By the time this election is through, billions of dollars will have been spent between the two presidential political campaigns — and the lion’s share of that will be used to fund TV ads. Boring, obnoxious, terrible TV ads. And thanks to the glorious existence of Supreme Court-approved political action committees (PACs) and their steroided cousin the SuperPAC, pinpointing who, exactly, is funding which ad is next to impossible.That’s because the highest court in the land decided in 2009 that corporations, unions, and foreign governments may donate limitless amounts of cash to those entities — and loopholes in the rules make it possible for donors to keep their identities a secret. And even if donors do disclose their contributions, most voters will only see a jumble of meaningless small print at the end of the ads. So, a couple of Harvard and MIT grads created a ’Super PAC app":http://www.superpacapp.org/ designed to better connect voters with some context and the missing fine print. The video above demonstrates how it works.Watch this, for instance,and all you’ll see, if you’re really looking, is that some group called Restore Our Future paid for the ad. You would have no idea that Restore Our Future is the primary SuperPAC backing Mitt Romney, that it’s run by ex-Romney aides, that it has raised $82 million, and that its largest donor is Sheldon Adelson, a staunchly conservative Las Vegas real estate mogul who originally backed Newt Gingrich. Or that he alone has dumped $10 million of his savings into the PAC.Same goes for this controversial pro-Obama ad that implicitly accused Mitt Romney of killing a woman with cancer:So I downloaded Glassy Media’s Super PAC app, and gave it a whirl. I watched the Restore Our Future Ad, did the Shazaam-like audio capture, and got this:
The app tells you who’s behind the ad, how much the group has raised in total, and then links out to fact-checkers like PolitiFact.org so you can investigate its claims. (Those links take you out of the app, though, and take a while to load if you’re 3Ging). Then, you can vote on the ad: ‘Fair,’ ‘Fishy,’ ‘Love,’ or ‘Fail.’ Unfortunately, the app doesn’t hook you up to a watchdog like OpenSecrets so you can see the PACs’ donor lists and get the real grit. And it doesn’t tell you how much the ad cost, who’s running the PAC, or which markets its airing in. As such, you’re left with a bunch of news stories that mostly equivocate about the ads, a small consensus of app-users’ impressions, and the name of the offending SuperPAC. But at least it makes the act of double-checking some crap you heard on TV easier — and therefore brings it into the realm of feasible.Smartphone apps do harbor the potential to improve the democratic process by rapidly providing users with relevant information about candidates and their claims — the Shazaam-like interface is a great idea, for instance. It’s just got to be linked up to some data we can really use. We need something that more aggressively helps citizens parse fact from fiction — like this impressive analysis engine that investigates misleading political claims. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a mobile bias confirmation machine for political junkies. And an app that actually does peel away the veneer of the SuperPACs would be a hell of a tool, so let’s hope somebody takes this platform a step further.
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Priorities USA Action is of course Obama’s go-to PAC, and its biggest donors include Hollywood execs and unions.But you wouldn’t find any of that out just by watching the ad; ergo, almost nobody will ever find out, since we are a nation of lazy bastards. Seeing as how apps are indeed helping to make us even lazier bastards, we might as well use them to investigate politics for us, too.
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