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
A lot of the public records law dates from a time when it was inconceivable that the information could be broadcast on a whim to hundreds of thousands of people. I think of this stuff as "public-but-not-THAT-public". It mixes my feelings, too
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Replying to @Pinboard
I think there are at least two questions here. One is whether we should encourage a norm where powerful people single out ordinary people (I think absolutely not). The other is, given it’s now so easy to single people out, should we rethink making donations public? (Harder)
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Replying to @mattblaze
A particularly vexing aspect of this when I was fundraising was hearing from people who were victims of stalking, and could not contribute to candidates for fear of being found. Some were afraid to register to vote. And then there is the use of those lists for political spam…
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Replying to @Pinboard @mattblaze
But surely it would be nice to know that billionaire X donated a zillion dollars to Lindsay Graham, who proceeds to shill for Lockheed Martin
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The way billionaire X donates a zillion dollars is via undisclosed dark money independent expenditures, not political donations (which are capped at $2800 per donor/election/candidate). So we don't have any visibility into the truly large spending.
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Replying to @Pinboard @mattblaze
Ok fair. Which is something we should also work on...
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