The left-leaning media company Courier Newsroom is paying Snapchat to target users with unbranded clips of Kamala Harris and her campaign surrogates. At least one of the ads looks identical to an official Harris campaign ad and directs users to Harris’ campaign website.
Courier Newsroom — which was founded by a former Democratic political consultant Tara McGowan and operates a network of local newsrooms in primarily battleground states — is not required to report political spending to the Federal Election Commission, after the agency unanimously ruled the outlet was a “press entity” exempt from campaign finance laws after the 2020 election.
But its latest ad spending pushes the limits of FEC regulations, experts told NOTUS, and sheds new light on the unprecedented — and largely unregulated scope — of political ad spending on social media this election cycle.“These ads from Courier Newsroom and elsewhere aren’t disclosing the funders of the ads,” McKenzie Sadeghi, from the media transparency advocacy group NewsGuard, told NOTUS. “They just say that they were paid for by Courier Newsroom, so a user would have to do that research on their own in depth to figure out who Courier Newsroom’s finances are.”