The Clinton campaign is trolling Hillary Clinton’s likely White House rival during this week’s Republican National Committee convention, buying anti-Trump filters for Snapchat images captured in downtown Cleveland.

Geofilters are those tiny pieces of art that Snapchatters can use to overlay images captured in a certain location. During the 2016 race for the White House, politicians have employed these sponsored filters to playfully knock their opponents and attract the attention of college-age voters.

In this case, the Clinton campaign sponsored some distinctly cheeky messages that attack Trump: One featuring yellow police tape emblazoned with the “Stop Trump” message, and another containing a rotating series of critical quotes from notable GOP figures.

The campaign is starting to attract buzz, especially this one featuring Trump’s rival for the GOP nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich: “Why would I feel compelled to support someone whose positions I kind of fundamentally disagree with?”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Sometimes social media can’t help but channel its inner 13-year-old.

As Donald Trump announced his new running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, his campaign unveiled a new logo that immediately became the object of ridicule on social media, and inspired oh-so-many sexually suggestive GIFs.

Perhaps that critical reception shouldn’t be surprising, given the unusual rancor of the 2016 campaign. But the day-long Twitter troll-fest is reminiscent of the mockery that accompanied the 2014 unveiling of Airbnb’s new corporate logo, with a circular pink shape that critics guffawed looked like a vagina.

“It’s just like: Go ahead, laugh all you want, guys,” Airbnb co-founder and CTO Nathan Blecharczyk told Recode at the time. “We wouldn’t want to design a logo that caters to the lowest common denominator. This was a yearlong undertaking for dozens of people, it’s something meaningful, and no one pauses to really understand that.”

The chortles eventually stopped, but not before the logo became the butt of a thousand jokes. Apparently it’s still a touchy subject; Airbnb declined comment for this story.

The new Trump-Pence logo enmeshes the candidates’ initials — TP — with the American flag, sparking immediate references to toilet paper and other bathroom wit.

As the day continued, Twitter became something like a crowdsourced design studio or a post-facto focus group, and the logo emerged as a Rorschach test for the mass id, with some viewers interpreting male dominance and others seeing a rather specific sex act. The designers might have anticipated this before releasing into the wild a logo with one letter penetrating another.

“I can see this being sold to them as a visual representation of two people working hand-in-hand,” said Ethan Imboden, vice president of creative at Frog Design. “My guess is that was the intention, to represent them more in the form of a monogram, bringing together a T and P as a partnership.”

Twitter saw it differently.

Even serious Republican political advisers like pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson cringed.

Imboden said the Trump-Pence and Airbnb logos share a design element that invites comparisons to the human anatomy: They’re both symmetrical over a vertical axis.

“It invites an anthropomorphic meaning,” Imboden said.

The most striking decision, Imboden said, was the designer’s choice to replace the field of stars on the American flag with Trump’s and Pence’s initials.

“To me, the designer is making a very strong statement by placing Trump and Pence at the center of our symbolic heritage, effectively overwriting all 50 states with two people,” he said. “It’s a very aggressive positioning of their identity on top of our national identity.”

Of course, professional and instant amateur design experts had earlier trashed Hillary Clinton’s logo, with its blue H and rightward-pointing red arrow that seemed to suggest a political shift to the right. Logos are a great way to capture the attention of distracted voters on social media. Clinton’s, critics charged, didn’t say enough.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

The small firm backed by investor Chamath Palihapitiya has dropped from the Federal Communications Commission’s list of firms eligible to bid for wireless spectrum.

The auction is a significant opportunity for new and existing wireless companies to get some prime airwaves. TV broadcasters are voluntarily surrendering spectrum in exchange for some of the proceeds from the auction.

Palihapitiya announced at last year’s M1 mobile conference that the firm, Social Capital Rama Spectrum Holdings, would bid as much as $10 billion in the auction of TV spectrum. It had hopes of winning enough airwaves to launch a new carrier in the U.S.

Now it’s apparently out of the running, according to an updated list of eligible bidders moving forward in the auction.

Rama initially registered to participate in the auction but apparently opted not to move forward. Palihapitiya declined comment, saying he is bound by an FCC-imposed quiet period.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

The Republican establishment is heaping praise on Donald Trump’s selection of conservative Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate, but the two aren’t always in sync — at least according to what the Indiana governor says on Twitter.

There are some issues where the GOP duo are a perfect match (like when it comes to denying climate change), but social media also underscores areas where Pence and Trump clash.

Pence’s social media feed is mostly the bland stuff of an elected official in a Midwestern farm state, replete with photos of the governor posing with constituents at fairs, ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings, touting job-creation efforts (Silicon Prairie!) and lauding the efforts of the military and law enforcement.

Still, he chastised Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States in the wake of last year’s mass killings in San Bernardino and Paris.

When the FBI charged an 18-year-old with terror-related charges, Pence avoided his running mate’s hyperbolic language.

Unlike Trump, he is pro-immigrant.

Pence, like many pro-business Republicans, supports free trade, specifically the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that Trump trashes on the stump.

Pence also uses social media to remind us he’s been in the same relationship for decades — something that will doubtless appeal to social conservatives — in contrast to Trump and wife No. 3.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Donald Trump used his favorite hailing frequency, Twitter, to confirm his selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate.

It’s news that leaked Thursday, ahead of the official press conference. And the choice is bound to make conservatives within the Republican party happy — though the he’s unlikely to win the hearts and minds of anyone in the tech industry.

Indeed, his selection is likely to provoke the ire of many leaders in Silicon Valley, 70 of whom aligned against an anti-LGBT measure that Pence signed into law last year.

Some of the technology industry’s most prominent executives — among them Apple’s Tim Cook and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff — vocally protested the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a “religious liberty bill” that they warned would open the door to legalizing discrimination against minority groups.

Benioff was the first to speak out against the law, threatening to reduce the company’s investment in the state — and later vowing to cancel all Salesforce programs that required customers or employees to travel to Indiana.

Cook, meanwhile, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that condemned what he saw as a wave of new legislation that he said would enshrine discrimination.

Amid mounting pressure, Pence urged the legislature to revise the law to include language that businesses cannot use it to discriminate based on a client’s sexual orientation.

But the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign said Pence has a “disastrous record” on other LGBT issues, opposing marriage equality and Department of Education guidelines supporting transgender students.

“As Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence has given us all a preview of his vision for America — a future where LGBTQ people everywhere are put at risk for discrimination because of who they are or whom they love,” said HRC Senior Vice President of Policy and Political Affairs JoDee Winterhof.

Of course, Trump isn’t courting Silicon Valley with his choice of Pence. The first-term governor and former congressman is there to make the GOP’s evangelical wing happy. He’s a guy, the Wall Street Journal remembers, who described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”

For Silicon Valley, which has aggressively used corporate muscle on issues of LGBT rights, it seems Trump’s likely pick might be the worst possible selection he could have made.

Given that it’s Trump we’re talking about, is that really much of a surprise?

“I think he’d be a horrible president, and almost by definition anyone who would be his running mate can’t be that much better,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Update: Trump said he planned to postpone Friday’s news conference to announce his vice presidential pick after a truck plowed into a crowd watching the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, leaving more than 70 people dead.

Update: Silicon Valley is beginning is revving up the political commentary:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.