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Yesterday morning, our friend Zeynep Tufekci, the “technosociologist,” tweeted that the “Resistance” needed to come up with new tactics in addition to phone-bombing members of Congress and crowding town halls in order to demonstrate enough power to sway wavering Republicans facing the vote on health care. Her suggestion: to create a single fundraising page targeting them, and to flood it with donations to “spook the R’s voting yes.”
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Within less than four hours, ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform, had put up a page aggregating contributions to as-yet-unnamed challengers to Republicans who were voting yes on the bill. Less than ten hours later, that page had received more than $370,000 in donations. Here’s a tweet from ActBlue showing how donations spiked after the floor vote and kept spiking for several hours.
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SwingLeft.org, a network of 300,000 volunteers that sprang up after the November election, reported taking in $500,000 to support challengers in the 65 districts it is targeting.
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DailyKos.com, the online Democratic community that is still remarkably relevant after 15 years shepherding the net roots, reports nearly three-quarters of a million in its ActBlue fund supporting would-be challengers to vulnerable House Republicans in 2018.
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The surge of donations illustrates an ongoing strength and weakness of the grassroots opposition to Trump. Grassroots money flows fast during urgent moments (the ACLU can attest to that), but groups that do other kinds of vital work still struggle for funding. (We’ll make sure that Tufekci, who is speaking at Personal Democracy Forum 2017 this June, and has a new book out called “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Frailty of Networked Protest,” takes up this topic in her keynote talk.)
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And in case you think Silicon Valley VCs are filling the gap, consider this (thanks Zeynep for the pointer): Soylent, the energy drink for nerds, just got $50 million in funding but Signal, which makes the best encrypted communications tools in the consumer marketplace, hasn’t been able to raise $10 million to expand its services.
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On the right, the American Action Network, a nonprofit tied to House Speaker Paul Ryan, says it will spend $2 million over the next 11 days in 21 districts to thank House Republicans who voted for the bill, Kevin Robillard reports for Politico.
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Building on her earlier piece for Civicist on how protest memes have infiltrated the physical world, An Xiao Mina expands on the topic for The Atlantic.
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Shan Wang reports for Nieman Lab with some lessons from Electionland, a 1000-person effort led by ProPublica to crowdsource reporting on Election Day voting problems.
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Hillary Clinton will soon launch a political group called Onward Together to help fund resistance organizations, Gabriel Debenedetti reports for Politico.
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This is civic tech: Callisto, a new app aimed at combating campus rape and sexual assault, developed by an all-female team led by an epidemiologist named Jess Ladd, gets profiled in Quartz by Cassie Werner.
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What sharing economy? The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into Uber’s use of a software tool it called Greyball that was used to surveil and circumvent law enforcement officials, Dan Levine and Joseph Menn report for Reuters.
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Crypto-wars, continued: Laura Poitras’ new film Risk, which profiles WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is not the documentary she thought she started out to make. As Jake Coyle reports for the AP, she declares in a voiceover: “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”
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