How the GOP uses Facebook to scam Republican donors
Welcome to Popular Information, a newsletter about politics and power — written by me, Judd Legum In the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign faced a cash crunch. To solve it, the campaign effectively resorted to defrauding its own supporters. Starting in September 2020, the campaign set many campaign donations to recur weekly by default. To avoid getting charged repeatedly, donors "had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out." The result was stories like this:
These tactics resulted in many Trump supporters filing fraud claims against the Trump campaign. According to an analysis by the New York Times, from June 15 to the end of 2020, 12.29% of Trump's online donors requested refunds. Over the same period of time, just 2.24% of Biden's online donors asked for their money back. The Republican Party, however, is continuing to deploy these deceptive tactics in 2021. And, as Colin Sholes first noted, they are using Facebook to do it. For example, the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), which works to get Republicans elected to the House of Representatives, is running several Facebook ads featuring Trump. This one declares: "Trump is Back." If you click through the ad, you'll find a splash page with two pre-checked boxes. One pre-checked box will make any donation recur monthly. The other pre-checked box will charge your card an additional time on April 20. "UNCHECK this box if you've given up," the NRCC says. The GOP Facebook page is also running similar ads that link to a Facebook page with pre-checked boxes. According to Facebook's own metrics, these ads have reached millions of people over the last few days. These pre-checked boxes appear to violate Facebook's ad rules. Section 6 of Facebook's ad rules, which applies to "services that include… automatic renewal," states:
Facebook, however, said that Section 6 does not apply to political ads that solicit donations. "Pre-checked boxes do not violate our policies for political fundraising," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois told Popular Information, "We’re taking a close look at how this fundraising practice is used on our platform to ensure that we protect the people using our services." Two messages from corporate AmericaOn Tuesday, Popular Information reported on a Zoom call where a group of business leaders discussed potential future action opposing legislation to restrict voting. On Wednesday, that meeting resulted in an open letter, signed by hundreds of companies and CEOs — including Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Starbucks — in support of voting rights. But the letter itself was underwhelming. First, the language of the letter was quite broad. This is the most concrete section:
Even that statement was too much for companies like Walmart and Home Depot, which were among the companies conspicuously absent from the list of signatories. But the larger problem, as Popular Information has reported, is that the Republican sponsors of voter suppression legislation will not acknowledge that their bills are "discriminatory." So legislators will simply waive away a vague statement like this as inapplicable. So will companies that signed this letter now speak out about specific legislation — like SB7 and HB6 in Texas — that will restrict voting in a discriminatory manner? Kenneth Chenault, the former CEO of American Express who helped organize the letter, said that was not the expectation:
So the letter intentionally does not define what it is that these businesses support or oppose, which debilitates the effort. It also does not commit the corporations to any form of meaningful action. These corporations have collectively donated millions to the politicians pushing voter suppression legislation across the country. No company has committed to ending its support of politicians seeking to make it harder to vote. Nearly every signatory of the new letter supporting voting rights is also a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Shortly before the letter was published, the Chamber of Commerce issued a "key vote alert" urging Senators to oppose the For the People Act, also known as HR 1. The For the People Act would put into place fundamental reforms that would protect against the kind of voting restrictions passed in Georgia and Iowa, and being considered in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere. Among other provisions, it would require automatic voter registration, guarantee the right to vote by mail, establish minimum standards for early voting, and prevent voter purges. So on the one hand, many corporations have signed onto a generic statement support voting rights and opposing discriminatory voting restrictions. On the other hand, the most prominent lobbying organization representing these same corporations are pressuring Congress to reject legislation that could strengthen voting rights and protect against discriminatory voting restrictions. Popular Information's work on corporate accountability was profiled this week in The Forward. The publication recounts how "a newsletter with a staff of two… scooped the biggest media outlets on one of the biggest stories to follow the insurrection." In the piece, which you can read here, I talk about the path ahead:
Today is a big moment in that process — the first major FEC deadline since the insurrection. Tesnim and I will be pouring over the mountain of data and will report back on which corporations are breaking their promises. You can expand our capacity to do this work by becoming a paid subscriber. Popular Information is fiercely independent and does not accept advertising. This newsletter only exists because of the support of readers like you. |
Older messages
What we learned from the first major FEC deadline after the insurrection
Monday, April 19, 2021
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, about 170 companies announced they were suspending donations from their corporate PACSs to the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results or
A Zoom call will not save democracy
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Over the weekend, about 100 corporate leaders gathered on a Zoom call to discuss how to respond to Republican efforts to restrict voting in nearly every state. Although the call was ostensibly private,
These rainbow flag-waving corporations are backing the sponsors of anti-trans legislation
Monday, April 12, 2021
Seven members of the North Carolina Senate have introduced draconian anti-trans legislation targeting children, adults, and medical professionals. An investigation by Popular Information reveals that
How not to protect free speech
Thursday, April 8, 2021
The free expression of ideas is a bedrock principle for any democratic society. And that is particularly true on college campuses, where many young people are still developing their core beliefs.
Dan Patrick and the damaged Republican psyche
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
There is no greater proponent of Trump's false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election than Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R). Patrick described
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