We’ve kicked off the new year with another busy month here at Issue One as we continue our work to fix our broken political system and build an inclusive democracy that works for everyone.
Here are some highlights from January:
Ahead of this week’s Senate Judiciary Hearing where CEOs from five major social media companies — Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord — testified about their failures to protect children from sexual exploitation online, we released a new analysis detailing how they have assembled an army of lobbyists to influence Congress. We found that Meta, ByteDance, X, Snap, and Discord combined to spend a staggering $30 million on lobbying in 2023 — an increase of 12% from what these five companies collectively spent on lobbying in 2022. Moreover, these five social media companies combined to employ 142 individual lobbyists last year — or about one for every four members of Congress.
Our CEO Nick Penniman weighed in with an op-ed run in The Hill about why Congress should start treating social media companies like media companies. On top of that, Council for Responsible Social Media member Kristin Bride and fellow mom Maurine Molak wrote an op-ed about why Congress needs immediate action to protect kids online. Both are moms who lost their children to online harms. Be sure to also check out our press release in reaction to the Senate Judiciary hearing.
As cited in Politico, 75 members of Issue One’s ReFormers Caucus (RFC) sent a letter to the leadership of the Subcommittee on Modernization, strongly urging them to implement recommendations that promote collaboration and civility within the two chambers. The RFC is a bipartisan group of nearly 200 former members of Congress, governors, and Cabinet officials that has been working since 2015 to advocate for reforms to fix our broken political system.
We spearheaded a crosspartisan coalition that urged each of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to publicly reveal information about their top campaign fundraisers — often referred to as “bundlers” — on a regular basis throughout the 2024 election cycle. The effort was covered in The Hill.
As part of our Faces of Democracy campaign, we’ve been featuring election workers from across the country to highlight the work they do on behalf of our democracy. Check out the latest installment of our Meet the Faces of Democracy series: a Q&A with Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections for Marion County, FL!
Our “The High Cost of High Turnover” report continued to make headlines, being featured in outlets such as CNN and Rolling Stone.
P.S. Join us tomorrow, February 2, at 1pm ET for “Down the Rabbit Hole: How Social Media is Designed to Radicalize its Users” — a virtual event that will bring together experts in national security, technology, and democracy to discuss the effect of social media on domestic and foreign extremism, how algorithms are designed to radicalize users, and what solutions are necessary to protect our democracy from extremism.
Issue One is the leading crosspartisan political reform group in Washington. We unite Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the movement to fix our broken political system.
