CBC: Political campaigns are targeting you on Facebook. Help us find out how.. “Around 23 million Canadians use Facebook every month, and with elections looming in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick and a federal campaign next year, those users will no doubt be besieged by political ads on the social media platform. But unlike on TV and radio, political ads online are not strictly regulated.”
elections
Campaign Finance Institute: Introducing CFI’s Groundbreaking Database Of State Campaign Finance Laws
Campaign Finance Institute: Introducing CFI’s Groundbreaking Database Of State Campaign Finance Laws. “The Campaign Finance Institute is pleased to release a groundbreaking new tool, ‘CFI’s Historical Database of State Campaign Finance Laws’. The database covers all of the states’ campaign finance laws every two years since 1996. It is designed for everything from interactive and visualized lookups to downloadable datasets. “
Mapping Early American Elections: Mapping the Second Decade of Congressional Elections
Mapping Early American Elections: Mapping the Second Decade of Congressional Elections. “The Mapping Early American Elections team has released over eighty maps of elections for Congress’s second decade. This release adds county-level maps of election returns for the Sixth through Tenth Congresses, taking our coverage of Congressional elections up through the 1806–1807 elections. As before, these maps are accompanied by tables that succinctly summarize the results for each district or state-wide at-large election, and which link out to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Besides examining our maps, you can use the data that underlies them by downloading it from our data repository.”
Reuters: Facebook to trial ads tool in Ireland ahead of abortion referendum
Reuters: Facebook to trial ads tool in Ireland ahead of abortion referendum. “Ireland will become the second country to trial a new tool that Facebook hopes will ensure greater transparency in political advertising, when it holds a referendum on abortion next month, the company’s vice president for global policy said on Tuesday.”
Wired: How Russian Facebook Ads Divided And Targeted US Voters Before The 2016 Election
Wired: How Russian Facebook Ads Divided And Targeted US Voters Before The 2016 Election. “WHEN YOUNG MIE Kim began studying political ads on Facebook in August of 2016—while Hillary Clinton was still leading the polls— few people had ever heard of the Russian propaganda group, Internet Research Agency. Not even Facebook itself understood how the group was manipulating the platform’s users to influence the election. For Kim, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the goal was to document the way the usual dark money groups target divisive election ads online, the kind that would be more strictly regulated if they appeared on TV. She never knew then she was walking into a crime scene.
Nieman Lab: Facebook and Twitter are opening up a bit to academic researchers, so platforms “can make better decisions”
Nieman Lab: Facebook and Twitter are opening up a bit to academic researchers, so platforms “can make better decisions”. “Facebook announced on Monday, ahead of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress on Wednesday, that it plans to give a limited group of soon-to-be determined academics some access to Facebook data as needed, with a research emphasis on how Facebook influences elections in different countries around the word.”
Poynter: With money from Facebook, this Brazilian fact-checker created a Messenger bot for the election
Poynter: With money from Facebook, this Brazilian fact-checker created a Messenger bot for the election. “Six months ahead of the Brazilian election, one fact-checker is using support from Facebook to better reach its readers. The project, called ‘Projeto Lupe!’, allows people to ask for verified information on everything from candidate statements to viral fake news stories — all by sending Agência Lupa a message on Facebook, which has about 125 million monthly users in Brazil.”
