Facebook & Russian election meddling: The FEC’s Ann Ravel sounded the alarm in 2015 — Quartz
▻https://qz.com/1076964/this-us-official-warned-about-russia-using-the-internet-to-skew-us-elections-yea
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In October 2014, vice commissioner Ann M. Ravel wrote a statement (pdf) accusing the FEC of turning a “blind eye” to the growing force of the internet in politics, and explaining the reason she and two of her co-commissioners, all Democrats, had voted for more disclosure of funding of political material on the web:
Some of my colleagues seem to believe that the same political message that would require disclosure if run on television should be categorically exempt from the same requirements when placed on the internet alone. As a matter of policy, this simply does not make sense. … This effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators has been stretched to cover slickly produced ads aired solely on the internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV.
The FEC had just undertaken a vote on the topic that ended in a deadlock, with three Republicans voting against their Democratic colleagues, a common impasse in the increasingly dysfunctional agency tasked with keeping US elections fair and transparent. Nonetheless, Ravel’s statement sparked outcry and anger, especially from conservatives who equated money spent on political advertising on the internet to “free speech”—the same argument that won the landmark 2010 “Citizens United” Supreme Court case, sending a torrent of cash into political elections.
A day after Ravel published her statement, co-commissioner Lee Goodman, a Republican, appeared on Fox & Friends (video) to warn that the three Democrats wanted to censor free speech online, and set up a “regulatory regime” that would reach deep into the internet. “Boy, I thought Democrats were for free speech,” commentated the Fox anchor interviewing him, Tucker Carlson. “That was obviously an earlier species.”
Ravel says Goodman’s Fox appearance unleashed a torrent of abuse. The issue was picked up by Drudge Report, Breitbart, and other right-wing news sites, which singled her out. Responses poured in from Twitter and e-mail, ranging from death threats to misogyny, everything from “stick it up your c-nt,” she recalled this week, to “You’re the kind of person the Second Amendment was made for.” They also included “Hope you have a heart attack,” and “You will more than likely find the ‘Nazi’ scenario showing its ugly head,” the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that investigates democracy, reported (Ravel is Jewish).
Despite the backlash to her 2014 push to get Facebook and other internet companies to be more transparent about where their ad revenue was coming from, Ravel kept pursuing the issue. In 2015, the FEC grappled with the topic of how to make sure foreign money wasn’t being used to pay for political advertisements on the internet, a clear violation of a federal law.
In doing so, Ravel even anticipated Putin’s influence. “I mean, think of it, do we want Vladimir Putin or drug cartels to be influencing American elections?” Ravel asked in an October of 2015 meeting, while pushing for the commission to require state and local campaigns to declare foreign contributions. The commission tried once again to hash out what was “local” or “national” given the internet’s global reach.