Archive: Year: 2014

Security Insecurity Pew Internet's...

Sentimental BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith has a bold post up declaring 2016 "The Facebook election" and touting his site's semi-exclusive access to Facebook sentiment data on how Democratic and Republican users say about the emerging field of presidential candidates. "The data will be granular enough to see trends among and between states, between men and women inside states, and among age groups," he writes. I think he's absolutely right that "the viral, mass conversation about politics on Facebook and other platforms has finally emerged as a third force in the core business of politics, mass persuasion" and that "the way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election"--but it could also be that the way campaigns micro-target...

Boosts Before we get to the news of the world, here's our own scoop: Personal Democracy Media is proud to be launching a big new project called Civic Hall, a year-round community center and event space for civic tech in the heart of Manhattan's Silicon Alley. Details here. In the Washington Post, Matea Gold and Sean Sullivan break down the RNC's vastly improved voter contact program, which reached 35 million people. In at least eleven states, the Republican vote total was bigger than in 2012. By contrast, the biggest Democratic voter contact operation, run by the DSCC's Bannock Street Project, hit 10.2 million doors. Continuing the mid-term post-mortems, Andrew Bleeker of Bully Pulpit Interactive writes that the press overstated the role of tech...

Downplaying According to this report from Pew Research, the national vote share for Republicans versus Democrats in 2014 was pretty similar to 2010, with the same demographic divides. This despite hiring many of the Obama 2012 campaign's best digital strategists and spending $60 million to help maximize the turnout of the Obama base. So what about the role of tech in election 2014? Darren Samuelson of Politico got a bunch of interesting answers. Among them: says Stu Trevelyan of NGP VAN, "It was not enough, and never will be, except in close races." Also downplaying the importance of tech and data to the Democrats' midterm losses, Amelia Showalter, former digital analytics director for Obama 2012: "All of these are tools that help...

Voters Speak Big listening, GOP version: In AdAge, veteran digital marketing reporter Kate Kaye covers how the Republican National Committee made intensive use of Sprinklr, a social analytics platform, paying for customized real-time analyses of online chatter that was fed to several Senate campaigns. She writes, "Depending on what identifiable data people associate with their social accounts, Sprinklr can match what they do in social media with the GOP's data, which includes information about previous interactions someone might have had with the party, such as donating or signing an online petition." As of 11:00pm ET last night, 6.7 million people had used Facebook's voter megaphone to tell their friends that they were voting. An interactive map posted by Facebook show that participation...

Big Bad Data Facebook is pushing its "voter megaphone" out to all of its more than 150 million adult users in the United States, and here at techPresident, we're asking for your help tracking how the tool is deployed. Why big data is bad for political prognostication: In the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Thomas Gilbert and Andrew Loveridge have an absolutely brilliant critique of the new data-driven journalism exemplified by "explainers" like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver. They write, The real problem with our media wasn’t that it was bad at predicting elections (although it was)—it’s that it spends so much time on predicting elections at all, as opposed to moderating and shaping a national debate on what is at stake...

Today is Election Day in the United States, and along with the many efforts by campaigns and advocacy groups to get out their voters, Facebook is taking a big step to push people to the polls. As I reported last week for Mother Jones, for the first time in six years, Facebook says it is rolling out its "voter megaphone"--a banner across the top of each user's page like the one shown above--to all of its users above the age of 18 in the United States. That's somewhere upwards of 150 million people, if all goes according to plan. While other tech giants, notably Google and Microsoft, have put resources into making it easier for people to find their polling...

Nudges Darren Samuelsohn has a nice round-up in Politico of the ways that campaigns on both sides of the aisle are using tech in 2014, focusing on fundraising, targeting, GOTV, social media monitoring and video tracking. Most interesting: we are definitely in the age of individual voter targeting: Samuelsohn reports that "even if someone tries to erase their online web history by turning off the cookie function, campaigns are using their databases to find a targeted person’s home and then message them through the specifically-assigned address for each device on an internet network." Joe Rospars, the founder and CEO of heavyweight Democratic web firm Blue State Digital and the Obama campaign's main digital strategist, has written a cri de couer to his...

Scary Monsters Facebook has finally opened up about the experiments it was conducting in 2012 on its users' voting behavior, as I detail today in this story for Mother Jones. We're far from #1: "Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection," writes Claire Cain Miller for the New York Times. "In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege." This is from "The Cost of Connectivity," a new report from the Open Technology Institute. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is planning...