Texas
Texas Ethics Commission will require influencers to disclose when they’re paid for political advertisement
The action comes after The Texas Tribune reported that influencers were being paid to defend impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton.
AUSTIN (Texas Tribune) — 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.
In a 7-0 vote, the Texas Ethics Commission gave final approval to the changes, which were first proposed in March.
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 rulemaking,” 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.
Others argued that it did not go far enough because it held social media users accountable, but not those who pay them and fail to disclose as much.
“I just don’t want to pass the buck onto people that are literally only posting these because they’ll get $75, $80 or $90 out of it,” Andrew Cates, an Austin-based attorney focused on political campaigns, testified Tuesday.
The commission’s executive director, J.R. Johnson, agreed with Cates that the change is narrowly tailored, but added that it does prevent the commission from pursuing new rules in the future that deal with those who are paying social media users to post their political advertisements.
Campaign law experts have previously said that company’s like Influenceable reflect a decadeslong failure to modernize disclosure rules, many of which have not been updated since the widespread proliferation of social media or the internet.
“The [federal] laws around disclosure of campaign spending assumed a traditional model, like paying somebody to print your ad in the newspaper or paying a TV station to play your ad on the air,” Ian Vandewalker, an expert on the influence of money in politics and elections at the Brennan Center, told the Tribune last year. “Paying an influencer to talk about a candidate doesn’t fit into those traditional definitions, and so it’s slipping through the cracks.”
Texas has some restrictions on out-of-state donations, limits donations during the biennial legislative session and requires disclosures of political advertising that contain “express advocacy.” But otherwise, one longtime campaign finance lawyer said, the state’s rules allow “dark money to run amok.”
“If you’re not actually advocating for or against the election of someone or a proposition, then you pretty much fall outside” most regulations, Austin lawyer Roger Borgelt said last year.
This year, some Republican state lawmakers have called for ethics reform during the 2025 legislative session, citing what they said was a flood of misinformation and deceptive advertising during this year’s GOP primaries. Others directly cited Influenceable, and called for legislation to curb companies like it when lawmakers meet next year.
“I’m somebody who cares about truth and motivation,” State Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican who is currently running for Texas House Speaker, told the Tribune last summer. “I really dislike manufactured outrage and manufactured narratives. I prefer people to be honest, straightforward and truthful. And so I do think that, at a bare minimum, these things should have to be disclosed.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at www.texastribune.org. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans – and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
“Radical Islamist terrorist groups are anti-American, and the infiltration of these dangerous individuals into Texas must be stopped,” said Texas A-G regarding terrorist org. CAIR.
Air traffic controllers lost communication for about 10 minutes with a small Mexican Navy plane carrying a young medical patient and seven others before it crashed off the Texas coast, killing at least five people, Mexico’s president said Tuesday.
Authorities initially believed the plane had landed safely at its destination in Galveston, near Houston, before learning it had gone down Monday afternoon, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said. The cause of the crash remains under investigation. A search-and-resuce operation in waters near Galveston pulled two survivors from the plane’s wreckage, Mexico’s Navy said, while one remained missing.
Four of the eight people aboard were Navy officers and four were civilians, including a child, Mexico’s Navy said. Two of the passengers were affiliated with a nonprofit that helps transport Mexican children with severe burns to a hospital in Galveston.
“My condolences to the families of the sailors who unfortunately died in this accident and to the people who were traveling on board,” Sheinbaum said in her morning press briefing, without elaborating on a possible cause. “What happened is very tragic.”
U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Luke Baker said at least five aboard had died but did not identify which passengers.
The plane crashed Monday afternoon in a bay near the base of the causeway connecting Galveston Island to the mainland. Emergency responders rushed to the scene near the popular beach destination about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston.
Sky Decker, a professional yacht captain who lives about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the crash site, said he jumped in his boat to see if he could help. He picked up two police officers who guided him through thick fog to a nearly submerged plane. Decker jumped into the water and found a badly injured woman trapped beneath chairs and other debris.
“I couldn’t believe. She had maybe 3 inches of air gap to breathe in,” he said. “And there was jet fuel in there mixed with the water, fumes real bad. She was really fighting for her life.”
He said he also pulled out a man seated in front of her who had already died. Both were wearing civilian clothes.
It’s not immediately clear if weather was a factor. The area has been experiencing foggy conditions over the past few days, according to Cameron Batiste, a National Weather Service meteorologist. He said that at about 2:30 p.m. Monday a fog came in that had about a half-mile visibility.
Mexico’s Navy said the plane was helping with a medical mission in coordination with the Michou and Mau Foundation. In a social media post, the foundation said: “We express our deepest solidarity with the families in light of these events. We share their grief with respect and compassion, honoring their memory and reaffirming our commitment to providing humane, sensitive, and dignified care to children with burns.”
Teams from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board were at the crash site Monday, the Texas Department of Public Safety said, and a spokesperson for the NTSB said the agency was gathering information about the crash. The Galveston County Sheriff’s Office said officials from its dive team, crime scene unit, drone unit and patrol responded the crash.
A small Mexican Navy plane transporting a 1-year-old medical patient along with seven others crashed Monday near Galveston, killing at least two people, officials said.
Emergency officials rescued four people and were searching for two that were inside the aircraft, Mexico’s Navy said in a statement to The Associated Press. Four of the people aboard were Navy officers and four were civilians, according to the Navy. It was not immediately clear which ones were missing and which had been killed.
Two of the people aboard were members from the Michou and Mau Foundation, which is a nonprofit that provides aid to Mexican children who have suffered severe burns.
The crash took place Monday near the base of a causeway near Galveston, along the Texas coast about 50 miles southeast of Houston.
Mexico’s Navy said in a statement that the plane was helping with a medical mission and had an “accident.” It promised to investigate the cause of the crash.
The Navy is helping local authorities with the search and rescue operation, it said in a post on the social media platform X.
Teams from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board have arrived at the scene of the crash, the Texas Department of Public Safety said on X.
The Galveston County Sheriff’s Office said officials from its dive team, crime scene unit, drone unit and patrol were responding to the crash.
“The incident remains under investigation, and additional information will be released as it becomes available,” the sheriff’s office said in a post on Facebook, adding that the public should avoid the area so emergency responders can work safely.
Galveston is an island that is a popular beach destination.
It’s not immediately clear if weather was a factor. However, the area has been experiencing foggy conditions over the past few days, according to Cameron Batiste, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
He said that at about 2:30 p.m. Monday a fog came in that had about a half-mile visibility. The foggy conditions are expected to persist through Tuesday morning.
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