The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is an international collection of autonomous community-based organizations that advocated for low- and moderate-income families by working.
2009[]
In the US, ACORN suffered a damaging nationwide controversy in the fall of 2009 after James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles secretly recorded, selectively edited and released videos of interactions with low-level ACORN personnel in several of their offices, portraying the personnel as encouraging criminal behavior. Multiple investigations on the federal, state, and county level found that the released tapes were selectively edited to portray ACORN as negatively as possible, that nothing in the videos warranted criminal charges against ACORN or its employees, and that the clandestine recordings violated privacy laws in Maryland and California.