Elections and Media

Advocates for AI safety and regulation are emerging as a force in U.S. elections, spending nearly $50 million this election cycle on candidates who favor regulation. AI safety groups and individual donors have spent $48 million this cycle on Democratic and Republican races. That includes donations from researchers, such as OpenAI's Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe and Redwood's Aryan Bhatt. It also includes Guardrails Alliance, a tech-worker-backed AI safety group that has raised $11.7 million between its super PAC and 501(c)(4).

As social media platforms have become an important part of the information environment around the world, the view that social media is harming democracy has become more common. A new 37-nation Pew Research Center survey finds that in most countries where trend data is available, the share of the public who believes social media is bad for democracy has increased significantly from 2022 or 2023 to now. Views about social media’s impact are particularly negative in the United States, where 64% of adults say it is bad for democracy.

Democratic consultants are privately encouraging their battleground candidates to avoid talking about artificial intelligence regulations out of fear that powerful tech groups will unleash a tidal wave of spending against them ahead of November. That guidance came from strategists in three separate top-tier House races, according to people involved in those races, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

The House passed a bill meant to protect consumers from higher electricity rates caused by data centers in one of its final votes before the midterms. The bill passed under a procedure that fast-tracks noncontroversial legislation and requires a two-thirds majority vote.

President Trump's longtime pollster is offering Republican candidates a detailed playbook for neutralizing Democratic attacks over AI data centers—down to what languag

Most Americans see freedom of the press – protected by the First Amendment to the U.S.

Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone. This is now the second time in a matter of months that a late-night host has disclosed they had to bury an interview because of Federal Communications Commission intimidation, and there is no way to know how many other editorial decisions across the country have quietly been shaped by this same pressure.

Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton recently released a realistic 

Large language models that underpin AI chatbots have taken on an expanding role in shaping the information environment. Roughly 25 percent of American adults use chatbots daily including for information gathering and synthesis, entertainment, and other uses. LLMs also increasingly influence information flows in more subtle ways. They are now a primary tool for fact-checking and content moderation on social media platforms.

Attorneys representing the state of New Mexico told jurors that targeted political ads, attempting to lower Democratic turnout during the 2016 election, used Facebook data sold to a political consulting firm, during opening statements in a trial over the platform’s data protections. In court documents, the state argues Facebook failed to alert or protect