Advertising
Voters face uneven AI deepfake protections
Axios
“Proposals to tackle AI in elections have been floated in Congress for years, but states have moved faster — creating different realities for voters depending on where they live.”
Democrats vs. the AI Ad Machine
Wall Street Journal
“In our sensationalized media landscape, political hopefuls are being cast as the heroes or villains of miniature manufactured movies that voters see on their feeds.”
Campaigns
Progressives think they’ve found a way around their old social media posts
POLITICO
“They’ve largely leaned into their outspokenness, past and present, in the hopes that voters will appreciate their authenticity.”
Ranked Choice Voting, Campaign Spending, and Independent Expenditures: An Exploratory Comparative Analysis
SSRN
“These findings are consistent with the theoretical argument that IRV changes candidate incentives in ways that reduce the marginal value of high-volume spending, particularly negative independent expenditure campaigns, by rewarding broad coalition-building over base mobilization.”
The Transparency Paradox: Voters Want Disclosure, Then Punish the People Who Give It
Katie Harbath
“Voters aren’t telling campaigns to stop using AI or not to work with influencers. They’re telling campaigns not to use it to fool them.”
want to reach young voters? try texting in lowercase
Hunter Schwarz
“State Navigate executive director Chaz Nuttycombe wrote on social media that the lowercase text [increased] its sample of 18 to 29 year olds from 1% to 9%.”
Data
The New Media Partnership Looking to Fix Stale Targeting Data
Campaigns & Elections
“KPI projects $10.4 billion in midterm ad spending will run through this decaying targeting infrastructure.”
Fundraising
Finance ‘Reform’ Feeds Nasty Campaigns
Wall Street Journal
“After Watergate, Congress believed that limiting direct contributions to candidates would reduce the influence of money in politics and make campaigns more transparent and more democratic. The rules had the opposite effect.”
Social Media
Death to the Content Calendar: How Risk Aversion is Clobbering Progressive Campaigns
Campaigns & Elections
“Campaigns have built communications systems optimized for internal approval instead of external attention.”
Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects
Science Advances
“In total, 23% of Facebook users and 11% of Instagram users, representing approximately 53 million and 22 million accounts, respectively, were responsible for 80% of exposure to content from untrustworthy sources on those platforms.”
Technology
Anthropic’s text watermarks signal new front in AI detection
Axios
“Comms teams using Claude to simply clean up, translate, or format human-drafted press releases could stamp those documents with an AI signature.”
Chatbots are doing the work of Congress with little oversight
Washington Post
“Even as politicians are debating how to govern AI for the rest of America, Congress has already settled how it will use the technology: quickly, broadly and with little oversight.”