Kamala Harris and Open Secrets, Building America’s Future, have no endorsed a Democratic Presidential Candidate in 2024
According to documents obtained by OpenSecrets, Building America’s Future — which has reportedly received funding from Musk — registered to use Project 2028 as a “fictitious name” in late September. The group previously ran seemingly contradictory ads aimed at voters in different swing states. The ad that was aimed at the Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan said Harris was a steadfast ally of Israel and that her husband is Jewish. An ad in Pennsylvania claims that Kamala Harris stands with Palestine, not Israel.
Musk personally distributed the first of these checks at a pro-Trump event in Pennsylvania and hasn’t let the Department of Justice’s warning that the lottery may be illegal — or a recent lawsuit filed by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — stop him.
“Whether they are impactful is another question, but they are highly likely to deceive,” he said. “They seem real and the only way to recognize they are not is if you are a highly informed voter who knows the claims are untrue.”
Weissman said that lies framed as if they are coming from the candidate goes beyond a brazen distortion.
The site states that “when Kamala Harris takes office, we will have a never-before-seen opportunity to enact sweeping reforms that will ensure that equity across every corner of America is finally a reality,” before launching into a series of policy proposals Harris does not in fact endorse in the 2024 race.
Open Secrets discovered that Progress 2028 sent text messages to potential voters, as well as a link to its web page, which gave the impression it was a group supporting Harris for president when the opposite is true.
First Amendment Right to Lye: Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and the Progress 2028 Decay ad Library
Weissman says this is not enough. “Meta is disdaining responsibility for permitting this deception, but Meta is 100 percent responsible,” Weissman said. “Yes, there is a First Amendment right to lie, but that does not constrain Meta’s management of advertisements on its platform.”
After November 5th, political advertising can resume on the social media sites, as it was not banned after the 2020 election. If votes are still being counted in the event that election ads are not allowed, Google will block them.
Meta’s Ad Library, which allows the reach of ads to be viewed, brings a level of transparency to political advertising that far exceeds that of any other platform where these ads have run.
Ryan Daniels was not involved in the Progress 2028 ads, but he did say that he wouldn’t comment on them directly. The ads do not seem to run afoul of Meta’s advertising rules, which require that entity paying for the ad be disclosed. The rules also ban premature claims of victory and ads that question the legitimacy of the election process.
“It truthfully discloses who is paying for the ad, but that entity sounds like a Harris supporting organization, when it is not,” said Weissman, who has called on Meta to remove the ads.
Weissman said that the disclosure at the bottom of the advertisement that it was paid for by Progress 2028 fuels the lie.
The ad buys are publicly available in an ad library database hosted by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. It shows that so far the group has posted 13 of these ads. As of Wednesday afternoon, Meta tallied the ads as having received 8.7 million impressions, although some viewers may have seen the same ads multiple times.
Experts told NPR that there is nothing illegal about the ads, since the First Amendment protects political speech, even when it contains lies. The messages can cause voters to change their minds just days before the election.