Defendant, Censor, Politico, Spy
The improbable but true story of how non-profits operating a private intelligence agency to combat terrorism decided to interfere with campaign infrastructure in a U.S. election.
This piece includes original public interest reporting, following on the previous episode on how the Southern Poverty Law Center became financial infrastructure. If you have previously read Bits about Money's reporting on this subject, note there are two major additions here: 1) direct evidence of interference in campaign infrastructure for a declared candidate in a U.S. election, which was newly developed after our original reporting and 2) responses (and lack thereof) from the non-profits at issue.
Table of Contents
(00:00) Intro
(02:50) The coordinated pressure campaign, as experienced by industry
(08:13) The coordinated pressure campaign, as narrated by its authors
(08:36) Mid-2017: Color of Change dialogue with PayPal begins
(09:27) August 11, 2017: Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally
(10:58) August 21, 2017: JPMorgan Chase Foundation donates $500k to the SPLC
(11:44) 2018: SPLC organizes Change the Terms, which becomes the coalition's nucleus
(19:07) March 2021: Color of Change describes the meetings on a podcast
(21:42) A brief interlude about causality and communications strategy
(22:58) The coalition targets politicians in nonpartisan fashion
(28:20) Early 2020: The SPLC describes this campaign to Congress
(31:26) June 2020: Widespread protests throughout America; National Guard, Facebook deployed
(35:33) July 29, 2020: Antitrust Committee hearing about market power
(38:05) January 6, 2021: A riot at the Capitol
(42:51) February 25, 2021: The SPLC lobbies Congress to require companies to inform on nonprofits and others to government
(44:49) June 4, 2021: Facebook rescinds newsworthiness exception to multiple policies
(45:22) July 2021: The Change the Terms coalition attempts nonpartisan interdiction of Trump PAC fundraising
(48:16) Later in 2021: Coalition members fundraise in reliance upon this conduct
(50:52) 2022 to present: The Change the Terms coalition evolves posture
(52:10) January 2023: Change the Terms intervenes in its own name against a declared candidate for the presidency
(53:53) A brief parable about maintaining tax-exempt status
(55:30) We have invited coalition participants to comment
(57:50) We received a statement from the Center for American Progress
(01:02:43) No other member of the coalition offered any comment
(01:03:13) The moral authority of charities is a commons
Transcript
My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internet.
Defendant. Censor. Politico. Spy.
The United States does not have a uniformly happy history with domestic intelligence services. They sometimes become obsessed with the enemy beyond reason. They sometimes develop perverse internal cultures which justify the next incremental step no matter the cost. They sometimes scorn any form of oversight. They sometimes begin to treat democratic accountability itself as a problem to be managed. The people they nominally serve could vote for the enemy.
In 1975, the Church Committee documented these exact patterns at the FBI and CIA, and produced reforms that the federal intelligence community has lived under ever since.
But enough of the history lesson.
Previously, in Bits about Money and Complex Systems, we covered the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-respected civil rights organization, for donor fraud, money laundering, and bank fraud.
Defendant.
The indictment focuses on an SPLC unit that SPLC itself calls the Intelligence Project. SPLC describes the Intelligence Project, in its own materials, as monitoring and exposing domestic terrorists and hate groups. SPLC publishes what it calls Intelligence Reports through that unit. SPLC has, in its own post-indictment statement, described a multi-decade paid informant program. SPLC has offered, in its defensive motions, that it frequently liaised with law enforcement.
So, to recap: runs covert assets, partners with law enforcement on anti-terrorism brief, produces intelligence estimates, communicates recommendations to policymakers. There is a word for this kind of org: intelligence service. In this case, a private intelligence service.
Spy.
From 2017 through 2023 and continuing, the private intelligence service ran an operation, in concert with allies, against private companies, mostly in tech and finance, in the United States. Many of us around during those years in the tech industry were there to see it, though we didn't always appreciate what we were seeing in real-time.
That operation’s declared aims included interdicting incitement to violence and also “hate”, which largely encompassed lawful but distasteful speech.
Censor.
This piece is a history, and public interest reporting, about that operation.
Bits about Money usually covers financial infrastructure. When we record a transaction, we have retained the receipts.
Since some of the details sound so farfetched that they border on unbelievable, this piece is extensively sourced to, mostly, the statements of the architects of the operation. We will quote extensively from primary sources and have linked and mirrored them in the show notes.
I am aware this piece is quite out of character for me, and I am aware that it has political ramifications. That is, unfortunately, unavoidable when private intelligence services interfere in democratic elections.
Politico.
And, uh, spoiler alert.
The coordinated pressure campaign, as experienced by industry
One coalition of non-profit organizations ran an organized pressure campaign against industry, for years. It started in 2017, with the SPLC and another non-profit informally coordinating. It intensified and formalized in 2018, under SPLC co-leadership. It escalated sharply in 2020 and 2021.
The campaign had two main components. The first was public advocacy and communications work. The second, less visible but more consequential, was a series of meetings with industry. Hundreds of meetings. With a specific target set of companies.
The campaign's declared aims were three. To convince those companies to censor more communications the coalition characterized as hate. To blacklist organizations and individuals the coalition characterized as promulgators of hate or violence. And to interdict the flow of funds to those blacklisted parties.
The coalition claimed to be non-partisan. Be on the lookout for mentions of “non-partisan,” because it is a word the coalition understands differently than I do.
The coalition calls its targets “Internet companies” and relies on government, media, and the public to not read the fine print. In it, they define Internet company mendaciously to include banks, credit card processors, and any other financial infrastructure their enemies could touch. The coalition was going after posts, but it was also and primarily going after money. I will use the language “industry participants” going forward to identify who they met with.
Industry participants included Facebook, Twitter, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard, and many other firms. Some were among the largest companies in the world. Others had fewer than 10 employees. (I estimate headcount based on published reporting and industry experience.)
Stripe was an industry participant. I was employed at Stripe continuously from late 2016 through early 2023, covering the entire period under discussion. I remain an active advisor to Stripe. Stripe does not necessarily endorse what I write in my personal spaces.
This series of hundreds of meetings involved hundreds of employees from industry participants. Those employees included C-suite executives and managers and individual contributors across a host of functions. Those functions included communications, legal, government affairs, Trust and Safety, and compliance professionals.
Meeting notes were frequently kept, and sometimes widely circulated, as is the routine practice in industry. The meetings were documented on calendar invites (often with full participant lists), shared docs, attachments, emails, and other contemporaneous records. In the ordinary practice of industry these primary documents distribute themselves promiscuously into secondary documents; think of an email being screenshot to paste into a PowerPoint to discuss the response in a meeting. Records exist on conservatively hundreds of systems and can be accessed by many more than 10,000 people.
No employee of an industry participant I have spoken to, familiar with the contents of the meetings, was willing to provide quotes for publication with their name and corporate affiliation attached.
Their reasoning included not being authorized to disclose private information, fear for their personal and corporate reputation, future career consequences for leaking, personal consequences for being identified adjacent to national political controversies, in some cases fear for their physical safety, and in some cases unwillingness to betray a cause they personally support.
Industry participants recount the tone of the meetings differently, and as varying over the meetings. Some meetings were strained-but-professional. Sometimes the coalition participants were described as demanding and “hectoring.” Industry participants report abusive remarks towards their companies and to the people in the meeting.
Industry participants were repeatedly told that if they did not accede to demands they would be profiting from evil, complicit in the death of innocents, or benefitting from white supremacy. The innocents claimed to be at risk were often specifically identified as black, including during a period of intense societal concern for the lives of black Americans specifically. Industry participants were told that they wanted this. That they were taking “blood money”. Industry participants repeatedly felt personally attacked, in ways and using language not normative in their professional experience.
On the account of multiple industry participants, coalition participants explicitly held individuals in the meeting personally responsible for the actions of their employers. This was aimed at individuals with substantial influence and authority in companies, and also at junior employees.
Industry participants describe the coalition participants as threatening their employers, openly and by implication.
The most commonly described threat was coordinated negative public messaging with the goal of causing reputational harm to the industry participants. Feared comms outcomes ran the gamut from heavy mainstream media coverage to a Twitter pile on. Twitter is real life, particularly when a large and vocal contingent of your employees use it and Slack simultaneously. Ever been pulled into a meeting over a single customer tweet then burn weeks on managing the fallout? Count yourself lucky.
Less commonly, the industry participants perceived they were being threatened with adverse legislative, executive, or regulatory action indirectly by coalition participants who are reasonably read as exercising substantial political influence. Industry participants sometimes report that coalition participants flaunted their political influence.
Industry participants were repeatedly told that if they did not accede to specific demands, they would share the blame for future deaths. Bits about Money has reviewed contemporaneous records which unequivocally make this claim, authored by coalition participants. We note that this echoes language the coalition routinely puts in press releases, Medium posts, and similar artifacts after presumptively careful review of the phrasing. The coalition was inconsistently disciplined in phrasing in documents we have reviewed, and we decline to quote their phrasing, in part, out of charity.
You will share the blame. We will hold you responsible.
The coordinated pressure campaign, as narrated by its authors
The coalition has publicly and voluminously described their own understanding of what was said in those meetings.
Where employees of industry participants dispute their characterizations, I will characterize broadly what some employees of industry participants have said, to preserve their anonymity. You should not view this as a claim on behalf of all industry participants. Patterns emerge frequently, but I am making no claims about unanimity.
Mid-2017: Color of Change dialogue with PayPal begins
Many left-of-center voices felt that white supremacists had been emboldened by the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Beginning in mid-2017, Color of Change communicates with and meets with PayPal, with the objective of cutting off financial services to hate groups. Color of Change is a civil rights organization which specializes in online organizing.
The Center for Media and Democracy, an aligned non-profit, quotes a senior executive as saying “Let’s be clear: public speech promoting ideologies of hate always complements and correlates with violent actions.”
Industry participants characterize the coalition participants as asserting that speech was inseparable from conduct. Free speech concerns were dismissed and, industry participants report, mocked, including with the dismissive rendering “freeze peach.”
August 11th, 2017: Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally
As has been abundantly reported elsewhere, a coalition of white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and alt-right organizations (per voluminous public reporting tracking self-identification) organized a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This sparked counter-demonstrations. A rally attendee struck and killed a counter-demonstrator with his car.
Color of Change intensified its existing engagement with PayPal and other industry participants. Rashad Robinson, then executive director, would describe them in detail later, to a podcast on iHeartRadio. Fast Company [archive] approvingly cites that this came after “Robinson used similar tactics to move companies to withdraw sponsorship from the 2016 Republican National Convention.” The Republican National Convention is a get-together sometimes described as a grand old party.
Robinson articulated the coalition’s theory of change: “Power is the ability to change the rules.” The coalition perceived the industry participants as having power, desired power for itself, and took steps to achieve it.
Color of Change swiftly organized what it describes as a social media campaign using the hashtag #NoBloodMoney.
In the wake of Charlottesville, which was shocking in the broader U.S. political environment and perceived as a watershed moment within tech companies, many industry participants made decisions to end services to a variety of groups they felt had violated their policies against promoting violence or extremism. This was sometimes proactively. It was sometimes after receiving communication from activists, either in their personal capacity or identified as coalition participants.
Meetings were, prior to this point, relatively ad hoc. This would soon change.
August 21, 2017: JPMorgan Chase Foundation donates $500k to SPLC
As mentioned above, the SPLC enjoyed broad trust within the financial industry dating to long before these events. Chase’s donation to SPLC immediately after a galvanizing tragedy could, if one were immensely cynical, be read as a tiny communications expenditure.
Industry participants routinely claimed shock and a sense of urgency after Charlottesville. A grown man once wept in my presence recounting that event. While there is substantial diversity of views among industry participants, many have, in their private spaces, when the cameras are not rolling, when there is nothing to gain, repeatedly described the SPLC to me as being on the side of the angels.
Keep this in mind as the coalition describes industry as being standoffish and foot-dragging.
2018: SPLC organizes Change the Terms, which becomes the coalition’s nucleus
The SPLC co-led an effort to unify, coordinate, and intensify previously ad hoc organizing actions. Change the Terms (CTT) was a coalition, to its friends, a conspiracy, to its enemies, and an unincorporated association, to a geek with an unhealthy interest in LLC formation. (The only fact I’ve ever retained about unincorporated associations is that they are jointly and severally liable for acts of the members.)
The individuals identified contemporaneously as co-chairing CTT were Heidi Beirich (then-head of the SPLC Intelligence Project) and Henry Fernandez, of the Center for American Progress (CAP).
SPLC’s Intelligence Project ran the private intelligence service and produced its data products. It also produces an annual intelligence estimate, such as the (2024) Year in Hate and Extremism.
(Beirich left SPLC in 2019 to co-found Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) with a fellow SPLC alumna.)
The SPLC characterized the CTT coalition as its own initiative under the Intelligence Project, and not simply Beirich’s initiative, in charitable governance and fundraising documents in the possession of Bits about Money. We cite one such document below, contrasted against later Congressional testimony.
According to documents reviewed by Bits about Money produced by coalition participants, the SPLC participated in cost-sharing arrangements to fund expenses of other coalition participants incurred in carrying out the joint purpose of the coalition. We are unaware of the extent of this practice.
CTT presently describes its most senior members as CAP, Color of Change, Common Cause, Free Press, GPAHE, Muslim Advocates, the National Hispanic Media Center, and the SPLC. There is some ambiguity around who claims founding member status and whether that list has evolved over time. Startup life, I get it.
I will refer to CTT’s primary artifact as the Terms. This document, announced at the coalition’s debut, was foundational to CTT’s positioning (they are Change the Terms). The Terms were sometimes described as recommendations, sometimes as a model Terms of Service (ToS). They were consistently positioned as being for Internet companies.
This is sleight-of-hand. A primary purpose, perhaps the primary purpose, of the Terms is to interdict money movement.
The Terms define “Internet Companies” in a non-standard fashion to include banks, credit card brands, any business of any character which facilitates a transfer of money with a web or mobile interface, and also more central examples of Internet companies. This is in keeping with the coalition’s by-now demonstrated target selection of PayPal (an Internet company) and Mastercard (which predates the commercial Internet by decades).
The SPLC co-drafted the Terms.
The SPLC referenced the Terms in Congressional testimony as being an extension of the SPLC’s long-running campaign to interdict money movement to targeted organizations.
For decades, the SPLC has been fighting hate and exposing how hate groups use the internet. We have lobbied internet companies, one by one, to comply with their own rules to prohibit their services from being used to foster hate or discrimination. A key part of this strategy has been to target these organizations’ funding.
The Change the Terms coalition existed to coordinate and parallelize execution on this tactic. In addition to nominating targets for existing policies, it extracted concessions from industry in the form of policy changes. The coalition, when minimizing its own power served its purposes, sometimes described all actual decisions as made by industry. The coalition was very candid when speaking with itself, with allies, and with industry participants. The coalition understood itself to have some degree of coercive power, and factually had some degree of coercive power, as we will discuss. It also secured delegated authority, routinely but not universally, as we have discussed.
Industry participants do not consider the Terms to be reasonably characterized as a ToS.
I would say the Terms are an advocacy artifact which adopts the stylization of a ToS without making any effort to be one. A ToS is a binding contract that industry customarily pays professionals to produce or adapt from firm-maintained templates appropriate to young startups. The English-language U.S. ToS of a major tech company has consumed more than 7 figures in bespoke services work, as a rule. The idea that a filesharing service and regulated U.S. depository institution could adopt the same ToS is fatuous on its face.
The purpose of the Terms was to get the meeting and, oh boy, did the coalition get them. I estimate they successfully achieved hundreds of meetings.
March 2021: Color of Change describes the meetings on a podcast
Color of Change’s Robinson was interviewed by Hillary Clinton on her podcast You and Me Both in March 2021. You and Me Both is available on major podcast platforms through iHeartRadio. Readers may recognize Clinton from other work.
Bits about Money has archived the podcast MP3 file, to make specified quotations findable via timestamps. Many professional podcasts use dynamic insertion of ads, which is good for advertising revenue but bad for reproducibility of timestamps across listeners. Please do not use the archive unless you need these specific timestamps.
Robinson confirms that CoC works with SPLC and that its relevant work began after the 2016 election (29:15).
Episode at 29:30:
We started calling the credit card companies. We started calling these payment processing companies. And you know what they told us? They said, oh, we're with you, but, you know, you have to talk to the banks. And then the bank said, you know, you have to talk to the credit card companies. So we start building the #NoBloodMoney campaign and we start building this platform. And, you know, we're not quite done with it all when Charlottesville happens.
Robinson describes a central tactic of the coalition: identifying particular accounts it wants deactivated, with a consequence if demands are not met. He claims this to have been demonstrably effective.
Multiple industry participants describe the same sequence of events across several invocations of the tactic. I feel it necessary to caveat causality, as described below.
Episode at 30:00:
We have been talking with you [companies] for months. We’ve given you these lists of white nationalist groups. And then within about twenty four hours [of launching the #NoBloodMoney campaign], they start sending us a list of white nationalist organizations that they are cutting off from processing. No law had changed.
Clinton interjects: Exactly.
Robinson locates this within his non-partisan broader political project.
Episode at 28:00:
We really built what I feel is a new strategy. It was focused not simply on resistance, but on opposition. What would it mean to not just resist but to build power, to oppose, so that we could get back to governing, focusing on winning real victories at the local level, while also recognizing that the game was not fair, that the rules were rigged, and that we couldn't simply say that what happened in 2016 was democracy. It was what happened.
Clinton later comments, at 31:20 :
Moving [your advocacy] to the private sector, and corporate power, was an incredibly smart approach.
A brief interlude about causality and communications strategy
Industry participants have, compared to anyone else in the world, broadly better information about account status, account history, position in pipelines, and similar. (This is not to say they have total awareness of all information in their possession, or that all employees of an industry participant have equivalent access to information and capacity to understand it. Some organizations tightly silo information internally by role.)
It is easy to infer causality from timelines without that being warranted. One mechanism for this: accounts may be in pipeline at the time of target nomination. An external observer will perceive “account active, nomination communicated, account closed shortly thereafter” and make the obvious inference.
If one understands one’s counterparty to have misunderstood something, one can correct them. Or not.
Industry participants describe a variety of tactics for extending olive branches to the coalition participants, including but not limited to acceding to demands. One such tactic was giving more visibility into pipelines than the broader public had, with or without influence on operation of those pipelines. “Thanks so much for bringing that to our attention. They are absolutely on our radar now.” can mean many things, including “Message received.”, “I confirm they are in pipeline.”, “I confirm they are in pipeline thanks to you.”
The coalition targets politicians in non-partisan fashion
The CTT Terms include the following recommendation.
Many Internet Companies have granted special exemptions to official accounts, government actors and powerful people, allowing them to promote hateful activities, disinformation and other divisive behavior. Instead, these actors should be held to the same standards (if not higher standards) as regular users. There should be no special exemptions that allow the powerful to spread hate with impunity. Many official accounts at various social-media companies have circumvented platform policies despite promoting hateful activities, disinformation and other divisive behavior. Policies should apply equally to all users and must be enforced.
Industry participants perceived themselves as being in an impossible situation with regards to a handful of accounts which were both extremely vexatious to coalition members and obviously newsworthy. Consider how manifestly unwise it would be to intentionally deplatform the sitting, duly elected President of the United States. While nominally about a large class of users, industry participants describe the motivating examples brought up in meetings as consistently circling back to Trump, Tucker Carlson, and a very short list of other names.
The ADL, a coalition-aligned non-profit, co-authored a press release with some coalition members titled Deplatform Tucker Carlson.
The coalition benefits from the mistaken impression that it only asks platforms to remove accounts controlled by terrorist organizations. No. The first, unobjectionable list is the ante. After you’re in the hand, they raise you Tucker.
Once the coalition has achieved agreement in principle it defines the bounds of polite society, it soon broadens the ask, framing the new concession as something you have already committed to publicly.
The coalition often communicates the ask privately but the retaliation for non-compliance publicly. The public, mainstream media sources, and similar interpret the sudden coordinated pressure intensification as evidence that the targeted company has failed at the original commitment, the one about terrorist organizations.
In public communications, some coalition participants exhibit message discipline in locating the agency within the industry participants: the coalition “recommends” policies, the industry participant agrees to a policy, then the industry participant is responsible for enforcing what is now their own policy.
Coalition participants were, in the recollection of many industry participants, frequently undisciplined in meetings. They specifically nominated accounts for adverse actions, up to account closure, in no uncertain terms, and it was not a request.
Color of Change, at a minimum, was quite disciplined: they consistently adopted coercive conditional escalation as their default engagement model. Get the meeting, communicate demand, show a marketing brief of words and images that would be activated if you did not swiftly accede to the demand. This account is described by industry participants and by executive director Robinson to Fast Company, where he describes employing it “95% of the time.”
Coalition participants were inconsistently disciplined in their contemporaneous written records, some of which Bits about Money has reviewed. Authenticating these as true copies is tricky; authenticating public statements is not.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in October 2019 wrote Facebook a public letter, which the SPLC and many coalition members co-signed.
And yet, sabotaging your own efforts, Facebook recently announced that it would automatically deem speech from politicians to be newsworthy, even when it violated the company’s Community Standards; exempt politician-created content from its fact-checking program – permitting anyone running for office to post or purchase ads with falsehoods; and exempt content deemed to be “opinion” from its misinformation rules. Politicians should not get a blank check to lie, incite, spread hate, or oppress groups of people. Politicians are historically responsible for perpetuating discrimination and erecting barriers to voter participation, while autocrats throughout history have relied on mass media to rise to power and subjugate minority communities.
Note the conflation here of committing incitement (illegal), spreading hate/oppression (probably bad), and lying while being a politician (Tuesday). This sort of conflation, of attempting to box someone into a proposition they had never actually agreed to, was routine, in the view of some industry participants.
I contemporaneously viewed the brouhaha about politicians lying as being battlespace preparation for the 2020 election. First, establish the general principle that social media platforms had a duty to censor lies told in campaigning. (This was sometimes described as “misinformation,” to imply that an American politician lying was doing so in a Russian accent.) Then, seize on every lie in one very specific political campaign, and use the platforms to interdict that political campaign’s storytelling. I didn’t expect campaign financing shenanigans, because I have a strong prior that responsible professionals might fly close to the sun but do not attempt to fly through it. More on that later.
Industry participants have their own compliance issues to worry about and frequently perceived this two-step as being too cute by half. The aim was obvious to them. Industry participants describe coalition participants as stating directly that Trump lies frequently, and helpfully telling people with degrees in logic that it therefore follows that if lies cause decisioning, and Trump lies, Trump should be decisioned.
Early 2020: The SPLC describes this campaign to Congress
The SPLC has described the coalition's strategy in its own voice, in the most formal venue available to it: sworn testimony before Congress. Lecia Brooks, who self-identifies as senior SPLC leadership, appeared before the House Financial Services, Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy on January 15th, 2020.
Verbatim quotes from prepared testimony:
For decades, the SPLC has been fighting hate and exposing how hate groups use the internet. We have lobbied internet companies, one by one, to comply with their own rules to prohibit their services from being used to foster hate or discrimination. A key part of this strategy has been to target these organizations’ funding.
The coalition was an extension of the SPLC Intelligence Project, identified as such in their 2018 Annual Report, pg 9 [archive]. A charity annual report is a governance and fundraising document exhaustively reviewed by professionals and customarily approved by the board. It would be uncharitable to argue the SPLC misunderstands or is dissimulating about its role in the coalition in that document.
Brooks, to Congress, chooses to describe the SPLC as a member of the coalition and not the animating force of it:
On Oct. 25, 2018, the Change the Terms coalition – including the SPLC and other civil rights groups – released a suite of recommended policies for technology companies that would take away the online microphone that hate groups use to recruit members, raise funds and organize violence. In response to Change the Terms’ advocacy, several Silicon Valley leaders have made promising changes that align with the coalition’s vision for a safer online world.
Brooks then lists several examples of specific wins the coalition achieved.
Brooks then claims these accomplishments advanced the SPLC’s mission. She implies that the coalition’s important work will continue.
Hate groups have clearly been damaged by the efforts of the SPLC and its allied organizations, including the Change the Terms coalition, to fight them and their funding sources online. But the fight is far from over.
Brooks had an opportunity to describe industry participants as valued partners. Brooks describes the SPLC’s relationship with industry participants in part as follows:
The public exposure was half the battle. We conducted the other part of the campaign privately. SPLC officials held dozens of meetings with top Silicon Valley executives. Some companies acted. Some took half steps. Others did little or nothing. But eventually, the far-right extremists who depended on Silicon Valley were beginning to feel the pain.
Brooks characterizes the SPLC’s tone in a similar fashion to industry participants quoted above.
She indirectly confirms one of the campaign’s core tactics: get the meeting, get a commitment under threat of coordinated public pressure, then judge progress against the commitment to be inadequate. In the next meeting, offer absolution and de-escalation, contingent on policy concessions. Repeat as desired.
The SPLC kept up the pressure, cajoling companies and exposing those that dragged their feet.
The coalition, across a wide variety of documents, more consistently describes itself as having only influence when having power would require accountability, and more consistently describes itself as having power when addressing audiences presumptively sympathetic to the aims towards which that power was deployed.
June 2020: Widespread protests throughout America. National guard, Facebook deployed.
As a reminder, in late May 2020, the death of George Floyd triggered a wave of nationwide protests.
Several of those protests devolved into riots and looting. This continued for months. The usual reckoning of the death toll, based on contemporaneous reporting, is two dozen. Property damage is generally estimated at between $1 and $2 billion based on insurance industry claims data.
Trump posted “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The U.S., unfortunately, has long historical experience with race riots, and the civil rights movement has strong institutional memory of that phrase being invoked to justify murder as a riot control tactic.
One can believe people steeped in this tradition, inclusive of many coalition members, sincerely understood the post to be a true threat. One can also believe they understood the situation to be an opportunity.
The coalition’s operating logic has been to use each expansion to prepare for the next. A win here would establish that no one is beyond its reach. It would also establish that industry just isn’t qualified to understand what their policies mean, and should defer to the subject matter experts who wrote them.
Facebook declined to remove the post.
Some employees at Facebook organized a walkout in protest.
In an attempt to quell the discontent within the ranks, senior Facebook leadership (Zuckerberg and two lieutenants) had an unusually publicized meeting with coalition members (the heads of Color of Change, the NAACP, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights).
Coalition participants did not achieve what they professed to want in that meeting and, in a tick-tock motion industry participants were very familiar with by this time, released a statement to media then coordinated coverage around it.
Widely quoted language from the statement included “Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.” The specificity and analytical rigor of this sentence is not dissimilar to that recounted by industry participants of statements made in many meetings.
The statement explained its concern was that failing to censor Trump, in a non-partisan manner of course, would result in voter suppression, via a causational pathway that the margin of the statement may have been too small to contain.
This was transparently designed to activate commitments Facebook had made in the wake of the 2016 election.
Believing the 2016 election had been tainted due to Russian interference was a left-coalition signifier—much as believing Trump actually won 2020 became a right-coalition signifier later. Neither of these views has the evidentiary strength the coalitions claim for them. But they aren’t claims advanced to achieve understanding; they are advanced to achieve alignment and, through it, power.
If one was concerned about the substantive merits of the claim on election interference, and not willing to simply accede to it on the strength of the speaker’s social position, one might wonder whether widespread actual violence might not suppress voting more than words describing hypothetical government violence.
Industry participants who asked coalition participants (in other circumstances) to explain their reasoning were told that it was not their job to educate them, that there exists literature, and that civil rights organizations had unmatchable expertise. Stick to coding, geeks. This did not always mollify industry participants, who in 2020 and 2021 were becoming deeply skeptical of expertise wielded as a shield for disastrous policy recommendations. For reference, see any history of the early days of the covid pandemic.
When they knew the cameras were rolling, participants were fractionally more disciplined. Color of Change's Robinson delivered a 2019 speech to Facebook leadership [archive], telling executives directly that they had 'profound gaps in their expertise' and that implementing CTT would be 'a step toward seriousness.' We believe we fairly characterize other documents we have seen as extending the logic from a claim about incapacity to understand racism as a societal problem to incapacity to understand the words written on industry’s internal policy documents.
The term of art in industry for the person responsible for the interpretation of a document is the “owner” of that document. Accepting this term of art, many professionals in the industry would agree that if the coalition doesn’t understand themselves to own the policies, it’s tough to guess where they think they should be on the stakeholder-analysis form. “Consulted” doesn’t get to say the owner has blood on their hands after a decision.
July 29th, 2020: Anti-trust committee hearing about market power
The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law conducted a hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The CEOs of the four companies attended as witnesses.
This is the hearing at which Jeff Bezos invited Congress to recommend a substitute data product for the SPLC blacklist.
About a month later 15 Republican lawmakers wrote Bezos a letter, saying:
Amazon’s ongoing reliance on the SPLC, with its documented anti-conservative track record, reinforces allegations that Big Tech is biased against conservatives and censors conservative views.
The letter did not contain a recommendation for an alternative data product.
Industry participants were extremely aware of the climate regarding potential anti-trust actions against their firms at many times during these years. Avoiding that was a central goal of policy teams and company leadership at all levels. Industry participants perceived the coalition members as possessing substantial influence over outcomes for anti-trust policy.
You don’t get interviewed by Hillary Clinton for being a nobody.
January 6th, 2021: A riot at the Capitol
Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump disputes this.
A planned demonstration in Washington D.C. for protesters sympathetic to him, timed to coincide with the counting of electoral votes in the Capitol Building, devolved into a riot. Demonstrators gained physical access to the Capitol Building, sometimes by force and sometimes being let in by overwhelmed police. Capitol Police shot and killed one demonstrator while she attempted to enter a window. A Capitol Police officer who had responded to the riot died the following day; the medical examiner ruled the cause natural (strokes) but noted the events of the day played a role in his condition.
Industry participants and coalition participants treated the events of January 6th as a multi-faceted emergency and responded within days.
Industry participants converged on nearly unanimously terminating or severely restricting services to Trump and affiliated entities. Coalition participants pressed publicly and privately for this outcome.
Some commentators view these events as over a dozen firms watching the same news and making substantially the same decisions independently of each other. Some commentators, focusing on the near unanimity, believe these decisions to have been strictly coordinated. This commentator believes neither.
There was a widespread effort to blame the tech industry specifically for the events of January 6th, contemporaneously reported in many places. The WSJ synthesizes, in a straight news story, the view “The Capitol incursion, some of which was planned and discussed in advance on social media, has hardened many Democrats’ view that a lack of tech-platform regulation is undermining democracy.” The climate in industry contemporaneously was acutely aware of being perceived as a threat to national security.
Industry participants perceived they were making decisions under conditions of profound risk to their businesses. This perception was contemporaneously noted by many external observers, including then-Senator Rubio, quoted by the WSJ as saying:
The reason why these guys are doing it is that the Democrats are about to take power, and they view this as a way to get on their good side.
If “get on their good side” converges with “not get one’s license to do business revoked” then there is not much daylight between that model and tech’s own. I am making this observation generally, on the basis of years of industry experience, rather than on the specific basis of any conversation that happened that week.
Financial professionals not directly employed by tech companies themselves shared this model, articulated it, and attempted to profit from it in a way which is entirely permissible under capitalism. Bellwether tech stocks (including those of industry participants) sold off during market highs for non-tech indexes, pricing in regulatory risk to these businesses.
This was noted by many non-political industry observers. The WSJ quoted an equity analyst as saying:
The bottom line is that the odds of legislative action on privacy, antitrust and [liability shield Section] 230 just went up significantly.
Investment banks get market color on recorded lines. In tech we get it in DMs from people we’ve worked with before and will again. It flows up to decisionmakers when it needs to. Much color is tweets being pasted into Slack.
This is not limited to times of national crisis. Speed is edge. As an illustrative example, regulators learned FTX had tried suborning a bank from the NYT, who learned it from an informed source in Tokyo, who developed a package of proof after reading a single document posted to Twitter. Or so this writer speculates in a curiously specific and consistent manner.
Now, putting these observations together:
Imagine a coordination game with two sides of a fence. Players have to pick either side of the fence. They may announce their decision at any time, and may change it until all players have announced a decision. Payoffs to this game decline the longer one waits. They are catastrophically negative if the game ends with one player alone on a side. The game has no winners ever and you can’t refuse to play.
This game has a “race to be second” dynamic, where any credible commitment to a move, or observed move, strongly encourages any player contemplating the same move to immediately announce it. Each additional player joining the block is a domino against players who have yet to announce.
The real-life situation reached rough equilibrium by January 10th.
Industry participants do not perceive themselves as having highly weighted the opinions of coalition participants during these few days. They were considered unimportant relative to other factors. Nor did industry participants broadly attempt to solicit input from coalition participants, in part because their responses were viewed as being trivially predictable. Further meetings during a crisis were considered a distracting waste of time.
Coalition members publicly and privately, along with many who had learned by imitation, immediately demanded everyone shut down everything. If he still had Netflix the next day it was not for want of trying.
Change the Terms issued a joint statement [archive] demanding an absolute Trump ban on January 6th itself using extraordinary language.
If platforms do not take immediate action to permanently remove Trump’s accounts, they will further share in the blame for additional white-supremacist violence that may unfold over the evening and in the remaining days before Trump’s term as president ends.
February 25th, 2021: The SPLC lobbies Congress to require companies to inform on non-profits, and others, to government
The House Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy held a hearing titled Dollars Against Democracy: Domestic Terrorist Financing in the Aftermath of Insurrection. SPLC’s Brooks again offered prepared testimony. The SPLC appears to ask Congress for new legislation establishing a BSA-style mandatory reporting regime, with penalties for non-compliance, across industry participants.
Verbatim quotes, bolding in original:
Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
and
[These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
Given that this reporting regime is mandatory, on the face of it, if a respected civil rights organization makes a payment to an individual responsible for violence, harassment, and/or terrorism, facilitators would have an immediate reporting requirement. That seems to carry the risk of reporting on the actions of an NGO to a potentially hostile government. That government could be the current one or a future one, because governments have been known to keep written records and employ personnel who serve across generations.
Had the SPLC asked me for comment on this novel expansion of BSA-style enforcement mechanisms, I would have told them that the existing BSA enforcement apparatus routinely negatively impacts marginalized individuals the SPLC makes the center of their moral concern. Bits about Money has made this argument across many pieces and in depth for years, continuing on observations I had made during my time as a consumer advocate for individuals with banking and credit problems, dating to the mid-2000s.
June 4th, 2021: Facebook rescinds newsworthiness exception to multiple policies
Facebook announced that it would end its longstanding "newsworthiness exception” to content moderation rules. This was a concession to years of repeated public and private demands by CTT coalition members. These demands included the October 2019 letter co-signed by 46 organizations including several CTT coalition members.
This form of exception was called out in the CTT Terms and ending it was an avowed goal of the coalition.
CTT coalition members then pushed for another concession they desired.
July 2021: The CTT coalition attempts non-partisan interdiction of Trump PAC fundraising
Industry participants have characterized coalition members as being routinely undisciplined, verbally and in writing, in specifically nominating FEC-registered entity controlled accounts, including fundraising accounts, for termination. They claim this was a pattern of practice for several years. Bits about Money has reviewed multiple records suggestive of this pattern.
It is not straightforward to authenticate documents obtained through sources. More rigorous authentication often poses additional risk to sources.
On the other hand, sometimes documentary evidence of the pattern is available from the coalition directly. Common Cause maintains a WordPress site, and occasionally posts their target lists in public. [archive] WordPress is a complex and highly modular open source platform which you could use for a blog or e-discovery delivery service.
Bits about Money’s eclectic collection of coalition-authored communications unequivocally demonstrates a) multiple coalition members b) specifically directing account termination and/or continuous restriction c) against Trump-affiliated accounts d) for the express purpose of interdicting political fundraising and other activity e) with them subsequently fundraising in specific reliance upon these acts. We offer the published document in substantiation of claims a-d and the next section of this piece in substantiation of claim e.
Verbatim quotes from the document:
As you know, The Team Trump Facebook page is operated by Save America, a political action committee (“PAC”) controlled by Trump.
and
Allowing Team Trump to continue running political ads on Facebook is a significant loophole in Trump’s two-year suspension and provides a pathway for the former president to evade the ban. … Further, Team Trump is soliciting donations and inviting supporters to Trump rallies.
and
[We urge you to s]ubject the Team Trump account and any other account under Trump’s control, including any account of a political committee authorized and/or established by Trump pursuant to campaign finance law, to the same two year-ban as his Facebook and Instagram accounts.
No other accounts are specifically nominated in this document.
The document makes a token gesture that the principle is broader than the specific PAC whose fundraising activities it desires to be interdicted.
[We urge you to s]ubject any Facebook pages run by a political committee or other political entity authorized, established, financed, maintained or controlled by an individual to the same content moderation decisions as that individual’s Facebook account.
The Common Cause demand letter was co-signed by CTT coalition members Common Cause, CAP, Free Press, GPAHE, Media Justice, NHMC, and many other aligned 501c3 organizations. The published version of the demand letter is not signed by the SPLC.
Consider what level of operational discipline prevailed in the coalition, which employs many communications professionals and lawyers, to publish that document. Now imagine what individual coalition employees wrote with their thumbs. Do you picture excessive emoji, or prose that reads more Blackberry.
Later in 2021: Coalition members fundraise in reliance upon this conduct
Coalition participants Free Press and Common Cause rented a mobile billboard to reiterate their demands. The mobile billboard was deployed to follow Facebook executives around Washington D.C. They tie this action to organizing to achieve a government investigation of Facebook.
Verbatim quotes from their press release [archive], titled Facebook Targeted by Mobile Billboard Circling Capitol Hill Demanding That Company Close the Trump Ad Loophole:
A mobile billboard demanding that Facebook ban Team Trump ads in accordance with its ongoing suspension of Donald’s [sic] Trump’s accounts will greet Facebook representatives following their Capitol Hill testimony today.
and
Sponsored by Free Press Action and Common Cause, the mobile billboard began its route this morning and is continuing to circle the Federal Trade Commission, the White House, Facebook headquarters and the U.S. Capitol, and will join the “Rally to Investigate Facebook”
We below reproduce Chris Cruz 8 Media Group’s photo of the mobile billboard, attached to the press release. The mobile billboard reads “Facebook must close Trump’s ad loophole” and “Nobody is above the rules.” We believe this reproduction is fair use for the purpose of reporting and commentary, but are happy to pay any reasonable fee for an unrestricted non-exclusive perpetual worldwide license across all media types currently existing or to be invented. Invoice to Kalzumeus Software, LLC please.
Free Press’s 2021 end of year communication [archive] to donors, signed by its co-CEOs, attempted to fundraise in part based on their participation in the Change the Terms coalition and in part based on the mobile billboard campaign to interdict PAC fundraising. The communication includes a photo of the billboard. All following quotes are from the document, and bolding is true to the original.
[W]e co-founded Change the Terms, a coalition that calls on the platforms to adopt model policies we developed to crack down on hateful content.
…
Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump[.]
…
Facebook initially suspended Trump “indefinitely” and later changed his suspension to a two-year ban. We’re now pushing the company to permanently ban Trump and to close a loophole that’s allowing a Trump PAC to fundraise and organize on his behalf.
The funding call to action, immediately above a donate button, was:
FUND THE FIGHT. Your generosity makes our work possible. Please give what you can today to make sure we have the resources we need to keep fighting for equitable media policies that improve people’s lives.
The communication included the following disclaimer, directly under the donation call-to-action. It was italicized.
Free Press and Free Press Action are nonpartisan organizations fighting for your rights to connect and communicate. Free Press and Free Press Action do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
2022 to present: the Change the Terms coalition evolves posture
Meetings between industry participants and coalition participants decline from being a regular practice to occasional and ad hoc. This is according to several industry participants in past meetings. The Change the Terms social media presences, which had posted regularly from 2018 through 2021, significantly scaled back their operations. Their last Medium post was in May 2022. Their last tweet was in mid-2023.
CTT coalition member GPAHE released a statement [archive] about Facebook and Trump on January 25th, 2023. The Change the Terms coalition retweeted it, in one of their final Twitter posts, and the final one naming Trump.
The most striking difference from the CTT coalition’s past several years of public and private statements: this is, conspicuously, carefully worded.
There was no urging, calling upon, demanding, etc in this public statement. It was comparatively disciplined in only describing Facebook’s decision and their analysis of it, and letting a rhetorical question hang in the air.
If that’s not enough for Facebook to continue to ban him, then what is?
When we wrote about this in Bits about Money, published May 1st, we surmised that this evolution represented a break from form for the coalition. We assumed that they had begun to become disciplined in public communications.
We were wrong. Bits about Money regrets the error.
January 2023: Change the Terms intervenes, in own name, against declared candidate for presidency
On January 20th, 2023, Change the Terms published [archive], on its own letterhead, a last-ditch effort to get Facebook to “instate” a ban against Trump.
The document begins:
On behalf of Change the Terms, a coalition of more than five dozen civil rights, human rights, tech policy and consumer protection organizations, we urge you to permanently instate Meta’s ban on former President Donald Trump.
The document clearly understands the Facebook platform to be core to political activity, citing the possibility that Trump might campaign on the immigration issue (“[use Facebook’s] advertising platform to target xenophobic campaign ads to potential voters”).
President Trump repeatedly violated Meta’s rules. He used Facebook to spread hate and racism against people of color, targeted Black women and women of color politicians, spread misogyny and white supremacy, used your advertising platform to target xenophobic campaign ads to potential voters, repeatedly spread lies about the integrity of our electoral process to undermine our democracy, and used your platform to incite a violent insurrection.
No other candidate is named in the statement.
The coalition’s stated rationale in intervening, via Meta, was to preserve democracy by defeating Trump.
On January 6, 2021, you might have claimed ignorance on the extent of the harm posed by President Trump’s use of Meta’s platforms. Today such a claim would be a reckless abdication of your responsibility to protect the safety of the larger Meta community and the health of U.S. democracy. We implore you to do the right thing.
Trump was, as of the publication of this document, unambiguously a candidate for public office. He had filed his statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission months earlier.
Trump would, despite the best efforts of Change the Terms and its allies, go on to win the 2024 election to the presidency.
A brief parable about maintaining tax-exempt status
Wiley Coyote Charities, an IRS-recognized 501c3 non-profit organization in a universe not too far from our own, has chased its hated nemesis for years. The orange road runner is tantalizingly close. Focused and untiring, perceiving himself close to ultimate victory, Wiley Coyote Charities salivates. This time, this time for sure, he will be sated. He will be free.
Wiley Coyote Charities speeds past a sign reading “Danger: Plausible Non-Partisanship Ends.” The only danger is to that blasted bird.
Wiley Coyote Charities is, to the appearance of observers of the race, now running over two miles of clear blue sky. He has not yet looked down. We know what will happen when he does. Blame the road runner all the way down.
As a former 501c3 CEO myself, I am aware of the requirements to maintain tax-exempt status. This is of paramount importance to charities. You can save yourself some legal bills quickly with the IRS's Restriction of Political Campaign Intervention by Section 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt Organizations :
"Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes."
501c4 organizations have similar considerations. Consult your lawyer.
We have invited coalition participants to comment.
As our reporting is potentially averse to coalition members, we have made extraordinary efforts to get their side of the story. We have reached out on 15 occasions to 10 organizations. We sent emails to named staffers identified on contact pages, to press team aliases, and to senior communications staff identified as such on LinkedIn. We used comment forms when we had no other option. In the final extremity, we posted publicly on Twitter. Twice. (The Change the Terms coalition does not appear to maintain a press contact to discuss their long-running non-partisan interest in these matters.)
We asked very simple and specific questions.
A representative example, to Change the Terms directly:
We invite Change the Terms to deny, in the voice of the coalition, with specificity and vigor, that it has directed negative action against specifically designated accounts for the purpose of interdicting political fundraising and activity.
Where we were prepared to publish evidence averse to the coalition, we described that evidence with specificity. There was no ambush by hidden camera. We told them, in advance, which documents they wrote that we would rely on.
We were polite and non-argumentative in our outreach. We gave participants between one and four business days of time to formulate their reply, depending on participant and round of outreach.
On general knowledge of industry practice, pending litigation is frequently cited as a reason to decline comment on the litigation's subject matter. The SPLC is not presently under indictment for the subject of this piece, nor is any other coalition participant, as far as we are aware.
The Southern Poverty Law Center ran and runs a private intelligence service. It has, in its own voice and through its Change the Terms coalition allies, claimed unique expertise and therefore moral standing to dictate terms to the rest of society.
The coalition is well-resourced due to the generosity of donors aligned with its stated non-partisan mission. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It maintains large staffs of communication professionals and lawyers.
The coalition has attempted to achieve power over what Americans can read, say, and hear, and has in some cases achieved such power. The coalition claims unfettered jurisdiction over payments, blocks anyone it pleases from at least some financial services, and answers to no appeal or authority. The coalition has intervened against a named, declared candidate to the presidency, despite consistently claiming to be non-partisan.
What do they have to say for themselves?
We received a statement from the Center for American Progress
It seems precisely one participant in the coalition thinks the conduct we have reported remains meritorious enough to offer a defense. We shall engage with that defense substantively.
Among similar questions to others, we asked CAP:
to deny, with specificity and vigor, that your own organization has directed negative action against specifically designated accounts for the purpose of interdicting political fundraising and activity. We hold documents which conclusively demonstrate that the Center for American Progress has done so on at least one occasion, including: (a) a July 26, 2021 letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed by the Center for American Progress and twenty other organizations, in which the signatories identified "any account of a political committee authorized and/or established by Trump pursuant to campaign finance law" as a demanded target of platform denial; and (b) a January 20, 2023 letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed on behalf of Change the Terms by Adam Conner, Vice President, Technology Policy, Center for American Progress, in which the coalition characterized the target's prior platform use as having included "campaign ads to potential voters" and demanded permanent denial of platform access. As you are aware, at the time of the second statement, Trump was a declared candidate for the presidency.
A Center for American Progress spokesperson provided a statement. Interested parties may read it in full.
The statement minimizes CAP’s involvement in the Change the Terms coalition, and the coalition itself.
CAP participated in Change the Terms (CTT), an informal advocacy coalition co-chaired by several organizations, including CAP. Our participation in the collective concluded when coalition’s work [sic] ended in early 2024.
This informal advocacy coalition had letterhead; you may recall it from their demand letter to Meta. It had sufficient governance to have a senior CAP executive sign as a co-chair of the coalition on that demand letter. It coordinated complex multi-party actions. One of its first was the debut broadcast for the Terms, hosted at the CAP offices, which was covered with a professional multi-camera broadcast setup. (If you missed it on C-SPAN in 2018, you can still catch it on YouTube.)
[Patrick notes: See the broadcast at about 43:05 for one of the shoutouts to C-SPAN: "Please do wait for the microphone [to ask questions] since we're C-SPANed and otherwise."]
The coalition was identified as being co-founded by the Intelligence Project in the SPLC’s 2018 Annual Report (pg 9). We see no reason to doubt the SPLC’s characterization of it being an organized and deliberate effort capable of multi-year planning.
The coalition’s collective moral authority was invoked, repeatedly, to secure meetings with companies. Its name rang out in the halls of Congress. The coalition’s work has ended, though we can find no announcement on its numerous professionally produced surfaces. We may have missed the C-SPAN coverage of the victory over hate.
With respect to the specific denial we had asked for: CAP declined to make it, responding with anodyne reframing that all political parties are opposed to violence. We are happy to stand with anyone on this most-basic-of-all democratic principles, but CAP really did ask for intervention against the campaign of a named candidate for elected office.
Their statement today:
Neither CAP nor CTT sought to "interdict political fundraising" or suppress nonviolent political expression.
Their words in 2023, describing conduct which they believed justified permanent suppression:
used your advertising platform to target xenophobic campaign ads to potential voters, repeatedly spread lies about the integrity of our electoral process to undermine our democracy
One can certainly disagree with those positions, and about half of Americans do. One can certainly agree that our electoral process was successfully corrupted by Russia, and about half of Americans do. Every four years we go into the ballot box to hash it out. We do not ask non-partisan charities to decide which non-violent beliefs are permissible then use “powerful, private companies” (the statement’s words) as their enforcers.
Their statement today:
The letters were motivated by and sought to address concerns over Meta’s confusing application of its own standards and reversal of the steps it had taken to assure Facebook reflected a free, peaceful and vibrant public forum necessary for the functioning of our democracy.
Their words in 2023:
On January 6, 2021, you might have claimed ignorance on the extent of the harm posed by President Trump’s use of Meta’s platforms. Today such a claim would be a reckless abdication of your responsibility to protect the safety of the larger Meta community and the health of U.S. democracy. We implore you to do the right thing.
Their statement today:
Neither CAP nor CTT sought to "interdict political fundraising" or suppress nonviolent political expression.
Common Cause’s demand letter in 2021 which CAP co-signed:
Allowing Team Trump to continue running political ads on Facebook is a significant loophole in Trump’s two-year suspension and provides a pathway for the former president to evade the ban.
For example, Team Trump has posted ads asking users to “join President Trump,” “show President Trump what you think,” and “stand with President Trump.” Further, Team Trump is soliciting donations and inviting supporters to Trump rallies.
We asked whether CAP’s statement should be attributed to their 501c3 or 501c4, stating that unless specified we would attribute to both. It appears to be attributed to the Center for American Progress, the same as the 2023 and 2021 demand letters. Their 501c4 entity is the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
No other member of the coalition offered any comment
Despite making reasonable (and perhaps beyond reasonable) efforts to offer other coalition members, and the coalition itself, the opportunity to contextualize their past actions, none seemed willing to engage with the record.
[Patrick notes: Animated version also available. This felt more glamorous on Lois & Clark.]
The moral authority of charities is a commons
When one walks into Congress and announces oneself as a non-partisan charity, one is drawing upon a treasury built by many people over many years.
Washington is not a town which hates political flacks. It just calibrates expectations for their candor appropriately. You do not rate testifying to Congress as a flack. Nor would a gaggle of flacks be able to bring the largest companies in capitalism to the table, except with the traditional method: payment for services rendered.
We trust charities. We see their good works in our cities, in our history, and in our lives. On the basis of that trust, and on our desire to see more of their important work in the future, we extend privileges. The most concrete one is the exemption from taxation.
We extend that privilege as part of a trade. In return for it, you must forsake being a flack. Quoting the IRS: a 501c3 is “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office[.]”
Was society well served by the coalition’s operation? Was our trust respected? Can its members stand proud in the public eye? Can they say, forthrightly, what they did with our trust?
Or was this the unsavory, cutthroat business of an intelligence operation? Is it not to be spoken of in polite company? Was this the game of mirrors, and half-truths, and knives in the dark?
It is difficult to run an intelligence operation out of a non-partisan charity, and eventually one or the other must win out. Whichever won, we lost.
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