New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy raised $3.2 million for her Senate campaign to replace indicted Sen. Bob Menendez, nearly doubling the amount her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Rep. Andy Kim, in the last quarter of 2023.

In fourth quarter filings with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, Kim’s campaign had raised a total of $2.77 million since the end of September, when he entered the race just after Menendez was indicted on corruption charges. Kim raised about $1 million in that one week before the fourth quarter started, on Oct. 1. Tammy Murphy entered the race six weeks after that, on Nov. 15.

Taking Kim’s additional week of fundraising in the third quarter and campaign spending by both candidates since then into account, Kim and Murphy ended the year on roughly equal financial footing — each with about $2.7 million on hand, according to the FEC.

Their fundraising dwarfed Menendez’s in the fourth quarter. He took in nearly $16,000 and refunded all of it, the filings show. But he still has about $6 million on hand from past fundraising, according to the records. A spokesperson for Menendez did not respond to a message seeking comment.

While Murphy raised more than Kim in the last three months of the year, the records show Kim’s strength with small donors as he tries to harness grassroots support in the nomination battle with Murphy, who has broad organizational support in New Jersey.

Donations under $100 made up 55.7 percent of the Kim campaign’s contributions, but only 0.6 percent of the Murphy campaign’s, according to the initial filings, not including those donated through ActBlue. The Kim campaign boasted that “92% of donations received were $100 or less, with $0 coming from the support of corporate PAC’s.”

“$100 might not seem like a lot to some, but I know what $100 means to working families. The support we’ve gotten from all 21 counties is a reminder that people are ready for change. The excitement we’ve seen across the state at our events is a reminder that people are fired up for a new kind of politics. We’re just getting started and I can’t wait to take this support into the final months of this election,” Kim said in a statement at his press release.

Former presidential and New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang; former New Jersey House member Rush Holt; former UN ambassador Susan Rice; and former Obama spokesperson and current “Pod Save America” co-host Tommy Vietor all donated to Kim. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ campaign committee also contributed to the Kim campaign, the filings show.

Murphy’s filing included a donation from Dorothea Bongiovi, the wife of Jon Bon Jovi. They are longtime friends and neighbors of the Murphys.

“Tammy has been humbled and energized by the groundswell of support her campaign has received from all 21 counties since she entered the race on November 15. Her historic fundraising numbers highlight that now, more than ever, New Jersey’s hardworking families are ready for a new energy and voice in Washington,” Alex Altman, spokesperson for the Murphy campaign, wrote to POLITICO.

The Senate primary is in June.

By HALELUYA HADERO and ALI SWENSON (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — A graphic video from a Pennsylvania man accused of beheading his father that circulated for hours on YouTube has put a spotlight yet again on gaps in social media companies’ ability to prevent horrific postings from spreading across the web.

Police said Wednesday that they charged Justin Mohn, 32, with first-degree murder and abusing a corpse after he beheaded his father, Michael, in their Bucks County home and publicized it in a 14-minute YouTube video that anyone, anywhere could see.

News of the incident — which drew comparisons to the beheading videos posted online by the Islamic State militants at the height of their prominence nearly a decade ago — came as the CEOs of Meta, TikTok and other social media companies were testifying in front of federal lawmakers frustrated by what they see as a lack of progress on child safety online. YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not attend the hearing despite its status as one of the most popular platforms among teens.

The disturbing video from Pennsylvania follows other horrific clips that have been broadcast on social media in recent years, including domestic mass shootings livestreamed from Louisville, Kentucky; Memphis, Tennessee; and Buffalo, New York — as well as carnages filmed abroad in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the German city of Halle.

Middletown Township Police Capt. Pete Feeney said the video in Pennsylvania was posted at about 10 p.m. Tuesday and online for about five hours, a time lag that raises questions about whether social media platforms are delivering on moderation practices that might be needed more than ever amid wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and an extremely contentious presidential election in the U.S.

“It’s another example of the blatant failure of these companies to protect us,” said Alix Fraser, director of the Council for Responsible Social Media at the nonprofit advocacy organization Issue One. “We can’t trust them to grade their own homework.”

A spokesperson for YouTube said the company removed the video, deleted Mohn’s channel and was tracking and removing any re-uploads that might pop up. The video-sharing site says it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators to monitor its platform, but did not respond to questions about how the video was caught or why it wasn’t done sooner.

Major social media companies moderate content with the help of powerful automated systems, which can often catch prohibited content before a human can. But that technology can sometimes fall short when a video is violent and graphic in a way that is new or unusual, as it was in this case, said Brian Fishman, co-founder of the trust and safety technology startup Cinder.

That’s when human moderators are “really, really critical,” he said. “AI is improving, but it’s not there yet.”

Roughly 40 minutes after midnight Eastern time on Wednesday, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group set up by tech companies to prevent these types of videos from spreading online, said it alerted its members about the video. GIFCT allows the platform with the original footage to submit a “hash” — a digital fingerprint corresponding to a video — and notifies nearly two dozen other member companies so they can restrict it from their platforms.

But by Wednesday morning, the video had already spread to X, where a graphic clip of Mohn holding his father’s head remained on the platform for at least seven hours and received 20,000 views. The company, formerly known as Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts in radicalization say that social media and the internet have lowered the barrier to entry for people to explore extremist groups and ideologies, allowing any person who may be predisposed to violence to find a community that reinforces those ideas.

In the video posted after the killing, Mohn described his father as a 20-year federal employee, espoused a variety of conspiracy theories and ranted against the government.

Most social platforms have policies to remove violent and extremist content. But they can’t catch everything, and the emergence of many newer, less closely moderated sites has allowed more hateful ideas to fester unchecked, said Michael Jensen, senior researcher at the University of Maryland-based Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.

Despite the obstacles, social media companies need to be more vigilant about regulating violent content, said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The reality is that social media has become a front line in extremism and terrorism,” Ware said. “That’s going to require more serious and committed efforts to push back.”

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the media advocacy group Free Press, said among the tech reforms she would like to see are more transparency about what kinds of employees are being impacted by layoffs, and more investment in trust and safety workers.

Google, which owns YouTube, this month laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams. Last year, the company said it cut 12,000 workers “across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” without offering additional detail.

___

AP journalists Beatrice Dupuy and Mike Balsamo in New York, and Mike Catalini in Levittown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A 75-year-old man has died after a sheriff’s deputy in western Minnesota shocked him with a Taser during an attempted eviction, officials announced Wednesday.

The cause of Michael James Yanacheak’s death in Willmar is undetermined pending further investigation by the medical examiner, the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said in a statement.

The BCA, which is investigating the incident, said Riley Kampsen is the Kandiyohi County sheriff’s deputy who deployed his Taser. Kampsen has five years of law enforcement experience.

According to the BCA statement, two Kandiyohi County sheriff’s deputies and two Willmar police officers went to Yanacheak’s apartment Monday morning to perform a court-ordered eviction. They tried to get him to open the door, but he didn’t respond. After about an hour, the apartment manager pried open the door, and the officers went inside.

“They found Yanacheak in a bedroom, where he picked up a kitchen knife and walked towards them,” the statement said. “The law enforcement officers tried to retreat out of the apartment, but at one point, Kampsen deployed his Taser, striking Yanacheak.”

The officers provided medical care at the scene until Yanacheak could be taken to the hospital, where he later died.

“At no time did anyone involved in this incident discharge a firearm,” the statement said.

A Willmar police officer recovered a knife at the scene, which was later turned over to the BCA. Kampsen and the two Willmar police officers were all wearing body cameras. The BCA is reviewing all available video as part of the investigation.

The Kandiyohi County Sheriff’s Office asked the BCA to investigate. Once the investigation is complete, the BCA will present its findings without a charging recommendation to the Kandiyohi County Attorney’s Office for review.

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