The Supreme Court severely damaged our already sickly election culture when it decided in favor of unlimited special interest campaign spending via Super PACs. While the freedom of speech was cited by the court as the primary reason for its decision, in the end it did free speech no favors. Super PACs use advertising to broadcast untrue, misleading, and slanderous messages to inflame their political bases at the direct expense of healthy debate.
Deciphering messages that are not “involved” with individual campaigns is daunting. There is no such thing as context in a 30 second spot. Any combination of clips, words, and sentences can turn an orator into a video editor’s puppet.
Luckily there is The SuperPAC App, a Shazam-like service that uses audio tags to identify a Super PAC commercial and tell the user how the message being portrayed stacks up to actual facts. Using non-partisan fact checkers like Politifact.org the app helps people to know what to believe and what is total garbage.
But it goes further, the app calls out the offenders, by listing who has funded each message. It’s not enough to know when a message is wrong, we must expose and shame the people sending them until they stop. Download it to keep your sanity this election season!
