Overview: Communications Tactics

Tours election technology from 2008 to 2018 "and beyond".2008: Obama integrated e-mail, cell phones and websites to both convey the candidate’s message and enable his supporters to connect and self-organize - supporting grassroots community. MyBarackObama allowed users to form groups, raise money, organise events, get info on local vote…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

As the internet lit up ... Accounts identified as belonging to Latino social media users voiced outrage about politically correct “mob” bullying ... activists immediately grew suspicious... thousands of posts were coming from ... bots... activists cooked up a counteroffensive... exposed “recipes” for disinformation and distorting facts... educatio…

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

don’t think about “abolish the police” as merely a policy proposal... Think about it as a narrative ... to change how people think... an objective to rally behind... a lesson in how... the broader left ... needs to work on its storytelling skills as much as its policy proposals...“storytelling” [is] ... a three-act structure ... a character with a…

In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

irony ... the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place... They cite an estimate that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans... about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. For this, they thunder, we’ve imposed huge economic and social costs on …

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches ... target them with get-out-the-vote ads...“geofencing” or “ring-fencing.”... data ... is anonymized. But ... potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users... virtual fence around a geog…

I went back and looked at all the stats of past UX Design Weekly issues ... and pulled out the most popular user experience design articles, tools, resources and media from the past year based on clicks and shares

In trying to access the federal programs which will allow her to afford college, Joanne must navigate the websites of multiple agencies. She finds dozens of government websites which all seem relevant to what she’s looking for. Joanne is confused. Are these programs related to each other? Are they even all a part of the federal government? Are any…