Advertising
Media Intel Firm KPI Wants to Shed Light on the Digital Ad Wars
Campaigns & Elections
“Just four super PACs hold nearly half of all political ad reservations on TV for the fall. But what they’re doing on the digital side has largely been guesswork up to this point.”
Campaigns
Trump told Republicans to talk about him. Data shows they aren’t listening.
Washington Post
“At the start of the year, Republican politicians mentioned Trump or the MAGA movement in about 1 in 6 of their online posts or podcasts...Those figures have dropped by nearly half as the year has played out. Some Republican candidates have removed mentions of Trump from their websites, while candidates in many competitive races declined to attend the convention.”
Jon Ossoff is giving the internet exactly what it wants
FWIW
“Ossoff and his team treat Senate committee rooms as high-yield content studios designed for third-party creators, late-night hosts, and commentary channels to clip and monetize.”
Disinformation
You Can’t Debunk What You Never See
Will Robinson
“People who saw it identified emotional manipulation 59.6% of the time against 38.2% for the control group. That 21-point gap was still there five months later.”
A Russian disinformation campaign is doctoring celebrity videos to meddle in the midterms
MS NOW
“It uses bot networks and has been known to send the clips directly to fact-checkers and newsrooms — a debunking from the media can amplify the messages.”
Technology
Chatbots and the Ballot Box: Evaluating Accuracy, Sourcing, and Language Gaps in AI Answers to Election Questions
Institute for Strategic Dialogue
“A recurring pattern across models was not just incompleteness but false certainty: where models frequently gave definitive responses to questions that were conditional, recently changed, or dependent on procedural nuance, without flagging that possibility to the user.”
Voters Are Asking AI About Elections. The Results Are Mixed.
Campaigns & Elections
“Twenty-nine percent of responses to generic English-language prompts were either incomplete, inaccurate or outdated, according to ISD’s study.”
Voters Are Asking A.I. About Elections. The Answers Can Vary by User.
New York Times
“When the prompt came from a Democrat, Claude said the incumbent had recently ‘shown some flexibility’ on health care. When a Republican asked, the chatbot said he was ‘generally aligned with G.O.P. priorities.’”
The Subtle Sign That A.I. Is Not Yet a National Political Issue
New York Times
“The most important part of the finding is that only 82 percent of voters had an opinion of which party would do better. In today’s polarized country, that’s a pretty low number — you can get 80 percent of people to say whether they better trust Democrats or Republicans to cook them breakfast.”
White House
Trump Defended A.I. Data Centers on Truth Social, and Commenters Clapped Back
New York Times
“The explosive pushback is the latest sign that A.I. and data centers have become a thorny issue for Republicans this midterm season — a rare topic in the campaign that has united the majority of Americans in common concern.”