Campaigns

Biden campaign joins TikTok in an effort to reach younger voters
Washington Post
"Biden’s campaign said that they’re taking advanced safety precautions around their devices and incorporating a protocol to ensure security of the account."

Biden’s campaign is multiplatform. Of course he’s going to join TikTok.
Yello
"Biden skipped the traditional pregame network interview this year, and his campaign didn’t advertise during the game. Instead, his TikTok account and social media posts constituted the entirety of his campaign’s Super Bowl content strategy. It was a bid to control the message, sure. But it’s also quite a bit cheaper..."

President Biden has a meme strategy, and it’s leaning on Dark Brandon
TechCrunch
"The payoff of the Dark Brandon meme — which depicts Biden with glowing red eyes, fighting to fix the economy or something — requires so much background knowledge that it’s surprising the Biden campaign has leaned so hard into it. But in some ways, it seems to be working. When Biden announced his reelection campaign in April, his team started selling official Dark Brandon merch, which accounted for 54% of total store revenue as of August."

Email

Email Security In the Spotlight For '24
Campaigns & Elections
"Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC), a non-partisan, non-profit group that provides cybersecurity support to federal campaigns, announced this week it has partnered with Valimail, an automated DMARC software provider, to provide their services free of charge."

Fundraising

How To Not Set Your Money on Fire in 2024
The Connector
"Part of the dynamic shift that we are pursuing is rather than us bugging you to give $5, we want the donor to tell us what they're interested in. And so, with that quick onboarding, we ask four questions: What issues motivate you, what you want to focus on, what your budget is, and how often you want recommendations. And so that enables us to send increasingly personalized recommendations, where tens of thousands of people can get an email with a different recommendation."

International

How Narendra Modi became India’s influencer-in-chief
Rest Of World
"Modi understands the power these numbers can unleash. For him, mainstream media is irrelevant — partly because he has in the past cast them in the role of biased adversaries, but more because he has built his brand on the politics of direct political communication."

Social Media

Meta won't recommend political content on Threads
Axios
“Threads users will be allowed to follow accounts that post political content, but the algorithm that suggests content from users you don't follow will not recommend accounts that post about politics.

“Users will have an option that allows them to opt into political recommendations — first on Threads and Instagram, then on Facebook, at an unspecified date.

“Users who post political content can check their account status to see whether they've posted too much of it to be eligible for recommendation.”

In battle with X, Threads gets trending topics where politics will be allowed
TechCrunch
"In other words, because topics are determined by algorithms, but aren’t individualized to the end users, they don’t get swept up in Threads’ political content purge from recommendations."