An attempt to regulate social media impact on campaigns. Influencers are now officially recognized as campaign operatives who must disclose who they work for.
Among other things, this is an example of rulemaking by the executive branch.
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Texas’ top campaign finance watchdog voted Tuesday to require social media figures to disclose when they are paid for political advertisement, nearly a year after The Texas Tribune reported that influencers were being quietly paid to defend impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Last summer, the Tribune reported on a new company, Influenceable, that was paying Gen Z influencers to create or share social media posts that attacked the impeachment process and the Texas Republicans leading it, including House Speaker Dade Phelan. Commissioners did not mention the company directly on Tuesday, but said at their previous meeting that the changes were in response to “at least one business” that was paying social media figures for undisclosed political messaging.
Influenceable has a partnership with Campaign Nucleus, a digital campaign service that was founded by Brad Parscale, a top official on former President Donald Trump’s last two campaigns. It also received $18,000 from Defend Texas Liberty in May 2023, after which influencers began to parrot claims that Paxton was the victim of a political witch hunt, accuse Phelan of being a drunk or urge their millions of collective followers to come to Paxton’s aid.
Defend Texas Liberty is a political action committee that two West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, used to give more than $15 million to far-right campaigns and candidates in the state since 2021. The two are by far Paxton’s biggest donors.
The new change amends the commission’s rules to clarify that disclosures are required for those who are paid more than $100 to post or repost political advertisements.
“This is not the case of the TEC inventing a substantive requirement to rule making,” the commission’s general counsel, James Tinsley, said before the vote. “It’s quite the opposite. It’s pairing back an exception.”
The rule change was strongly opposed by groups and figures funded by Dunn and Wilks, who decried it when it was first proposed earlier this year and claimed that the commission was creating a “secret speech police” that could target citizens for routine social media posts. Some of the loudest critics of the proposal, including the right-wing website Texas Scorecard, have for years been involved in lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the commission and sought to strip it of most of its regulatory powers.
