Propaganda and Polarizing Election Ads during Campaign Season
- Sabrina Soto
- Apr 11
- 4 min read
Last year, Bernie Moreno (R) and Sherrod Brown (D) battled for the Ohio Senate seat. Bernie Moreno beat incumbent Sherrod Brown with 50.2% of the vote and flipped the seat to the Republican party after a three-term possession by Brown.
Bernie Moreno, endorsed by President Donald Trump, ran on a platform of being an outsider fighting against “corrupt insider politicians[.]” His platform focused on sixteen priorities, among them strengthening the border, beating Communist China, supporting Israel, banning late term abortions, defending the Second Amendment, and ending wokeness, cancel culture, and socialism in America. Sherrod Brown promised to strengthen the border, raise the minimum wage, protect Ohio jobs, stand up to special interests, protect LGBTQ+ rights, expand voter registration, protect abortion access, and ensure affordable, quality healthcare, among other things.
Throughout election season you might have seen some very intense political advertisements on social media, especially YouTube. The ads, mainly coming from Moreno’s campaign, attacked Brown’s policies. One such ad, claimed that “Brown backed Biden, voting to let transgender biological men participate in girls’ sports... and Brown supported allowing minor children to receive sex-change surgeries.” While this claim is not technically false, the video uses inflammatory language such as ‘biological men’ and ‘sex change surgeries’ rather than ‘transgender women’ and ‘gender-affirming care,’ in order to cause outrage and make Brown’s policies seem more dangerous and radical than they truly are. The ad also pushed the use of buzzwords, inserting the redundant word ‘minor’ in front of ‘children.’ This incendiary language was also paired with ominous music and jarring graphics. All of this put together paints a scary and dangerous portrait of Sherrod Brown, and a voter who is unaware of Brown’s actual policies could not only be swayed not to vote for him, but also pushed further towards the right out of fear of the dangerous biological men and child surgeries. This is just one example of Moreno’s political ads, as he has many others relating to abortion and pro-life issues, as well as the border. Some of my personal favorites: 1, 2.
Sherrod Brown also put out ads responding to Moreno’s attacks, though very few and noticeably less inflammatory than the Senate Leadership Fund’s ads for Moreno. On facebook, he published an ad claiming that “special interests supporting Bernie Moreno are spending more than 100 million dollars in negative ads against [him]. They’re lies, they’re not true. But they think they can buy Ohio.” Brown’s ad uses Moreno’s opposition to insider politicians against him, implying that Moreno is corrupt because of his connections to ‘special interests’ which will allow him to ‘buy Ohio.’ While this attacks Moreno on a much smaller scale than Moreno’s ads attacked Brown, it still uses buzzwords and defamatory language to influence voter perceptions of Moreno.
These ads straddle the line between fact and disinformation, and are certainly defamatory. This poses the question how can political advertisements make false statements and lies about their opponents? The answer is that it is nearly impossible for a candidate to get in trouble for publishing false information. At the federal level, the “law prohibits false statements related to voting eligibility… and knowingly defrauding state residents of a fair election by procuring materially false ballots. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) also imposes disclaimer requirements on certain political campaign advertisements.” There are some restrictions on how candidates can campaign, but they mainly relate to fair voting and elections and funding disclosement rather than advertisement content. This is because the Supreme Court fears that “by prohibiting false speech, the government would also “chill” more valuable speech.” This means that people would censor what they want to say regardless of its truth because they fear the repercussions of false speech. Because of this reluctance to limit speech, public officials, if they wish to limit the speech of their opponents, must prove that the advertisement was made with “‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Since Moreno’s ads hold specks of truth, but just use specific words and visuals to twist the truth, it would be very difficult to prove that Moreno’s ads were made with knowledge of the information being false.
Ohio state law does not add any more restriction onto these federal regulations either. With only a vague guideline in the Ohio Revised Code (Section 3517.21) that states almost the exact same knowledge of falsehood requirement as the federal government, opponents would struggle to prove intent.
Next time you’re watching YouTube or scrolling through social media and come across a political advertisement, keep this in mind: no one is regulating what people can say on air. Both sides’ political candidates and their respective party’s goal is to push you as far into their side as possible. They will spread sensationalized or fear-mongering content to scare you into a radicalized point of view. Watch out for this, question everything, and do your own research. Do not be fooled by catchy slogans and buzzwords. Only in this way can we all do our parts to fight widening political divides and radicalism. For more reading on political advertisements and their lack of regulation, check out this article by WGBH.
Sources
"Bernie Moreno for U.S. Senate." Bernie Moreno for U.S. Senate. Accessed November 19, 2024.
Congressional Research Service. False Speech and the First Amendment: Constitutional Limits
on Regulating Misinformation. Government Publishing Office, 2022. Accessed
November 19, 2024. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180.
"Issues." Sherrod Brown. Accessed November 19, 2024. https://www.sherrodbrown.com/issues/.
Legislative Service Commission. "Section 3517.21 | Infiltration of campaign - false statements in
campaign materials - election of candidate." Ohio Laws & Administrative Rules. Last
modified August 24, 1995. Accessed November 19, 2024. https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio
-revised-code/section-3517.21#:~:text=(10)%20Post%2C%20publish%2C,or%20defeat%
20of%20the%20candidate.
"SLF: 'Nonsense' 30s – OH." Video. YouTube. Posted by Senate Leadership Fund, September
10, 2024. Accessed November 19, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
S10a0RJSP8M.
"Special interests think they can buy Ohio. Well, the joke's on them." Video. Facebook. Posted
by Bernie Moreno, September 21, 2024. Accessed November 19, 2024.
-the-jokes-on-them-join-our-grassr/1053744166356412/.
