LTO Links #33

Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News

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There will be no LTO Links next week as your author hopes to be in a post-Thanksgiving food coma.

LTO Links

Issue #33 |

Advertising

The GOP's 2016 Digital Revolution

"The old model of digital, even from one cycle ago, of simply posting TV ads to YouTube, is dead. The new model embraced by Republican campaigns up and down the ballot adapts traditional messages, with the advantage of creating and delivering engaging, specialized content that’s tailored to meet voters on the platforms they use every day."

Trump Digital Director: Twitter Killed Ad Buy Critical Of Hillary Clinton

"The ad buy in question was a sponsored emoji package that criticized Hillary Clinton and was scheduled to run on a debate day during the campaign. Parscale said he believed the ad buy, for which he claimed the campaign paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, was killed because Twitter 'thought the emoji would be too damaging to Hillary.'"

Community

What Companies, Candidates and Yes — Even Government Institutions — Can Learn From 2016

"People are no longer passive consumers of media content. They are active participants who create content, provide commentary and amplify information. In 2016, the best campaigns didn’t just serve up content, they genuinely engaged their constituencies and built the infrastructure to do so at scale."

Content

Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash

"One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds."

Google’s top news link for ‘final election results’ goes to a fake news site with false numbers

"These sites leverage the inability of Facebook and other social media sites to weed out nonsense in order to get clicks and make money from advertising -- a remarkably lucrative endeavor, particularly in a country where the U.S. dollar stretches a lot further."

Data

Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook In Final Months Of The US Election

"In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found."

Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters

"The campaign’s text messaging GOTV effort may have been the worst offender. Volunteers reported as many as 30% of the replies they received from voters they were urging to get out were Trump supporters."

Security

Interest in encrypted email spikes following Trump win

"According to statistics published by ProtonMail, after the election results were in, new user sign-ups for privacy-focused services doubled."

Social

Here’s How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency

"Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were."

Trump neared 1 BILLION Facebook interactions last week

"Facebook users in the U.S. generated 962.6 million interactions involving Trump last week, more than triple his prior record-setting total of 307 million the week of October 16, in the wake of the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape of Trump talking about grabbing women. For her part, during election week, Hillary Clinton generated 412 million interactions on Facebook, the second highest volume for any candidate for the entire year."