e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Campaigns Turn to Protected Twitter Feeds for Volunteer Organizing

February 27th, 2012

Our good friend (and recent Pinterest enthusiast) Beth Becker reports in with this tidbit from the trail: campaigns are turning to “protected” Twitter feeds to organize volunteers. Since the account owner of a protected feed has to approve everyone who wants to follow it, he or she can make sure that it’s restricted only to campaign volunteers. Thus, it can be used as a reasonably secure channel aimed directly at them and only them. And Beth says, “lots of campaigns are doing it with huge success.”

I say “reasonably secure channel” because obviously any such system is going to have the potential to be compromised, at the very least by a “volunteer” who is not who she or he appears to be. And just like email, the contents of a protected feed can still be copied and forwarded on to the rest of the world. But since we’re talking about volunteer-organizing instructions (“Be at the corner of 10th & Pine at 9 AM & wear your blue campaign shirts”) rather than high-level strategy discussions, the danger seems slight. Yep, yet another channel to keep in mind….

– cpd