Climate

Dark money is trying to take down the Inflation Reduction Act from the left

A new campaign is using social media to target voters in progressive districts to ask their representatives to vote against the Inflation Reduction Act. But it appears to be linked to GOP operatives.

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 02: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks to reporters outside of his office in the Hart Senate Office Building on August 02, 2022 in Washington, DC. Negotiations in the U.S. Senate continue for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

United for Clean Power's campaign is a symptom of how quickly and easily social media allows interest groups to reach a targeted audience.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The social media feeds of progressive voters have been bombarded by a series of ads this past week telling them to urge their Democratic representatives to vote against the Inflation Reduction Act.

The ads aren’t from the Sunrise Movement or other progressive climate stalwarts, though. Instead, they’re being pushed by United for Clean Power, a murky dark money operation that appears to have connections with Republican operatives.

While the campaign itself is not particularly sophisticated — the tagline “no reconciliation without comprehensive climate change” seems to forget that climate change is not desirable, in a bill or otherwise — it is an illustration of how social media is still being leveraged to sow doubt and confusion despite platforms trying to clean up the information environment.

The blitz started on the day Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that they had arrived at a deal for $369 billion in climate investments as part of a reconciliation bill. On Thursday, conservative Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema signaled she supported the bill after agreeing to a few tweaks to the tax policies, indicating it will likely clear the Senate.

But the votes in the House aren’t quite tied up yet, and the campaign — which newsletter FWIW first identified — has been using a swath of strategies that include social media advertising, direct text messages to voters and even a sponsorship of the POLITICO New York newsletter to try to chip away support from the left.

(Both POLITICO and Protocol are POLITICO Media Group publications, and are owned by Axel Springer.)

FWIW found a series of digital ads running on platforms like Facebook, whose parent company Meta has received at least $11,500 from the group so far, and on Google, where the group has spent at least $9,900. The campaign seems to specifically target constituents of progressive lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and urges those voters to push them to “demand environmental justice or kill the reconciliation bill.”

United for Clean Power is a symptom of how quickly and easily social media allows interest groups — both nefarious and not — to reach a targeted audience.

“Social media has allowed people to target super-specific audiences with messages about energy,” Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, told Protocol. “The scariest thing about social media is that you can test if a message is working.”

A review of both Meta’s and Google’s ad policies by the climate newsletter Heated suggests that United for Clean Power may be abusing at least Google’s policy, which doesn’t allow "coordinated deceptive practices.” POLITICO did not respond to questions from Protocol about whether a sponsor misrepresenting its position on an issue would typically be a cause for refusing to work with them.

The campaign is also targeting voters in districts represented by noted progressives via text message. Huffington Post journalist Alexander Kaufman lives in Ocasio-Cortez’s district in Queens and received one, and Sarah Loschiavo, a progressive constituent of Omar’s who has voted for the Democrat more than once, received one as well.

A collage of United for Clean Power ads and text campaigns.United for Clean Power's Facebook ads and one of its text messages sent to Sarah Loschiavo.Images: Sarah Loschiavo; FWIW

United for Clean Power has been around since 2015, though its current iteration is largely divorced from its origins. The group was co-founded by Erin Cummings, who currently works at the Department of Homeland Security, to promote bipartisan energy policies. In 2017, she transferred control of the group to its current director, Greg Finnerty, an Ohio-based lawyer who did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment. It is unclear who is funding the group under his leadership.

Cummings, who is no longer at all involved, told Protocol she is baffled by the group’s current campaign, which represents a different iteration of United for Clean Power than the one she was involved in.

“I support the bill,” she said.

In 2018, the group mounted a campaign against Ohio Republican Rep. Kyle Koehler via a Facebook page that has been quiet ever since; a 2019 tax form shows that the group spun out Ohioans for Efficient Government, which has virtually no internet presence.

The campaign’s 2018 tax forms show it spent over $135,000 enlisting the GOP-focused firm Majority Strategies for advertising services. The 2019 form, which is the most recent that is publicly available, shows the group had revenue of nearly $208,000. Neither the campaign itself nor Majority Strategies responded to requests for comment.

What is so striking about these ads is how wildly out of step they are with the reality of what progressive politicians have been pushing for on climate. While progressives had pushed for more climate funding as part of the Build Back Better Act, the Inflation Reduction Act is still historic and may be Democrats’ last best shot to pass climate legislation with the upcoming midterms likely to result in the party losing one or both chambers of Congress. Though it has not made it to the House yet, progressive independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has explicitly said that the climate funding is “a step forward” despite it coming alongside breaks for the fossil fuel industry; while he said he would submit some amendments, he seems prepared to vote for it given Democrats are moving ahead with the legislative process.

The campaign seems to ignore these dynamics entirely. But Davies said this and campaigns like it are designed to exploit the ongoing division within the party, political reality notwithstanding.

“[The campaign is] hitting a nerve that is raw, and somebody is aware of that and trying to divide the Democratic camp based on real divides that exist,” Davies said. “They know that there are divisions on the left that remain from the Green New Deal … It’s really difficult for some people to bite their tongue at this point.”

Update: This story was updated with new details, including comment from its co-founder Erin Cummings, on Aug. 9.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins