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LTO Fans - I need your help! Our friends at ACRONYM (the team behind the FWIW newsletter) have invited me to join their proposed SXSW panel entitled "#FWIW: The Digital Race for The White House" and we need your votes to make the final cut. (Note the growth hack here where SXSW is growing its email list by getting us to send you to their site).

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Issue #161 | August 9, 2019 

Advertising

Trump campaign, GOP committees halt Twitter spending after McConnell account locked
Politico.com
"The new halt in spending on Twitter is an escalation from Republicans, who have long complained the social media company of harboring a bias against conservatives."
  • Twitter Locked McConnell Campaign’s Account For Posting Video Of Protesters Outside Senator’s Home (DailyCaller.com)
How Facebook Is Attempting to Target Ads Without Personal Data
AdAge.com
"Brad O’Brien, VP of social and content marketing at marketing firm 3Q Digital, says that the job of a Facebook ad buyer is changing. There is less need for expertise in slicing niche audiences to direct super-customized ad campaigns, instead the social network is encouraging marketers to cast a wide net."

Campaigns

Buttigieg campaign hires CISO, citing cybersecurity emphasis
Politico.com
"Mick Baccio, the Buttigieg pick for [Chief Information Security Officer], was branch chief of White House Threat Intelligence, and helped build the first department-wide Computer Security Incident Response Center at the Department of Health and Human Services."

Data

What Netflix’s ‘Great Hack’ Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica
TheNation.com
"It’s not for nothing that political scientist Dave Karpf, who has written two books on the use of data in modern campaigns, calls Cambridge Analytica 'the Theranos of political data.' Eight different GOP political consultants told Ad Age’s Kate Kaye that the company was 'all hat and no cattle.'

"Here’s the bigger issue: When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018."

Fundraising

Proposing a Grassroots Fundraising Rate Metric
LearnTestOptimize.com
"In addition to being the best measure available for comparing grassroots fundraising across campaigns, the Grassroots Fundraising Rate is a good indicator of future fundraising potential, since most unitemized donors will – and are legally allowed to – give multiple times during a campaign."

Grassroots Fundraising Analysis: House Battlegrounds
LearnTestOptimize.com
"If we compare the median Grassroots Fundraising Rate of the two groups, it’s clear the Republicans not only have a deficit in terms of dollars, but overall online fundraising performance. The competitive GOP candidates had a median Grassroots Fundraising Rate of just 8.3% compared to the Democrats’ 14.3%."
Campaigns say they’ll match political contributions. It’s not clear how they would do that
OpenSecrets.org
"Limited-time matching gives ideological supporters extra incentive to donate to a campaign they care about. But legal experts say it is hard to see how donation matching could happen given campaign contribution limits. And there are no accountability mechanisms to determine whether campaigns actually follow through with their promises."

Jobs

Misinformation

Misinformation haunts 2020 primaries
Axios.om
"Rather than churn out short-lived fake accounts that spread misinformation but are quickly shut down, sophisticated players build pages and accounts that post engaging non-political content just to build a following."

Misinformation Attacks During the July 2019 Presidential Debates
Medium.com

Social Media

White House drafting executive order to tackle Silicon Valley’s alleged anti-conservative bias
Politico.com
"None of the three people could say what penalties, if any, the order would envision for companies deemed to be censoring political viewpoints. The order, which deals with other topics besides tech bias, is still in the early drafting stages and is not expected to be issued imminently."
  • What is Shadow Banning? (Imge.com)
  • USPTO grants Facebook patent for automated shadow-banning system (Techspot.com)
Twitter says it won't verify new candidates until they win their primaries
TheHill.com
"The policy, which a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill on Tuesday is a continuation of the tech giant’s practices in the 2018 midterms, is intended to recognize the seriousness a candidate receives by being verified."

Another Victim in Facebook Romance Scams: A U.S. Congressman
NYTimes.com
"The episode was just one of the bizarre interactions that Mr. Kinzinger said he had had over the past decade with women around the world who believed they were dating him."

Technology

Progressive Tech Group Makes Case for Texting Over Robocalls
CampaignsAndElections.com
"In fact, people who received messages with candidate or district-specific information on issues were 8.2 percent more likely to vote."

Texting For Political Campaigns Report
TechForCampaigns.org
"Registered voters between the ages of 27 to 50 turned out at a rate almost 8% higher than those in that same age group that were not texted."
Why and How Companies Invest in Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts
HBR.org
"Snapchat, Twitter, and Spotify used their platforms for sweeping public-facing campaigns, motivating their users to participate on Election Day and reminding them of the steps necessary to vote through on-brand tactics like alerts, user notifications, curated playlists, and influencer engagement. In addition to using these tactics to combat misinformation voters face, they also used their platforms to encourage users to share their voter experiences, which helps create a nationwide culture of voting and applies social pressure to others to participate."

Tools of the Trade

“Be Water!”: seven tactics that are winning Hong Kong’s democracy revolution
NewStatesman.com
"Protesters have used AirDrop both to share messages with participants in the course of protests, and to spread the word among a broader community. Commuters on Hong Kong subway system may find themselves receiving unsolicited AirDrop messages with slogans promoting the protesters’ cause or advertising the next rally. Prior to protests, Telegram chat groups carry the reminder “Remember to have AirDrop switched on!” Towards the end of a recent protest, as the protesters were preparing to again “Be Water” and disperse together, my mobile phone suddenly began to ping with AirDrop requests carrying the simple message: 'Leave together at 7:00.'"

Google’s Advice for Surviving Algorithm Changes
NeilPatel.com
"Go above and beyond and do what is best for them even if you feel it will hurt your rankings in the short run. Because in the long run, Google will figure it out and you should rank better if you are genuinely putting the user first and doing a better job than your competition."
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