies that have the leverage here—as the Gawker bankruptcy shows, it’s media companies that are just struggling to survive.
Yes, several incidents have shown how malicious actors can use the Internet to violate people’s privacy in unacceptable ways: the nude celebrity photo scandal, the Sony and DNC hacks, vigilante doxxers online, to name a few. But that’s not what’s on the mind of the likes of Thiel and Trump.
Instead, Trump banned news organizations from BuzzFeed and Politico to The Des Moines Register and The Washington Post from covering his campaign events. On Twitter, he rarely mentions The New York Times without describing it as “failing.” Reporters who write stories that cast him in a critical light are “dishonest” and “disgusting.” And his antagonism has only grown as his poll numbers have dropped, leading him to blame the media as co-conspirators in what he calls a “rigged” election. In Trump’s world as in Thiel’s, it seems, a press that isn’t subservient to the powerful doesn’t deserve to be free.
You’ve had it with this election cycle. The name-calling. The baby-banishing. The multitudinous email scandals.
So you log onto Facebook and fire off a post pumping Hillary Clinton, defending Donald Trump, or, perhaps, reminding everyone that Jill Stein exists. With each accumulating Like, you feel like you’ve accomplished something, like you’ve awoken the masses from this great national nightmare, and like maybe, just maybe, you’ve even changed some minds.
Except you haven’t—at least, not according to new research from the social media marketing firm Rantic. It recently surveyed more than 10,000 people on Facebook, spread evenly across political affiliations. It found that 94 percent of Republicans, 92 percent of Democrats, and 85 percent of independents say they have never changed their view of an issue because of a Facebook post. The majority of people from all political affiliations also say social media is an inappropriate place to express political beliefs. That’s despite the fact that the survey showed 39 percent of Republicans, 34 percent of Democrats, and 26 percent of independents have posted political content on Facebook.
But while all those political posts might not pack the punch we all hope they would, they do have some unintended consequences. The majority of both Republicans and Democrats say they judge their friends based on what they write on social media about politics. What’s more, 12 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of Democrats, and 9 percent of independents who responded say they’ve unfriended someone because of those posts.
All that said, research is still out on how sharing stories from WIRED impacts friendships, and since other research shows that sharing this stuff makes you happy, by all means, keep doing that.
Rantic
Donald Trump yells into the crowd at the conclusion of a campaign rally in Hickory, North Carolina on March 14, 2016.Sean Rayford/Getty Images
And so it begins.
For the last year and some change, Donald Trump has been complaining that the presidential nominating process is rigged. Now that he’s secured the nomination, though, he’s moved on to a new target, claiming last week that the election itself will be rigged. “I’m afraid the election’s going to be rigged. I have to be honest,” he recently told a crowd in Ohio.
That may seem like just another dubious claim from a candidate who’s prone to dubious claims, except for the fact that, well, Trump’s base is buying it. According to a new poll of North Carolina voters by the firm Public Policy Polling, a whopping 69 percent of Trump voters think that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it will be because the election was rigged. Compare that with the just 16 percent who say it would be because she got more votes.
The poll surveyed 830 likely Trump voters in the state from August 5 to 7, mostly over the phone, but approximately 20 percent via an Internet panel, and has a margin of error of 3.4 percent. If these North Carolina voters are emblematic of the rest of the country, this could present a new and dangerous frontier for American electoral politics. The fact is, the reason our country can boast about its peaceful transfers of power is primarily because its citizens have long trusted that the will of the people decides who should get that power. At times, the influence of the people’s will has been called into question, as it was during the 2000 election when Vice President Al Gore lost, despite winning the popular vote.
But even after a painful Supreme Court case that ultimately decided the presidency, Gore tried to quell suspicions that the process was rigged. In his concession speech, he told the American people, “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.”
In planting the seed in voters’ minds that the election will be rigged, Trump does not seem poised to make a similar concession if he loses. And he very well may lose. Clinton is leading by a big margin in post-convention polls. She is even drawing more donations than Trump is among Republicans who initially supported Republican candidates Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich during the primaries.
Besides, even if Trump does try to bow out gracefully, this poll indicates he has encouraged a large faction of voters to believe not only that the Republican party is corrupt, but that elections themselves are a hoax. If that concept becomes mainstream, there’s no telling whether the United States could begin to experience the type of chaos that mars other countries’ elections.
That the election will be rigged isn’t the only conspiracy theory Trump’s supporters now subscribe to, according to the same poll. Last week, Trump said he saw a video of US officials loading $400 million off a plane in Iran, a video that does not actually exist. His campaign later clarified that Trump had seen no such video. And yet, the poll shows that 47 percent of his voters in North Carolina say they saw the video themselves. He also said last week that Clinton is the devil, a statement that 41 percent of polled Trump supporters agree with, while 17 percent say they are unsure.
This has been a busy season for fact-checkers, and not just because of Trump. But there’s a difference between fudging the facts and seeding mistrust in the fundamentals of American democracy, which could have lasting—and potentially calamitous—ramifications.
Happy 55th, Barack! A brother to me, a best friend forever. pic.twitter.com/uNsxouTKOO
— Vice President Biden (@VP) August 4, 2016
It’s President Obama’s birthday, y’all. And yes, the general election is in full-on crazy mode. And of course tomorrow is Friday, the new designated time for bad news to spill unceremoniously all over the news cycle like slop from the bedpan of the world’s sickbed. But for today, Obama’s BFF is here to wish him well. And cheer the rest of us up, too. (As of 3pm ET, his birthday greeting was already Biden’s most retweeted tweet ever.)
The Obama-Biden bromance, immortalized in a video from this year’s White House Correspondence dinner and another from Buzzfeed that first introduced the world to those friendship bracelets, is the antidote to the hysteria and vitriol of US politics. It’s Leslie Knope, but real. Or at least, as real as any carefully constructed political theater opportunistically taking advantage of a meme might be! And you know? We’ll take it.
Since Biden sent this birthday greeting over Twitter, we can only guess that Twitter’s No. 1 VIP, presidential candidate Donald Trump, will see it. And so will his running make, Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
Mike Pence drafting texts to Donald Trump, finally settles on “mr trump… why don’t we have what they have” https://t.co/kdlHF6lq9P
— Brian Barrett (@brbarrett) August 4, 2016
Give it time, Pence. Loves like these don’t develop overnight. You’ve got a whole 95 days until November 8, and if you win, at least four years of staring into each other’s eyes in the White House situation room to let your friendship blossom.
The rumor mill is still spinning over how exactly WikiLeaks obtained tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Convention that reveal blatant favoritism of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders within the party.
This whodunnit saga will no doubt continue this week as the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Philadelphia tomorrow. Which means the Clinton campaign will need as much help as it can get from her volunteer base in pushing back against that narrative to capitalize on any good will the convention might inspire this week.
The campaign likely hopes its newly released mobile app could help with that. Taking a page out of the book of Sanders’ own primary campaign, Clinton’s new app, Hillary2016, aims to make it easier for volunteers to set up their own virtual field offices. On the app, they’re able to check into events, funnel campaign content to Facebook, and compete for various types of rewards, among other campaign-related activities.
In many ways, Hillary2016 resembles the Field the Bern app that Sanders volunteers created earlier this year. Both apps use technology to cut out the middle man in campaigning. The idea is to give volunteers all the tools they need to spread a candidate’s message without ever having to step foot in a field office.
Of course, there’s only so much volunteers can do on their own. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee itself were no doubt hoping to host a convention that looked disciplined and controlled compared to the chaotic Republican convention last week. Instead, they’ll have to contend with newly fired-up Sanders supporters who were already convinced “the system” was rigged anyway. Now many feel like they have the emails to prove it.
Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine wave to the crowd during a campaign event in Annandale, Virginia on July 14, 2016.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton finally announced her vice-presidential running mate today. Senator Tim Kaine isn’t an exciting pick, but he makes sense. Clinton more or less has liberals safely on her side; Kaine is a moderate white man from Virginia, a swing state, which pretty much checks off all the demographic and electoral boxes where she needs to build up more support.
What’s more interesting is how Clinton told the public she would deliver the news: via a text from Hillary. It was the ultimate Internet age callback to the viral meme of Clinton and her now infamous sunglasses and Blackberry. But it was also a way to drum up anticipation among her supporters for an event that is, admittedly, a snoozefest for anyone but cable news producers.
That Clinton indicated she would reveal her pick first to a relatively narrow audience may seem counterintuitive. Wouldn’t a candidate want to spread the word as widely and quickly as possible? Press conferences have always been a way for candidates to drive the narrative. But in 2016, with so many social media tools at the public’s disposal, that’s no longer possible. By sharing the Clinton can shape her inevitable public address around that all that online buzz.
Since Obama’s 2008 campaign used targeted digital messaging to help put him over the top, the Democratic party has worked aggressively to build a tech infrastructure that relies on focused outreach to solidify support and get voters to the polls. Clinton’s tech team this election cycle represents the culmination of that strategy so far, and digital discipline has characterized her approach since the primaries. In that light, Clinton’s text message veep announcement today makes perfect sense.
Given that the “veepstakes” (gag) is essentially a fun time-filler for pundits, the average citizens who are going to care the most are the ones who are already passionately in Clinton’s camp. If you’ve given Clinton your phone number to get text messages, that includes you. By announcing her pick to those people first, Clinton makes that group feel part of an inner circle—while simultaneously tapping them for a donation. This kind of narrowcasting helped Obama win in 2008 and 2012. Clinton will likely rely on an even more focused version of this approach to chase votes in 2016.
But while Clinton promised the news by text to gin up support with her base first, in the end, the campaign did broadcast the Kaine announcement on Twitter as well. Given Donald Trump’s dominance on the platform, there’s no sense in Clinton taking any chances.
Indiana Governor Mike Pence introduces Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Grand Park Events Center on July 12, 2016 in Westfield, Indiana. Aaron P. Bernstein /Getty Images
Updated on July 15 at 10:55 am after Donald Trump confirmed that Mike Pence will be his running mate.
Donald Trump just announced that Indiana governor Mike Pence is his pick for vice president. And that means the online masses are frantically picking apart Pence’s digital footprint in search of something incriminating—or at least that’s at odds with Trump.
There’s plenty to work with.
Shortly after The New York Times reported that Pence will likely be Trump’s running mate, this Pence tweet surfaced, a clear jibe against Trump’s pledge to ban Muslim people from entering the United States.
Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.
— Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) December 8, 2015
In another, Pence voices support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Trump calls “terrible.”
Trade means jobs, but trade also means security. The time has come for all of us to urge the swift adoption of the Trans Pacific Partnership
— Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) September 8, 2014
The swiftness with which Pence’s own words are being turned against him shows just how difficult it is to run for office or pick a running mate in 2016. To accuse someone of flip-flopping is an age-old insult in politics. Now that politicians have social media accounts and armies of constituents constantly demanding to know how they feel about the news of the day, hiding those inconsistencies becomes tougher. By sheer force of character, Trump has managed to overcome all the times he’s contradicted himself. Not everyone can.
To be sure, plenty of mainstream Republicans have come out against Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, and even the US Chamber of Commerce has rejected his stance on trade. So the fact that Pence disagrees with Trump on those issues may not carry all that much weight on the right.
What’s more likely to hurt him—and Trump—among moderate Republicans is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act he signed into law in 2015. It would have allowed Indiana businesses to deny service to people on the basis of their sexuality. The bill was widely condemned as discrimination, with the state’s own Chamber of Commerce calling the law a hit to Indiana’s “national identity as a welcoming and hospitable state.”
It also drew the ire of tech industry leaders like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. In a Washington Post op-ed, Cook compared the Pence-signed Indiana law to Jim Crow. “The days of segregation and discrimination marked by ‘Whites Only’ signs on shop doors, water fountains and restrooms must remain deep in our past,” he wrote. “We must never return to any semblance of that time.”
Pence amended the bill in an attempt to curb fears of discrimination, but he couldn’t win, as social conservatives lashed out against what they saw as a weakening of the legislation.
In other words, Pence is no stranger to the battles that rage in media, both social and traditional. But now that he’s Trump’s running mate, it’s safe to say he ain’t seen nothing yet.
Peter Thiel.Bloomberg/Getty Images
Silicon Valley promised us flying cars. Instead, we get Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican National Convention.
A newly released list of speakers for next week’s convention in Cleveland includes Thiel, the litigious Silicon Valley billionaire investor, Facebook board member, and Donald Trump delegate, who, most recently, funded a revenge lawsuit against Gawker that forced the media company into bankruptcy.
In a statement to WIRED, Thiel explained why he wants to appear at the convention, an obligation even top Republicans have ducked this year. “Many people are uncertain in this election year,” he wrote, “but most Americans agree that our country is on the wrong track. I don’t think we can fix our problems unless we can talk about them frankly.”
In any other election year, Thiel’s presence at the convention wouldn’t be all that surprising. A known libertarian, he was one of the most prominent backers of Ron Paul’s 2012 Super PAC, and during primary season he was a key donor to Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC.
But the fact that Trump is this year’s presumptive Republican nominee makes Thiel’s support curious. On everything from trade to immigration to government data collection, Trump’s policies stand in direct opposition to the ones laid out by major industry groups like the Internet Association and TechNet.
Today, a large group of tech leaders, including Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, investor Vinod Khosla, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and more than 100 others published an open letter repudiating Trump, not just for his tech policies, but for his broader campaign.
“He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline,” the letter reads. “We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation.”1
Thiel’s decision to back Trump is also unique given the new RNC platform’s stance on LGBT issues. Thiel is openly gay and supports gay marriage, but this year’s RNC platform includes a plank that supports conversion therapy for LGBT people and promotes states’ rights to decide which bathrooms transgender people can use. When this so-called “bathroom bill” was introduced in North Carolina, the CEO of PayPal, the company Thiel co-founded, pulled plans to expand operations in that state.
Suffice it to say, as a member of the tech industry elite, Thiel is breaking ranks—even with himself. Back in 2014, in an interview with the conservative outlet The Daily Caller, Thiel waxed poetic about the future of democracy and said that Donald Trump, who had long toyed with a presidential bid, was “sort of symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City.”
Of course, he won’t be the only convention speaker who’s come out against Trump in the past. The list also includes former competitors Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, as well as Republican party leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Oh, and PS: Peter Thiel rocks.
1. Update: 11:06 am ET 07/14/16 This story has been updated to include the open letter from tech industry leaders.
Twitter has been perhaps the most talked about platform this election cycle. (Thanks, Donald Trump.) Now, in hopes of capturing even more of the political conversation, the company is announcing that it will livestream the Republican National Convention when it kicks off next week in Cleveland, followed by the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the week after that.
The streams will be available on both the mobile and web apps through Twitter’s new Live product. The company recently tested Live during Wimbledon, streaming matches through a broadcasting partnership with the tennis tournament organizers.1 Later this year, the company will also team up with the NFL to stream Thursday night football.
The convention coverage, which will be shot by CBS and its online affiliate CBSN, is part of that push into event-based livestreaming, a fitting move for a company whose core strength has always been real-time events.
Throughout this election cycle, Twitter has vied with other social media sites for a share of the public attention. But it has excelled in moments when people want to huddle together to talk about one thing and one thing only. On debate nights, Twitter is the modern day spin room, and when a crisis hits, it’s typically the first place candidates go to respond. Facebook may have more users, but Twitter tends to have the densest, most instantaneous conversations around a single topic.
“Twitter is the fastest way to find out what’s happening in politics and to have a discussion about it,” Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. The goal of the livestream, he said, is to give “people around the world the best way to experience democracy in action.”
Just how you’ll find the Twitter Live stream of the conventions is unclear, but CBS will likely tweet out a link to the Live page. A link to the page may also appear in the Twitter Moment for the convention. Either way, a spokesman for Twitter says, “It won’t be hard to find.”
The stream will be available to people who don’t have a Twitter account as well, which should help expose the platform to new users and show them why it’s useful. As the video streams on the live page, the company will also surface Tweets from across the platform that are relevant to that moment, using a combination of hashtags and its own algorithm.
For Twitter, this partnership is a smart move. Already, audiences are used to watching a live event on television, then turning to Twitter to comment on it. Now Twitter is placing the entire experience on the second screen. It also gives Twitter a way to compete with Facebook’s live feature, which delegates and other convention attendees will no doubt be using to cover everything that happens on and off the convention floor.
And for American voters, it will make the sometimes opaque and bizarre process of picking a president just a little more transparent.
1. Correction 09:32 am ET 7/11/16 An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported that Twitter partnered with ESPN. It partnered with Wimbledon.
The FBI’s months-long investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private emails has come to an end. Investigators found that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified information, FBI director James Comey said today. But they do not believe her transgressions warrant criminal charges.
Investigators interviewed Clinton for three-and-a-half hours over the Fourth of July weekend about her use of a private email server while Secretary of State, and the threat of a possible indictment has hung over her presidential campaign. The final decision on whether or not to bring charges against Clinton still remains with the Department of Justice.
“In our system the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate,” Comey said. “Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Comey called the investigation “a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.” But while the FBI’s final assessment would seem to absolve Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing, its findings still give her opponents and critics ample fodder for criticizing her judgment.
The FBI searched several servers and email devices Clinton used as Secretary of State and found 110 emails and 52 email chains considered classified at the time they were sent and received, Comey said. Eight of those chains were top secret, the government’s highest security classification.
The investigation also found several thousand work-related emails not among the 30,000 messages Clinton handed over during the probe. The FBI discovered those emails by searching for traces on servers or devices connected to her email domain, as well as by analyzing archived government accounts of other officials who were emailing with Clinton at the time. Of those emails, the FBI found that another three were considered classified.
But Comey cautioned that Clinton’s failure to produce these emails was not likely an intentional attempt to obscure information. Instead, he said Clinton deleted or her email system purged many of those emails over time. Because Clinton wasn’t working with a government server or even a commercial service like Gmail, no archive existed.
The FBI also assessed whether foreign governments had hacked Clinton’s account. Investigators found that Clinton did use her personal account while traveling “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries” but didn’t find any direct evidence of a hack.
At the very least, Comey emphasized that Clinton’s use of a private server was an exercise in sloppiness.
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive highly classified information,” he said. “Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Still, the FBI does not believe criminal charges are appropriate, because such a case would require evidence of “intentional misconduct or indication of disloyalty to the United States,” Comey said.
The Politics of Email
In a statement, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign is “glad that this matter is now resolved.”
“We are pleased that the career officials handling this case have determined that no further action by the Department is appropriate,” he said. “As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again.”
But while the investigation itself is over, this will not be the last time we hear about the email scandal. On one hand, Clinton no longer has an FBI investigation hanging over her head. On the other, Comey just handed Donald Trump and other conservative leaders ready-made talking points that will feed into concerns over Clinton’s trustworthiness and prudence. And the fact that Clinton likely won’t face charges, despite Comey’s rebuke, will only fuel more campaign rhetoric that the “system is rigged”—a sentiment already being fed by recent news that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch last month while the FBI investigation was still in progress.
Already, the presumptive Republican nominee has taken to Twitter to express those thoughts.
FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2016
In his remarks, Comey acknowledged that the FBI’s assessment will likely stir up more controversy about the politics of the investigation, but he rejected any claims of undue influence.
“Opinions are irrelevant,” he said. “Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.”
Hillary Clinton testifies in front of the Benghazi Committee on October 22, 2015.Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
If you were to read the way the left wing and right wing media were covering the newly released report on the attacks in Benghazi today, you could be forgiven for thinking they were referring to two entirely different documents.
“House panel investigating deadly Benghazi terrorist attack faults Obama administration response — finds Clinton knowingly misled public,” read the Fox News homepage banner.
“Benghazi Committee Releases Final Report, Slams Clinton,” the unabashedly conservative Breitbart News reported.
But over on the left, it was a different story. A very different story.
“House Republicans release anticlimactic Benghazi report,” Daily Kos wrote.
“$7 MILLION MOCKERY: GOP WITCH HUNT CLEARS CLINTON — AGAIN,” read the leading headline on the Huffington Post.
Even relatively mainstream outlets like The New York Times had a wildly different take from the right wing press: “House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”
If you’re an American voter, trying to decide whether or not Clinton was responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Libya in 2012—which was, after all, one of the chief missions of the House Select Committee on Benghazi—which story do you believe? The answer: Whichever one you want.
The Beauty and the Tragedy
It is the beauty and the tragedy of the Internet age. As it becomes easier for anyone to build their own audience, it becomes harder for those audience members to separate fact from fiction from the gray area in between. As media consumers, we now have the freedom to self-select the truth that most closely resembles our existing beliefs, which makes our media habits fairly good indicators of our political beliefs. If your top news source is CNN, for instance, studies show you’re more likely to be liberal. If local radio and TV figure prominently in your news habits, you’re more likely to be conservative.
Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, the American National Election Studies show that partisanship in the US has spiked drastically, with Americans on either side of the aisle harboring ever colder feelings about their political opponents. It’s hard to prove the country’s increasingly polarized media habits had anything to do with that, but it’s also hard to believe the two trends are unrelated. The country is being fed wildly different stories, all from media outlets claiming the other side is biased. So who’s right? Is there even such a thing?
The Bias Card
Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Obama, summed it up well in response to Mother Jones’s Washington bureau chief David Corn’s comment on Twitter:
@DavidCornDC no you wouldn’t, because all your news sources would still say that a) she’s to blame, and b) all other news is biased
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) June 28, 2016
Of course, the report itself is public, and interested audiences could theoretically “read this report for themselves,” as House Select Committee chairman Trey Gowdy suggested in a statement released with the report. And if they did, readers would see that the Committee both eviscerates the Obama administration for failing to adequately respond to threats in Libya and utterly fails to convincingly pin the blame on Clinton. Both, not either.
But at 800-pages, reading the report is a tall order for voters who now take their political lessons in caption-sized doses. Most readers probably didn’t even make it to the end of Breitbart’s 1,516 words on the subject or The Huffington Post’s 889 words, for that matter. If history serves, most of you probably stopped reading this story several paragraphs ago, and I’m only 517 words in.
That won’t matter, though. Because whatever people on both sides have read, they’ll claim to have heard the full and true story. But as the web widens, providing anyone a platform to tell their side of the story, that’s rarely if ever the case, and it may never be again.
Hillary Clinton meets voters after delivering a speech in Columbus, Ohio on June 21, 2016.Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton is releasing her technology and innovation agenda today, which includes plans to expand broadband access to all American homes, forgive some student loans for people starting new companies or joining a startup, invest in computer science education in schools, and create a national commission on digital security.
Clinton will address the plan today as she visits a workforce training facility in Denver and later, hosts a townhall with digital content creators in Los Angeles.
The presumptive Democratic nominee has touched on tech issues in an ad hoc way before, urging Silicon Valley to help fight radicalization online and calling for greater protection for on-demand workers. This is the first time, however, that Clinton—or any presidential candidate for that matter—is synthesizing these ideas into a comprehensive platform.
Though many pieces of the agenda are policy prescriptions Clinton has announced in the past, including a plan to bring broadband access to every American home by 2020, the tech platform includes newer proposals as well. Her plan would, for instance, allow would-be entrepreneurs to defer their student loans interest free for up to three years as they launch their businesses. Business owners who locate in “distressed communities” or start a social enterprise also could ask the government to forgive as much as $17,500 in loans after five years in business.
The goal of this part of the plan is to encourage millennials to start businesses. Entrepreneurship among young Americans has fallen drastically, and student debt is often cited as one of the greatest obstacles to starting up.
The tech agenda also affirms Clinton’s commitment to net neutrality; her desire to make the United States Digital Service, a tech team that modernizes government processes, a permanent part of the executive branch; her plan to train 50,000 computer science teachers over the next decade; and her interest in ensuring tech companies can recruit top talent from anywhere in the world. According to the platform, Clinton “would ‘staple’ a green card to STEM masters and PhDs from accredited institutions.”
Silicon Valley will probably be most interested, however, in Clinton’s policies regarding privacy and encryption, both topics that have intersected with the country’s national security interests in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, California. But the newly released agenda may not satisfy. Though Clinton’s plan notes the importance of tech companies and law enforcement working together to preserve “individual privacy and security,” it offers little in the way of specifics or new information. Clinton has repeatedly called for collaboration between Silicon Valley and the government to win the war against terrorists both online and off, but it’s never clear just how she’d convince a reluctant tech community to cooperate.
But while her sweeping suggestions may not appease security experts and others seeking specifics, the fact that Clinton has a tech agenda at all puts her ahead of just about everyone else in this presidential election cycle. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush tried to address such issues, but Donald Trump’s fixation with immigration and national security dominated the conversation. And Trump hasn’t offered much in the way of guidance here, except to say that as president, he would require Apple to manufacture its phones in the US and work with Bill Gates to “close that Internet up.”
It’s little surprise that Clinton would embrace the tech industry and its issues. Silicon Valley is loaded with high-dollar donors, and last week, a slew of technologists including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Dropbox founder Drew Houston, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and others openly pledged support for Clinton. Meanwhile, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt, who also announced his support, has backed startups that work with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party.
Not that Trump lacks any Silicon Valley backing. Noted libertarian and billionaire investor Peter Thiel is Trump delegate. Still, it’s clear that Clinton, like President Obama before her, has the tech industry’s vote. Now, she’s also got their attention.
Update 06/28/16 9:20 am ET: This story has been updated to include Clinton’s full tech agenda.
The one presidential candidate who’s staked his reputation on being “really rich” is actually not all that rich, at least, not as far as his campaign is concerned.
On Monday, the Federal Election Commission’s monthly report revealed a historic gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaign war chests. Where Clinton ended the month with $42 million in cash on hand, Trump rounded out May with just $1.3 million. To put that in context, that’s less than the $1.8 million Ben Carson’s campaign still has left, and Carson dropped out of the race in March.
Word traveled fast, and overnight, the hashtag #TrumpSoPoor began trending on Twitter, spawning endless tweets about his business dealings…
#TrumpSoPoor He’ll have to start paying taxes
— Jocelyn Plums (@FilthyRichmond) June 21, 2016
His looks…
#TrumpSoPoor he uses Tang when he runs out of Foundation.
— Brandon Unger (@ungerbn103) June 21, 2016
And of course, making Mexico pay for his campaign…
#TrumpSoPoor gonna make Mexico pay for his campaign
— David Shorr (@David_Shorr) June 21, 2016
But while Trump’s lack of cash may be shocking compared with Clinton’s abundance of it, it’s not all that surprising in the context of his campaign. Trump essentially self-funded his primary run and regularly spoke on the stump about why he wasn’t seeking money from outside donors. That rhetoric may have worked to sway primary voters, but it’s not a realistic strategy to fund an official presidential campaign in the general election.
The FEC report is an early reflection of Trump’s initial attempts at true campaign fundraising. It’s dismal, but it’s important to bear in mind that it reflects only the month of May. The next report, issued in July, will provide a clearer picture of whether Trump is truly struggling to raise money now that he’s really trying. The true challenge, however, will be matching Clinton’s on-air attacks. Already, reports show Clinton has reserved $117 million in TV ad time. Trump has reserved about zero, which means any ads he does place will come at a premium—a premium it doesn’t look like the Trump campaign can quite afford.
What’s just as telling as how much money the Trump campaign has raised, however, is where exactly that money is going. The answer: back into Trump’s pockets. According to the FEC filing, nearly 20 percent of Trump’s campaign expenditures have been spent on Trump-owned venues and airlines, as well as on members of the Trump family.
Talk about a self-funded campaign. Trump is, quite literally, funneling money back to himself. There are, for instance, a number of payroll disbursements to Donald J. Trump himself. There is a $423,000 payout to his Mar-A-Lago golf club and a $349,000 payment to Tag Air, a Trump-owned airline. And that’s just from May. There’s also a nearly $30,000 rental expense for Trump International Golf Club, and a nearly $36,000 fee for Trump National Golf Club. The list goes on.
The Trump campaign did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told NBC News the campaign has “no concerns” about funding. And why should it? With all that money flowing back into Trump’s empire, perhaps #TrumpIsn’tSoPoor after all.
Donald Trump often gets away with saying things that would be political suicide for anyone else. But this time he’s saying something that most Americans might actually agree with.
In the wake of the deadly shooting in Orlando last weekend, Donald Trump says he plans to meet with the National Rifle Association to talk about limiting gun access to people suspected of ties to terrorism.
I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016
The demand for this kind of change has grown deafening in recent days, especially after news emerged that, despite the FBI investigating him twice for his suspected terrorist ties, the Orlando shooter was still able to purchase a gun.
While Democrats have re-upped their calls for curbs on suspected terrorists’ ability to buy guns, Republicans have been entirely unwilling to entertain the idea. That’s largely due to the fact that the NRA wields enormous power over the GOP. But Trump has proven time and again throughout this election that Republican politics and pieties hold little sway over him.
Instead, Trump has staked his reputation to the claim that terrorism is the number-one threat facing the country, and that he will do anything in his power to stop it, including banning Muslim people from entering the United States. Keeping guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists is entirely in keeping with that message, whether or not it aligns with the Republican playbook.
The question now is: how will Republicans in Congress respond to Trump once again going rogue? Trump’s tweet pulls back the curtain on the fact that it’s the NRA, not Congress, that dictates the country’s gun laws. It also puts Republicans in a tricky position politically. Do they take this opportunity to voice their support for a policy that 71 percent of Americans already support? Or do they stick to the script for fear of upsetting the almighty NRA?
None of this is to say that Trump is becoming a gun control advocate. During his national security speech, Trump said Hillary Clinton wants to “take away Americans’ guns, then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.” Though that’s far from factual, it’s Trump’s way of pandering to pro-gun advocates.
This incident may still scare Republicans anyway, if for no other reason than it illustrates how little control the GOP and its longstanding allegiances have over Trump as president. It’s what Trump’s supporters love about him. It’s what keeps his ostensible allies up at night.
Donald Trump has never made a secret of his disdain for what he has called, at turns, the “disgusting” and “dishonest” press. Now, the presumptive Republican nominee is taking that vitriol to the next level, announcing on his Facebook page that he is revoking The Washington Post‘s press credentials.
According to Trump, this decision is a response to a story the Post published earlier this morning that accused Trump of trying to connect President Barack Obama with the Orlando shooting. The story referenced an interview Trump did with Fox News this morning in which he said, “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.” The Post apparently took that to mean Trump was implying that the president may be “identifying with radicalized Muslims.”
On his Facebook page, Trump said that while he is “no fan of President Obama,” the story is “incredibly inaccurate.”
“We are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,” Trump wrote.
Spurious as the Post‘s claims may be, it’s hard not to read Trump’s decision to ban the storied publication from his events as a major attack on the free press. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time either. The Trump campaign has repeatedly turned down reporters for press credentials without explanation or warning. Meanwhile, the candidate has promised that if he becomes president, he will “open up” the country’s libel laws to make it easier to sue news outlets “and win lots of money.”
The freedom of the press, of course, is guaranteed by the First Amen