Advertising
The One Political Media Market Nobody Actually Oversees
Billy McBeath
“Even modest inefficiencies scale quickly. A group spending $50 million in programmatic media that experiences 15% supply-path inefficiency effectively loses $7.5 million in voter contact capacity.”
How Meta Is Preparing for the 2026 US Midterm Elections
Meta
“Advertisers are required to disclose when they use AI to create or alter ads about social issues, elections, or politics in certain cases. When an advertiser discloses this to us, we will add information on the ad and in our Ad Library.”
Campaigns
Talarico and Crockett Test How to Convert Huge TikTok Accounts Into Votes
Time
“A recent survey from Texas Public Opinion Research found that 47% of likely Democratic primary voters said they had recently seen or heard from Crockett on social media; 35% said the same of Talarico. Digital platforms were the leading source of exposure for both candidates, outpacing cable and broadcast news.”
As Hochul posts AI images of herself, she aims to ban the tech in political attack ads
Gothamist
“Civil liberties groups argue much of what Hochul appears to be trying to stop is already illegal. Falsely impersonating someone is a crime, as are forgery and fraud.”
Content
Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio, study shows
TechCrunch
“Triton Digital’s U.S. Podcast Report for 2025 showed that 80% of consumers over 18 years of age tune into both audio and video podcasts; 13% only listen to audio, while 7% only watch video. Listener preferences also appear to vary greatly depending on a podcast’s genre, with podcasts about topics like music, sports, comedy, and news skewing more popular on video. Genres like science, history, art, fiction, and true crime are more often consumed via audio.”
International
Artificial intelligence bot runs in Colombia's parliamentary elections
YNET
“Gaitana was created by Carlos Redondo, a member of the Zenú community on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The AI character is named after a legendary Indigenous woman regarded as a symbol of resistance. She has a robotic voice and blue skin, and voters wishing to support her will need to mark the letters 'IA' on the ballot — the Spanish abbreviation for 'Inteligencia Artificial.'”
Social Media
The 2024 U.S. Election in Social Media: Changes in How Americans Used and Experienced 17 Platforms
Designing Tomorrow
“Private communication platforms WhatsApp, Facetime (52.0% during the election wave), and Text Messaging (51.8%), Facetime (52.0%) yielded the highest meaningful connection percentages while traditional, public-facing social media platforms showed more modest rates: Facebook at 35.3%, Instagram at 25.4%, and Twitter/X at only 9.0%. Personal communication tools therefore may yield genuine connections even during politically charged periods.”
Technology
AI Platform Rolls Out New Tracking Features for Digital Video
Campaigns & Elections
“The reality, Ground Truth AI’s CEO Andrew Eldredge-Martin said, is that candidates and brands often control less than 10 percent – and in some cases, less than 5 percent – of the narratives about their campaigns. It’s a challenge that’s only gotten more difficult as more and more Americans turn to highly fragmented online platforms, like YouTube, for news and information.”
White House
A White House Staffer Appears to Run Massive Pro-Trump X Account
Wired
“Johnny MAGA appears to actually be a White House staffer named Garrett Wade who works for the Trump administration as a rapid response manager, helping to run the very same White House account his anonymous MAGA account amplifies. A phone number associated with Wade is linked to Johnny MAGA, according to a WIRED review of publicly available records, and the connection was confirmed by a source close to the White House.”