So where the heck is it now? It seems like a lifetime ago. But after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, much of the social media industry seemed to be having an awakening about the role it played in misinformation. From its easy sharing buttons to its suggestive algorithms, Facebook, in particular, enabled the spread of Russian propaganda that helped get Trump elected . Read Full Story

The social network is again being weaponized—not by Russians, but by domestic groups calling on cizitens to obstruct vote counting. Facebook says it’s taking “exceptional measures” to control the influence of pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” groups on its platform, but so far the results appear to be mixed. The groups represent a growing right-wing movement on social media to stop the vote count in the presidential election. Read Full Story

Political scientists from Harvard and Boston University are using sophisticated mapping algorithms to ensure their deceptively simple bipartisan way to draw district maps is as fair as possible. Louisiana’s 6th would be a fairly normal-looking congressional district if it weren’t for the large 2nd district that cuts into its middle . Republicans in the Louisiana statehouse designed the 2nd district to separate the high numbers of black voters in inner Baton Rouge from the 6th district, which now contains the mainly-white Baton Rouge suburbs and outlying rural areas. In effect, this created a badly gerrymandered 6th district where voting-age blacks make up only 21.6% of the electorate—helping the Party of Trump to dominate. Read Full Story

These inspiring young activists worked for weeks to make millions of calls and social media posts to get out the youth vote for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Sophia Woodrow was 14 years old. Four years later, she was fighting to mobilize young voters in Georgia for the 2020 election and then the runoff to decide control of the Senate. Read Full Story

Just days before the 2020 Presidential election, we reported that Joe Biden was outperforming Donald Trump on social media by certain key metrics. Despite the penetrating volume of Trump’s Twitter feed, Biden was earning more interactions per tweet, and far more interactions per user. Not only was Biden winning on Twitter, but his campaign was making an impact on YouTube and even on Twitch. And, of course, he won the election. But this wasn’t a social media campaign based on flair and instinct: it was tightly driven by social analytics. No-one can better explain how that worked in practice than Sarah Galvez, Director of Social Media and Audience Development at Biden for President. Sarah J. Galvez “I started out like many millennials as a consumer of the internet and social media,” Galvez told us. “I think I started my Twitter account in a computer lab while I was in high …

Our analysis of the way Russian accounts shared and spread memes and other images on Twitter from 2016 to 2018 can help us prepare for the 2020 election. Russian-sponsored Twitter trolls, who so aggressively exploited social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, didn’t stop when Donald Trump was elected president. Read Full Story

From military patriotism and parenthood to science and dogs, we’ve got it all. Politics, and in particular elections, are all about persuasion. What can you say, and how can you frame it, to convince people to follow you? Or at least convince them to not follow the other candidate? Plenty of ads are aimed at firing up the base, getting people already on board extra-super-special excited, maybe excited enough to donate money or volunteer for the campaign. Maybe excited enough to talk to friends and family about considering to vote for you. Read Full Story

Facebook organic reach is down. Way down. In the past, posting a link on your Facebook or Instagram page could drive hundreds of clicks. Not any more. Social media referrals have stagnated around 5 percent of all traffic for years . The average Facebook post will reach just over 5 percent of your followers. The encouraging news is social media reach is still massive. There are more than 3.5 billion active social media users . But reaching that massive audience is harder than ever before. What’s the answer? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article. Let’s get started. What Exactly Is Organic Reach On Facebook Organic reach is the number of people who see your content without paid distribution. It includes people who are shown your posts in their own feed or because their friends have interacted with you. Paid reach is the people who see your content as …

Convincing communities not to vote can help sway an election as much as convincing people to vote for a particular candidate does. If you want to sway an election, sometimes you don’t need to convince people to vote for a specific candidate. Instead, you just need to convince those people to not vote for any candidate at all. Read Full Story

The practically unknown Denver company was harmed after being thrust into the middle of a wild vote-switching conspiracy cooked up to explain Trump’s loss. For weeks Dominion Voting Systems has stood by as attorneys Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump proxies cast it as the center of a wild conspiracy theory : that its software was used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on election night. The baseless theory, which probably emerged from QAnon circles , was used as one of the primary narratives to allege voter fraud and explain Trump’s loss. Read Full Story