Who funds politicians spreading hate?

Who funds politicians spreading hate, racism and misogyny? Follow the money with Code For Democracy.

"Paul Gosar a Republican posted a photoshopped anime video to his Twitter and Instagram accounts showing him appearing to kill Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response Monday saying a "creepy member" of the House had "shared a fantasy video of him killing me.""And he'll face no consequences bc @GOPLeader cheers him on with excuses," she added. - CNN

Political donations are reported to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), but are hard to trace given the volume of donations. Code For Democracy (CFD) has a simple solution which lets you easily track how much a donor donated to a specific candidate. It even sends out alerts when they get new donations. This blog describes four free apps:

Code For Democracy - track the money influencing politics as soon as it is reported
Scribe - A simple way to train others on how to use an app
Canva - Free app to design graphics and comic strips
Noun Project - Hundreds of icons relevant for social justice and voting rights causes

Follow the money promoting hate

Politicians need money to get elected. Do their donors really what they are funding? Track political donations in the Federal Elections Commission database with free apps like:
Open Secrets
Follow The Money
Little Sis
You can make queries with these apps, but one at a time. How do you stay informed of donations made while you're busy? Or need an automated to create list of donors that's always up to date?

Sherlock Holmes on steroids

Code for Democracy (CFD) provides a free to automate searches for political donations. Create queries in their app and it regularly checks against the Federal Elections Commission database to see if there have been any more donations made to the person you are interested in. Their app fetches the data and updates the graphs or reports you've created for that individual.

We tested the CFD solution by creating a query to see who was funding Paul Gosar. This took about ten minutes and you can see the results here. The list of results can be sorted, saved and shared. CFD fetches the latest data from the FEC every time you click on the link, so you always have the most latest information on Dosar donations.

Code For Democracy

Code For Democracy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that fights hidden influence in US politics by building tools that automate the analysis of open data. Its tools helps journalists, researchers, and open government advocates investigate relationships between campaign contributions, political narratives, and legislative outcomes. Their mission is to strengthen democratic processes by creating digital tools that support free and fair elections, open governance, and fact-based public policy.

Create your own query to track donations

Here is a simple, step-by-step instructions on how to create your own query with Code For Democracy. This tutorial was created in minutes with the free SCRIBE app. SCRIBE is ideal for online training because you can quickly create a tutorial, share the tutorial with others through a link and edit the training whenever needed.

Free apps to create compelling visuals

The infographic on 'Follow and expose the money funding hate' was created with the 'Comic Design' feature of the free CANVA app along with free icons from The Noun Project.

TakeAway: Hold donors accountable for funding politicians promoting hate and violence with the free Code For Democracy app.

Deepak
DemLabs

Zuckerberg's Facebook lack of standards

"The video was also posted to Instagram, owned by Facebook (now Meta). Instagram labeled the video as "sensitive content" Tuesday. "The video may contain graphic or violent content," the label states. In a section explaining why the video was labeled that way, Instagram explains, "This post doesn't go against our community standards, but may contain images that some people might find upsetting." - CNN

It makes you wonder what if anything, goes against Zuckerberg's standards?

Images & icons used