Twitter To Allow Political Ads

Advertising

A 2 million-person, campaign-wide field experiment shows how digital advertising affects voter turnoutNature.com"An important but exploratory finding is that the strongest differential effects appear in early voting data, which may inform future work on early campaigning in a post-COVID electoral environment. Our results indicate that differential mobilization effects of even large digital advertising campaigns in presidential elections are likely to be modest."

Twitter reverses long-standing ban on political advertisingWashingtonPost.com"The policy change, which comes at a moment when major advertisers are defecting from the beleaguered social media platform, would allow candidates and advocacy groups to spend money to promote themselves and their causes on the service."

Campaigns

Do Campaign Teams Matter? Republicans’ 2022 Enthusiasm Gap in Staffing NumbersSplit-Ticket.org"Data, volunteer capacity, and institutional knowledge is not something that can be stood up overnight. Like a muscle, grassroots capacity atrophies without use. Next cycle, a campaign that did not grow or maintain infrastructure starts out at a lower floor when it comes to grassroots capacity writ large. Volunteers require training, a familiarity with systems, and general comfort with direct voter contact."

Social Media

Why TikTok May Never Catch On With Political CampaignsDailyBeast.com"Instead of seeing platforms like TikTok and Twitch as purely transactional for voters, Smith said the new landscape of the internet requires campaigns to see these fragmented fanbases as constituencies with which to build relationships."

Facebook Wanted Out of Politics. It Was Messier Than Anyone Expected.WSJ.com"Meta now estimates politics accounts for less than 3% of total content views in users’ newsfeed, down from 6% around the time of the 2020 election, the documents show."

Technology

Parler’s parent company has laid off a majority of its staffTheVerge.com"One potential buyer told The Verge that the platform had only around 50,000 daily active users as of October 2022."