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.”
Courier is the second-largest spender on political ads on Snapchat in the final two months of the election, following the Harris campaign itself — which has paid more than $3.2 million since the beginning of September, according to ad transparency reports from the parent company of Snapchat, Snap Inc.
One Courier-funded ad shows Nevadans in front of Harris-Walz signs explaining why they’re voting for her. The minute-and-a-half-long clip cost more than $3,000 for about 180,000 users to see the ad and ends with, “Don’t forget to get involved by visiting go.KamalaHarris.com,” and flashes the distinctive, capitalized Harris-Walz logo.
Nowhere does the clip show a Courier Newsroom logo, nor does it link to editorial content from Courier’s websites. By all accounts, the ad appears to come straight from the Harris campaign.
The Nevada ad is part of a larger $880,000 ad spend to promote a wider range of Courier content on the platform since the beginning of September, Snapchat reports show. It’s a small portion of the company’s total social media spend: Data from Meta shows Courier Newsroom has spent $6.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads since the end of July, largely in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
“We enthusiastically promote our original explainer news content on Snapchat to reach key groups of younger Americans left behind by traditional news,” Courier spokesperson Danielle Strasburger said in an email to NOTUS.
Based on the nonprofit filings that are publicly available about Courier, it is funded by large grants from Democratic donors, and groups like Planned Parenthood, as NOTUS has previously reported. “COURIER is a transparently progressive digital news network,” Strasburger told NOTUS about the Snapchat ads, but she did not directly respond to questions about the promoted, unbranded clips of Harris. “The FEC unanimously affirmed COURIER in the past with a full-throated defense of our rights as a media company,” she said.
A NOTUS review of the more than 100 ads Courier ran on Snapchat in the past two months found less than half of the ads featured explainer-style content. The rest are clips of Harris or campaign surrogates and supporters laying out the case for voting for Harris.
Nearly 20 had no Courier branding or link to Courier editorial content — beyond the name of the paying advertiser at the top of the page, according to Snapchat ad formatting.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The FEC investigated Courier after a 2020 complaint from the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust alleged the company made political expenditures but didn’t register as a political committee when it promoted articles favoring Democratic candidates to voters in swing counties. (Last week, APT also filed complaints against another Democrat-backed network of local news sites running political ads this election cycle.)
Commissioners unanimously rejected the allegation in 2022, determining that Courier operates as a “press entity” and is exempt from federal campaign finance reporting laws.
“The overall record indicates that Courier was acting in a legitimate press function through the production and distribution of both electoral and non-electoral articles,” commissioners wrote in their decision, “Even if some of its content appears to advance its electoral goals.”
Experts told NOTUS that the press exemption is historically broadly interpreted to protect the First Amendment right to a free press. But unlike the latest round of Snapchat ads, the 2020 complaint centered on promoted articles that clearly linked back to Courier’s news content.
Courier’s political ads on Snapchat this cycle, without newsroom branding or editorial content, “appears to be a new tactic or method that they’re using in this election cycle to target voters,” Sadeghi told NOTUS.
NewsGuard describes Courier as a “pink slime” outlet — newsrooms that appear to be local newspapers but are actually backed by partisan groups and have limited transparency about their funding. If the FEC did treat Courier ad spending as political expenditures, Courier would be required to disclose its donors.
“In the past, we’ve worked with Courier Newsroom, sent them our ratings and they’ve made efforts to try and be more transparent,” Sadeghi said. “Our updated review, year after year, has found that they’re still not being transparent about their political leanings and agenda.” Campaign finance experts said the spending is also part of a broader trend this election cycle that capitalizes on the fact that political ads on social media are less regulated than traditional broadcast advertisements.
Influencers who are paid to create political ads aren’t required to disclose it. Campaigns and political committees are required to disclose spending on ads, but they often use third-party contractors to fund influencer campaigns.
“The last time there was major campaign finance legislation by Congress was 2002,” Ian Vandewalker, with the liberal voting rights group Brennan Center for Justice, told NOTUS. “The world of media that we live in now just didn’t exist then. So it’s a lot of obsolete, or just new things, that aren’t contemplated by the legislation.”
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Claire Heddles is a reporter for NOTUS and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.