FEC listings are public records, but audiences and context matter a lot. I've struggled to find a balance with this, calling attention to tech companies' political giving by citing FEC materials that contain employee names and (sometimes) home addresses. It's tricky.
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I think Joaquin Castro crossed a line. I'm cool with calling out donors who are public figures, or very well known. Listing random people in a tweet that's going to be seen by a big audience, even when you can get that same list easily by searching the FEC site, is icky.
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You don't want to punish people for participating in our political system, whether that's as donors, volunteers, candidates or staff. This is another example of those semi-private spaces I'm always going on about. You can find the names, but they shouldn't be shouted out loud.
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I think it's perfectly fine to ask "why is the owner of BURT'S BBQ here in San Antonio giving to Trump?". I think it's fine to link the FEC records. I don't think it's cool to publish an easy-to-retweet graphic of a bunch of people's full names, many of them retirees.
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Replying to @Pinboard
I have very mixed feelings here. For reasons I don’t fully understand or agree with, we made campaign contributions a public act. The act of giving support is tied to the act of proclaiming support. Is that sensible? I don’t know, but it seems to have been a deliberate policy.
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Replying to @mattblaze @Pinboard
Structuring tbings this way reconciles poorly with the secret balll, also a deliberate feature of the system.
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Replying to @mattblaze @Pinboard
Everyone has one equal vote (in theory, at least). Donations otoh are an uneven tool of power, so transparency is supposed to offset that. In Finland small donations aren't public, only big ones.
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Donations under $200 are not required to be reported here, either (though some campaigns use filing software that reports every donation anyway)
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