Political parties are increasingly using targeted social media ads to reach specific demographics and local constituencies. The spending on paid advertising online has been growing significantly.
SMS is one of the most underused answers to that problem. Texts get opened, they feel personal, and the barrier to respond is lower than almost any other channel. When you ask a question, people answer. And what comes back can become some of your most compelling content.
James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, has raised a staggering $27 million so far this year, with California donors contributing just under $1.2 million to back his campaign - second only to Texas supporters among those donors whose names were disclosed.
The principle of intellectual charity is fundamental to constructive political conversations. This principle states that, in any discussion, we should accept the best version of an opponent's ideas, not a distorted version or a "straw man." Exaggeration and distortion of opposing opinions (always present, to some degree, in political debates) have become the standard form of political argument in contemporary America.
Messages intended to suppress votes can be precisely delivered to particularly vulnerable and consequential groups of people via social media and keep millions of them from casting ballots, according to a new study that is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout. A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States-a group representative of the country's voting population-to install an app that
