Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Expansive, politically tough approach eyed to combat online election deceit

No fewer than 34 distinct but collaborative actions by governments, technology companies, candidates, the media and the education system are required to successfully combat digital deceptions and protect the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, a pair of non-profit groups argues.

The groups, MapLight and the Institute for the Future, say the United States was collectively slow to comprehend – and remains far behind in combatting – the pervasive influence on public opinion of political bots, troll farms, fake social media accounts, networks of disinformation websites and deceptive digital advertising. And technology companies and the campaigners themselves are not acting nearly aggressively enough to prevent the specious practices that made headlines in 2016 and 2018 from being repeated and magnified in the future.

But the sprawling roster of proposals in their new report, unveiled today, includes almost two dozen that would require bipartisan collaboration at a sharply divided Capitol or assertive actions by a Trump administration that has so far seemed disinterested in playing a strong regulatory hand in politics.


Legislation is needed to stiffen disclosure requirements for online political ads, force more donors to reveal their identities, and create a new government authority to investigate the true source of funding for digital political activity, for example. None of those bills has much of a chance in the current Congress, and the groups' proposed new federal regulations on data usage, consumer privacy and online antitrust are similarly a longshot.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

In addition, the more systemic changes the groups propose – such as making media literacy and civics more central to public education, and establishing more international cooperation in regulating online behavior – are many years away from fruition.

"Both the 2016 and 2018 elections have served as glaring reminders of the vulnerabilities in our democracy in the information age," said Ann Ravel , the co-author from MapLight and a member of the Federal Election Commission from 2013 to 2017. "We cannot respond to the challenges with paralysis and inaction. We must put in place protections now to safeguard our political process,"

"There's no magic-bullet policy that is going to automatically safeguard our elections and wind back the clock to the era before digital communication was a primary feature of political campaigning," said Samuel Woolley of the Institute for the Future. "We need our full society to be involved in responding to these problems."

Read More

Houses with price tags
retrorocket/Getty Images

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

Yes.

The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

Keep ReadingShow less
I Voted stickers
BackyardProduction/Getty Images

Voters cast ballots based on personal perceptions, not policy stances

The Fulcrum and the data analytics firm Fidelum Partners have just completed a nationally representative study assessing the voting intentions of U.S adults and their perceptions toward 18 well-known celebrities and politicians.

Fidelum conducted similar celebrity and politician election studies just prior to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Each of these found that perceptions of warmth, competence and admiration regarding the candidates are highly predictive of voting intentions and election outcomes. Given this, The Fulcrum and Fidelum decided to partner on a 2024 celebrity and politician election study to build upon the findings of prior research.

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand waving an American flag

"Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being," writes Johnson.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

Redefining America's political lingua franca

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino attendees of the Democratic National Convention

People cheer for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats

As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.

Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.

Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”

Keep ReadingShow less