THE SOCIAL ACTION NETWORK: BRINGING POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Disrupting Corporate America’s Stranglehold on American Politics

By Alex Ferguson

Part I: Citizens United and the Big Business of American Politics

On January 21st, 2010, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which fundamentally changed American elections and issue advocacy. The court ruled 5-4 in favor of Citizens United, a conservative non-profit organization, to strike down the restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions that were established under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). The decision effectively ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to free speech, which includes the ability to contribute unlimited sums of money as independent expenditures for political campaigns. This led to the rise of Super PACs and dark money in American politics, allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited money to influence elections and public policy in order to benefit their own interests.

Beyond its impact on elections, Citizens United also fundamentally changed the political market by introducing big money into all elements of the American political system. This resulted in American politics becoming an even bigger business. Candidate campaigns, issue campaigns, partisan and non-partisan organizations, and political action committees all began receiving more money, especially the entities whose work benefitted corporate special interests and their policy agendas.

According to OpenSecrets, the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy, the total cost of election in 2008, the country’s last presidential election before the Citizens United decision, was $5.29 billion. In 2024, the country’s most recent presidential election, the total cost of election was $15.9 billion. This means that since the decision, the total cost of election has grown by over 200%, even after being adjusted for inflation.

The Citizens United decision also coincided with the social media and digital advertising technology booms of the early 2010’s, resulting in numerous tech companies focused on satisfying the needs of political entities that now had virtually unlimited spending potential. This included large, public corporations like Facebook, Instagram, Google, TheTradeDesk and Twitter as well as smaller, privately-owned tech companies like NGP VAN and NationBuilder. Beyond spending money with these technology companies, there was also a massive uptick in spending with campaign consulting firms and creative marketing agencies.

All of these companies have one thing in common; they operate using a “business-to-business” or B2B sales model. Meaning, they sell products and services from their business to another business or organization rather than selling directly to an end consumer, which is what companies with a “business-to-consumer” or B2C sales model do. The increased spending in the political market since Citizens United was driven by a higher demand from businesses seeking to boost profits by selling their products and services to political entities that had more money to spend. This trend only further cemented the political market as a firmly B2B market.

While there is an inherent need for B2B products and services in the political market, the model is highly inefficient from a social impact perspective. I’ve dubbed this phenomenon “Trickle-Down Impact.” Just like President Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics, “Trickle-Down Impact” has economically and politically benefitted the wealthy and businesses. They have increased spending ability to impact issue advocacy and elections, which has resulted in greater political influence. The assumption is that this money donated to political entities will eventually “trickle down” to the average citizen in the form of tangible social impact via electoral and public policy outcomes. However, the vast majority of this money is spent inefficiently on things such as overhead expenses, consultant fees, software licenses and advertising costs. According to Axios, U.S. political ad spending alone was projected to top $16 billion in 2024, making it the largest line item of all political spending in the 2024 election cycle and more than the entire cost of election in 2020.

Despite this influx of money into the political market, there are an incredibly limited number of products and services that are designed to directly empower the average citizen. The majority of all political products and services that exist are designed purely to service political entities in order to empower those entities to build movements and achieve their stated electoral and policy goals, which often come with strings attached from their big money funders. Moreover, the campaigns that these entities execute are often ineffective, only winning over a small percentage of the prospects that they target to convert them into supporters. There is a clear and urgent need to shift this paradigm and invest in products and services that directly empower the average citizen rather than political entities and the corporate special interests that fund them. There is a better model to both empower ordinary people and boost the social impact of political entities in a more effective and efficient way.

It’s time to use technology to bring power to the people!

Part II: The Cambridge Analytica Scandal and Big Tech’s Fear of Politics

In 2018, there was second event that had a massive impact on the American political market: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. During the 2016 election cycle, a British consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica was hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to provide data and analytics consulting services. The company was hired to build psychographic predictive models for targeting political digital advertisements based on a viewer’s predicted psychological profile. To build these models, Cambridge Analytica used personal data from approximately 87-million Facebook users that was improperly obtained through a third-party app called “This is Your Digital Life,” which violated Facebook’s terms of service. These predictive models were a crucial component in Trump’s misinformation campaigns around the country that preyed on “more persuadable” voters with certain psychological profiles, and ultimately, these models may have handed him his narrow victory in the 2016 presidential election.

After The New York Times and The Guardian released an exposé on the scandal, Facebook lost more than $100 million in market capitalization in the coming days, with many users deleting their profiles on the platform and calling on others to do the same. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, then went on an apology tour to try and save the brand’s reputation, with multiple appearances on cable news networks and eventually apologizing in testimony to Congress. The Federal Trade Commission later announced that Facebook would be fined $5 billion for their negligence in the scandal.

As a result, big tech companies became instantly afraid of getting overly involved in American politics. Facebook paused the ability to place political advertisements on their platforms while they refined their policies, practices and terms of service. They also downgraded the functionality of their Facebook Town Hall product, which provided powerful civic engagement tools directly to voters, removing features such as links to register to vote, polling location lookups, voter guides and more. Google and Twitter also both refined their data privacy policies and their advertising policies, and Google stopped supporting its polling location lookup tool.

In other words, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its fallout fundamentally altered the way big tech is involved in politics. The big tech companies that previously offered B2C political products and services stopped doing so in any meaningful way. However, they leaned further into their B2B business model of offering political advertising capabilities, albeit with more stringent policies and practices. With these moves big tech made one thing clear: they intend to minimize their liability by not providing political tools directly to voters, but they still intend to maximize their profit by allowing political advertising from political entities.

This leaves ordinary people with only a limited, fragmented group of B2C or “direct to voter” products that empower them to be more civically engaged. This limited set of B2C platforms includes organizations and companies such as Vote.org for voter registration, Change.org for petitions, and GoFundMe for crowdfunding. Meanwhile, mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Threads are limiting free speech on hot button political topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the genocide in Gaza, while platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social are pushing a white nationalist agenda, censoring opposing views and doing everything in their power to prop up their chosen political candidates.

It’s unlikely that the mainstream big tech companies will create meaningful political tools and open themselves up to the perceived liabilities of the political market that became apparent with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It's even more unlikely that the Citizens United decision will be overturned any time in the near future with the current 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court and partisan government gridlock at an all-time high. In all likelihood, big money from corporate special interests will remain in politics and big tech companies like X, Meta and Google will refrain from creating meaningful B2C political tools. This means any solution to this issue will need to navigate big money in politics and big tech’s fear of the political market’s perceived liabilities.

To solve this issue, a new set of tech investors should invest in the political market by financing the creation of a first-of-its-kind, “direct to voter” political technology platform.

Part III: Bringing Power to the People with The Social Action Network

The solution to these problems is to create the world’s first Social Action Network: an online platform that allows users to connect and organize around shared political and social ideals using a comprehensive set of civic engagement tools. The platform’s mission will be to revolutionize civic engagement with technology in order to build a more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive world.

The platform will empower ordinary people to become activists by providing them with direct access to a comprehensive set of powerful civic engagement tools for free, revolutionizing the civic engagement process by making it simpler and more impactful. It will feature the typical features of a social network: user profiles, a news feed, direct messaging, comments, tagging, events and groups. However, the platform will truly differentiate itself and derive its true power by providing its comprehensive set of social action features.

The Social Action Network in its final form will amalgamate all of the tools that are offered on existing B2C platforms and by B2B companies in the political market. It will be designed to serve as the preeminent platform for politics where ordinary people can access civic engagement resources tools. Its comprehensive set of “direct to voter” tools will include the following:

Voting: (1) Register to vote or update your registration, (2) Request and track your mail-in ballot, (3) Access ballot guides and save your selections, (4) Customize a vote plan and receive push notification reminders and (5) Find your polling location with map directions and voting wait times.

Advocacy: (1) Track policy issues, (2) Review your elected officials & their voting records, (3) Call and email your elected officials and (4) Sign petitions.

Fundraising: (1) Give one-time or recurring donations, (2) Contribute to crowdfunding campaigns and (3) Purchase merchandise from campaigns and organizations.

Organizing: (1) Plan and promote in-person and online events, (2) Organize groups of like-minded users and (3) Create campaign pages with crowdfunding, elected official messaging and petition features.

News: (1) Access news articles with a built-in “fake news” probability score, (2) Review fact checking reports on all trending posts, articles and topics and (3) Engage in moderated debate forums.

Careers: (1) Volunteer and organize for campaigns and organizations, (2) Apply to job postings for campaigns and organizations and (3) File applications to become a candidate or an appointed official.

Like more conventional social networks, the platform will focus on algorithm-based content recommendations that are personalized to each user. Users will have the option to build a robust ‘voter profile’ that uses survey questions and account activity to inform the algorithm. The algorithm will accurately predict user’s likelihood to support particular campaigns, causes, and movements in an unbiased and nonpartisan way. The aim is to help users cut through the noise and deception to show them who or what they’re truly likely to support. The algorithm will provide voting, advocacy, and fundraising recommendations along with the tangible tools for engaging with users’ supported campaigns and movements. The platform will also automatically load informational resources and suggested content for users based on where they live and vote.

While the concept is largely to apply a B2C business model to a political technology company by offering “direct to voter” tools, there will also be tangible benefits to political entities like campaigns and organizations. These entities will be able to create more sophisticated profiles, campaigns and pages on the platform, but most importantly they’ll have the ability to engage directly with users and grow their network of supporters. Additionally, they’ll have a powerful algorithm-based engine to drive likely supporters directly to their campaigns and tools that benefit their movements. The business model would focus on building a comprehensive platform designed for ordinary people to engage in political activities, growing the network of users by satisfying the market’s demand for better “direct to voter” political tools and giving political entities the ability to use the platform to access the network of users and to engage and activate likely supporters.

In other words, the platform would revolutionize the way political entities engage in supporter prospecting. Instead of exclusively executing costly advertising campaigns to gain supporters for their movements, these entities will be able to connect with supporters on a platform where users are explicitly there to engage in political activities. The concept is simple: connect with likely supporters in a place where they want and expect to be connected with, drive lead generation and prospect conversion using algorithm-based recommendations and boost impact by providing a set of tools specifically designed to build movements and drive electoral and public policy outcomes.

Building the world’s first Social Action Network would revolutionize the political market. In a digital world, where virtually everything is driven by digital devices and user-based platforms, the political market has lagged far behind the direct-to-consumer technology market. The world needs new innovations that are focused on social impact and solving the modern challenges that threaten our society, our democracy and our planet.

Instead of funding platforms that are designed purely to maximize profit, it’s time to fund and create a platform for good!