The latest digital politics news and perspective, including a few highlights from late 2017. Send in good stories as you see them! Just email me or send a tweet.
- Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share. C.f. Facebook Finally Blinks. Also check out Beth Becker’s Epolitics.com piece on the changes.
- Facebook Crushed Everyone’s “Pivot to Videoâ€â€”Except Its Own.
- The Lesson For Campaigns In Facebook’s Pivot, and Will Facebook’s News Feed Changes Upend Digital Strategy?
- Twitter Admits There Were More Than 50,000 Russian Bots Trying to Confuse American Voters Before the Election.
- Political Ads on Facebook Now Need to Say Who Paid For Them. C.f. Twitter will now label political ads, including who bought them and how much they are spending.
- How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda.
- What Could Go Wrong With Facebook’s Plan to Rank News Sources by “Trustworthinessâ€.
- When Trump Tried to Give Out “Highly Anticipated” Fake News Awards, the GOP Website Crashed.
- ‘Fake news’ went viral in 2016. This expert studied who clicked. C.f. You Can Now Check if You Interacted With Russian Agents on Facebook.
- Don’t Blame Social Media for Celebrity Politicians. Blame Everyone.
- 2017 Was The Year We Fell Out of Love with Algorithms.
- Twitter Has Officially Replaced the Town Square.
- Can Washington Be Automated?
- How politicians’ use of social media is reinforcing a partisan media divide.
- I’ve Studied the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop for Months. It’s Crazier Than You Think. He’s basically live-tweeting Fox. C.f. ‘Fox & Friends’ is shaping Trump’s views before our very eyes and President Who Says He Rarely Watches TV Describes Multiple Hours of Tuesday Cable News Programming in Detail.
- How a man’s first-ever tweet, about Obama’s respect, proved more popular than Trump’s bluster.
- How U.S. Foreign Policy Is Being Shaped by Trump’s Tweets. C.f. America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation.
- Keeping up with the Kims: The Salt Lake blogger who watches North Korea’s elite. C.f. Chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine’ goes public — power of a Mosul blog.
- Why Is James O’Keefe Going After Twitter?
- The Video Game That Could Shape the Future of War.
- Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for total surveillance.
- China Is Hard At Work Developing Swarms Of Small Drones With Big Military Applications. As is the U.S., of course.
- The Neo-Nazis of the Daily Stormer Wander the Digital Wilderness. For longer than 40 years, let’s hope. But, Bitcoin’s boom is a boon for extremist groups.
- Russian Money in Silicon Valley. “The Paradise Papers tell a story about the Kremlin’s evolving methods of manipulating the internet — and how it exported them.”
- We are being defeated in a digital war – but there is still time to fight back.
- How Breitbart became just another right-wing Trump cheerleader.
- Sanders will host health-care town hall, aiming for online audience bigger than cable.
- Can You Govern Via Skype? The Exiled Leader of Catalonia Wants to Try.
- ‘We have tapped into something’: Impeachment drive builds digital army to take on Trump. Tom Steyer builds a list, but will it convert to anything useful? C.f. This Man Is Building An ‘Army Of Environmental Super Voters’ To Rival The NRA In Turnout, using data-analysis to guide GOTV.
- A Groundbreaking Case May Force Controversial Data Firm Cambridge Analytica to Reveal Trump Secrets.
- A year after the Women’s March, new activists take anti-Trump message into midterm elections.
- U.S. urges Iran to stop blocking social media sites as death toll rises in nationwide protests.
- In interview with Prince Harry, Obama says leaders shouldn’t use social media to divide.
- What happens when Trump targets you on Twitter. IRL consequences, detailed by Annie Karni.
- Bridging The ‘Ginormous’ Divide Between Consultants & Silicon Valley. Will it actually work? C.f. How Silicon Valley Volunteers Cracked The Virginia Campaign Market.
- Four video trends to watch in 2018.
- Five 2018 Nonprofit Trend Predictions From Someone on the Inside.
- House GOP sets fundraising record, in ‘great shape’ to keep majority. “Digital fundraising accounted for 16 percent of the NRCC’s total amount raised in 2017. Email fundraising grew by over four times compared to the last off year, $5.79 million in 2017 compared to $1.36 million in 2015.”
- Meanwhile: “So entering the year, the DGA had raised four times more from individual donors than it had at this point four years earlier — on top of quadrupling its number of contributors”.
- Should charities use AI and data analytics to target potential donors?
- Turning government-shutdown lemons into lemonade via online fundraising.
- Opinion: Fundraising And Comms Integration: Count Me Out – It’S Time For Fr-Exit ! (Fundraising-Exit!).
- From Fear Comes Loathing: A Guide to Email Fundraising that Respects Your List.
- Navigating Your Facebook Comments Section.
- New Year’s Resolution For Democrats: Take Digital Seriously In ‘18.
- Can These 10 Political Tech Startups Help Democrats Win In 2018?
- The Stories That Will Shape the [Political Consulting] Industry In 2018.
- VR objects are coming to your Facebook news feed with ‘3D posts’.
- The Unexpected Power of Google-Doc Activism.
- As Facebook Live video dreams fade, publishers look again to Twitter.
- It Takes Just $1,000 to Track Someone’s Location With Mobile Ads.
- President Trump’s viral moments of 2017.
- The Library of Congress Will Stop Archiving Every Tweet. Good.
- Finally: Meet Trumpbot, the bot that tries to talk like Trump.
– cpd