News Clips

Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn explained that "we are a democracy and democracies count all the votes. But the president is freely using his Twitter account in an attempt to deliberately undermine the nation's vote count and undercut Americans' faith in our elections." "We are urging Twitter to take immediate action to enforce its own policies and curb President Trump's Twitter campaign to spread disinformation and sow unrest amongst his followers," she added. "The president's actions are dangerous and irresponsible and Twitter has an obligation to be a responsible corporate citizen and safeguard our democracy."

Leaders of two nonpartisan organizations sent Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a letter urging him to take further action to stop Mr. Trump from posting more on his platform about the presidential race. The plea from the presidents of Common Cause and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law followed Democratic congressmen similarly calling a day earlier for Twitter to suspend Mr. Trump.  Mr. Trump has repeatedly violated Twitter‘s policies recently, they noted, evidenced by the company acting on several of his posts on the social media service after Election Day ended Tuesday. They argued that simply applying warning labels or limiting the spread of Mr. Trump‘s recent posts has proven to be “insufficient,” however, and encouraged Twitter to intervene further. “We fear that, in the absence of action by Twitter, the President may be successful in his goal of delegitimizing the integrity of our democratic processes for many, and not just Twitter users but other voters and members of the public, sowing uncertainty about the voting and elections process and potentially inciting violence against civil servants or others,” they warned in the letter.

Advocacy organizations led by Prometheus Radio Project are fighting the FCC changes. They called the 3rd Circuit ruling an “unremarkable” decision that merely required the commission to explain how the changes would affect its longstanding goal of increasing ownership diversity. The FCC may not “expressly embrace ownership diversity as an important policy goal yet fail to reasonably consider how its repeal of major broadcast-ownership restrictions would affect that goal,” argued the group, which includes Common Cause and the National Organization for Women.

"The House of Representatives passed nearly 10 democracy reform bills, often with bipartisan support, this session, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked debate and markups on all of these bills and refused to allow a vote," Common Cause's director of legislative affairs, Aaron Scherb, said. The 2020 Democracy Scorecard, one of the group's initiatives, provides data on every current member of the House of Representatives and Senate, including their votes and co-sponsorships of democracy reform bills. Scherb told Newsweek that McConnell has been instrumental in blocking the current Congress from enacting laws. "There have been hundreds that have been passed by the House at this point. There have only been 158 enacted laws by this 116th Congress to this point. Yet there are hundreds of bills that have passed the House but continue to sit in Senate Majority Leader McConnell's desk, or his 'legislative graveyard' as it's been called," he said.

"[The] hack occurred in an age when the current president conducts official business on his Twitter account," said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. "Federal agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Center for Disease Control also share news and information through social media. It is time for real government oversight and for meaningful legislation to safeguard these important yet extremely vulnerable platforms."

Yosef Getachew, Media & Democracy Program Director at Common Cause, expressed a similar sentiment.  We have a "glaring lack of privacy protections [in] this country," Getachew told Salon, pointing out that there is "no federal framework for privacy." Regarding the Trump app specifically, Getachew noted that it is "pretty invasive, and one of the things that we would like to see in a federal framework is some sort of data minimization policy, where your company or service provider is only required to collect data necessary to run the surface."