Recent polling suggests that concerns about government corruption are top of mind for voters heading into the midterm elections — and that the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has effectively become the face of repulsive self-enrichment to many Americans.

It’s in that environment that Florida Republicans are threatening criminal prosecution over a campaign advertisement spotlighting damning corruption allegations involving top state officials.

We’ve seen various Republicans using the Trumpian tactic of threatening to arrest people who are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Trump, a chief enemy of those constitutional rights, has called for journalists to be arrested for accurately reporting on crowd sizes at his rallies. And Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., faced mockery and condemnation last week for threatening to have a journalist prosecuted after she asked a question about his support for Trump’s deadly war with Iran.

Now Florida Republicans are threatening to prosecute television stations that air a Democratic ad spotlighting the Hope Florida charity scandal, which involves public money being directed to political allies by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP administration.

As the Miami Herald reported:

The Republican Party of Florida is threatening television stations with criminal prosecution if they run or report on a scathing campaign ad addressing the Hope Florida scandal and a grand jury’s finding. The GOP is seeking a temporary injunction to prohibit the airing of the ads.

The Republicans had some daylight when Judge Lance E. Neff of the Florida First District Court of Appeal wrote an opinion ordering the expungement of a grand jury report, saying the panel exceeded its authority. The lawsuit once again brings it front and center during the stretch run to the Nov. 3 election.

Basically, a Florida grand jury concluded that the DeSantis administration — including Attorney General James Uthmeier and his predecessor, Sen. Ashley Moody — “misappropriated” taxpayer money as part of a “sophisticated scheme to fund political activities” with money from a Medicaid settlement. DeSantis, Uthmeier and Moody have all denied accusations of wrongdoing.

The leaked grand jury report said indictments weren’t feasible because nobody would “take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida,” adding: “This decision was the original misappropriation, and no witness would take responsibility for making the decision or had any memory of who made it.”

A couple of weeks back, Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeals ordered the report to be expunged, with one DeSantis-appointed judge arguing that it wrongfully “impugned” private individuals. But the issue remains under review by at least one state attorney and has continued to dog Moody’s Senate campaign. Moody has stumbled while answering questions about it, and the topic has become a major talking point for her Democratic opponent, Angie Nixon.

Republicans more or less have two pathways to address their PR problems: become more likable as a party, or seek to silence people who expose its warts. And it seems clear which route the party is taking.

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A bipartisan group of state attorneys general apparently isn’t buying OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s insistence that “the world should accept some bad things happening” in order to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence technology.

Amid allegations that OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, has helped fuel school shootings and teen suicides, at least eight states are suing the company, accusing it of violating consumer protection laws and putting young users in danger.

The AGs are clearly paying no mind to President Donald Trump’s assertion that AI companies should be allowed to “self-police” as they rapidly develop their AI tools.

As The Guardian reported:

Eight US states sued OpenAI Wednesday, alleging the ChatGPT maker is harming children en masse.

Kansas, Arizona, Montana, Iowa and four others allege the company’s products carried out “willful, dangerous, reckless and unlawful conduct” by coaxing children into harming themselves.

“OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans,” Brenna Bird, the attorney general for Iowa, said in a statement. “OpenAI claims ChatGPT is safe while it’s giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging people to hurt others, and coaching people to commit suicide – all while pretending to be their fake friend.”

The lawsuits, which seek monetary damages and restrictions and court-imposed changes to how OpenAI builds its AI models, were also filed in Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska and West Virginia. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Guardian that the company has “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.”

The lawsuits underscore states’ interests in placing guardrails on AI companies as the Trump administration — led by someone who has invested heavily in the AI industry — seeks to prevent states from passing their own regulations. They also come amid widespread public concern about AI tools destroying humanity.

To be clear, such efforts by states have run into roadblocks. For example, Elon Musk recently won a partial victory when his AI company secured a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking a Minnesota law from going into effect that would ban AI tools that generate nonconsensual sexual imagery, including of children.

Nonetheless, the OpenAI lawsuit shows that several states are being rather relentless in pursuing AI regulations — no matter the obstacles.

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Nearly a decade ago, when Facebook admitted that its platform was used to incite genocidal violence in Myanmar, some may have been inclined to accept the company’s defense that it had been unwittingly used as a tool to benefit authoritarian regimes.

Ten years and numerous scandals later, some people may be less willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the company, which has repeatedly bowed to President Donald Trump and whose platforms have spread hate speech and far-right propaganda. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, appears to be censoring some left-leaning users, as conservatives have baselessly accused the company in years past of targeting them.

Meta faced widespread condemnation over the weekend for freezing the primary Instagram account organizers used to promote the anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrations that took place on Saturday. The account was down “several hours,” according to the activist group. Meta, which also owns Instagram, apologized and said that ”automated action” triggers such suspensions after “accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.”

Nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said it filed a records request on Monday “for any communications between Meta and [the Department of Homeland Security] concerning the No Kings movement, protests or Meta social accounts.”

“The public deserves to know whether the Trump admin is coordinating with Meta to suppress or censor No Kings accounts,” the group, known as CREW, wrote on X.

Meta’s apology for restricting “No Kings” posts is hard to accept at face value when Meta is simultaneously facing allegations of undermining Trump critics elsewhere.

My Oct. 1 post about MAGA world’s efforts to sway Brazil’s presidential election in favor of Trump-aligned Flávio Bolsonaro referred to accusations about Meta undermining incumbent president — and Trump critic — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign. The accusations I cited centered on Meta temporarily suspending an Instagram account that had promoted a viral video linking Bolsonaro to corruption, and another incident in which the company temporarily disabled Lula’s ability to run political ads from his campaign Facebook page. Meta has apparently restored capabilities for both accounts. In the case of the account that hosted the viral video, the company claimed it was restored after an “internal review” and went on to “apologize for the inconvenience.” Meta denied meddling in the election, saying in a statement, “Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false.” But the scrutiny continues.

On Monday, Brazil’s top electoral court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it’s treating Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s campaigns equally. As The Associated Press explained, Meta has said the issues involving Lula’s accounts “stemmed from unrelated global technical glitches, strict anti-fraud measures, and regulatory compliance rather than targeted suppression.”

Presently, we’re seeing some of the top social media platforms in the world being used to protect powerful MAGA oligarchs and undermine their perceived enemies. Elon Musk’s X is a cesspool of racist propaganda and right-wing disinformation. And TikTok, partly owned by longtime Trump ally Larry Ellison, recently reversed its suspension of an account that had been promoting a documentary critical of Musk. And whether it’s enabling the Trump regime’s free speech crackdown on critics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or boosting Bolsonaro’s electoral chances, Meta has been used to quiet some opposition to the MAGA movement on its platforms.

Trump is suffering from historic unpopularity. And no one seems more desperate to reverse that trend than his allies in Big Tech.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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