Really Good News - Politics and Social Media

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Really Good News - Politics and Social Media

Some really good news came from an unlikely sourse: Facebook.

Check out the following:

Facebook slams the door on political campaigns
An upcoming code change means Obama’s groundbreaking 2012 outreach on the site won’t happen again
by Jon Ward
November 17, 2014
Yahoo News

From the article:

Barack Obama’s reelection campaign pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material.

But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken.

. . .

More than 1 million Obama supporters in 2012 installed the campaign’s Facebook app. These supporters were given the option to share their friend list with the Obama campaign. Goff said most of the app users did so. And when they did, Goff’s team would then “run those friend lists up against the voter file, and make targeted suggestions as to who [supporters] should be sharing stuff with.”

This was a powerful new form of voter outreach.

. . .

“We've heard from people that they're often surprised when a friend shares their information with an app,” wrote Facebook engineering manager Jeffrey Spehar in a blog post. “So we've updated Facebook Login so that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list.”

Today, when Facebook users choose to share their friend list with an app, only those friends who also use the app become visible, Facebook spokeswoman Tera Randall told Yahoo News.

The changes went into effect for new apps on April 30, and existing apps were given a year before the change applied to them.

. . .

What this means in practice is that a group like Ready for Hillary, the grass-roots network of supporters for a Clinton presidential run, has been able to use targeted sharing over the past year. That means it has the Facebook friend lists of all the people who’ve installed Ready for Hillary’s app on the social network.

But when the API and terms-of-service changes become permanent for all apps, Ready for Hillary — as well as any campaign that has bought its voter information — won’t be able to keep up to date with its supporters’ most recent lists of friends, and will learn nothing about the Facebook friends of new supporters. Facebook’s change becomes permanent on April 30, 2015.

Most of the Republican presidential hopefuls, meanwhile, will not get the chance to use the tool at all.

. . .

as the NRSC official put it, “It seems that the days of getting 1 million users to scrape all of America's social data are gone.”

Why am I not surprised the Republicans are clueless about social media?

At least one form of really annoying political spam is biting the dust. Which is good because this kind of spam works, so it was destined to get much worse and much more annoying over time had it not been nixed.

Michael