u/jayubba

i run a small site that reads political language for manipulation techniques (loaded language, name calling, that kind of thing). it doesn't say who's right, it just flags the wording. ran last night's iowa pbs debate through it, every answer, and checked who was talking by hand against the video

hinson: 10 of 30 answers flagged, mostly loaded language and name calling

turek: 4 of 22, mostly loaded language and exaggeration

also looked up 114 of their factual claims against fact checkers, congress.gov, wire stories etc. honestly most couldn't be settled by any source. the ones that could were mostly true but missing something. hinson's "zero crossings at the southern border" is dhs's number for releases, not crossings. turek's "$20 billion to argentina" was a currency swap line, not a grant

every answer links to that spot in the video so you can check it yourself. link in the comments. doing the oct 13 one too. if something's flagged wrong tell me, i read everything

with the cbp "pro-trump ads" story this week i wanted to see how much of this you can reconstruct from public records alone. turns out a lot, but no single source joins up per ad. here's the method in case its useful:

1. contracts: usaspending.gov api (free, no key). search awards by awarding agency + the advertising naics codes (541810-541890), then separately by recipient name for firms named in reporting, because the big one files under a different category. dhs obligated $142.8M to safe america media across 3 awards in 2025 for the border ads. the new one is award 70B06C26F00001137: cbp, $20M "NATIONAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN", LMD Agency, dated sept 20, the day after the money was reportedly moved. nothing in the record says which ads it paid for.

2. google/youtube: google publishes its political ads data as a public bigquery dataset (bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads). advertiser_stats shows dhs is the only federal agency in it: 85 video ads, about $5.29M, march 2025 to feb 2026. creative_stats gives spend and impressions ranges per ad. catch: no video ids, just a link to the transparency center page, which won't show the video once the ad stops running.

3. facebook/instagram: meta ad library api, search by page id not keyword (keyword search matches ad text, which is useless for finding an advertiser). dhs's main page: 56 ads, $3.1-3.8M, all in spanish, 31 captioned "un mensaje del presidente trump". the api gives you the caption only, not the video audio. use the languages field, not a language detector, short spanish text fools most of them.

4. youtube channel: no spend data at all, but view counts relative to the channel's own median are a decent tell of paid promotion. dhs's "spanish warning" 30 sec spot (noem, opens "thank you president donald j trump") has 51.5M views on a channel where videos typically get about 2,600. that's a signal, not proof.

what you can't get: tv, streaming, radio. no public per-ad record, and that's probably where most of the money goes.

i put all of it together on one page with every figure linked to its source: semblen.com/government/ads (it's my site, fwiw). happy to share the queries if anyone wants to do this for another agency.