We talk about the system behind campaign fundraising texts, how it works, who profits and why changes could be on the horizon.
My Journey to the Center of America’s Political Spam Text Hell
I’ve gotten nearly 2,000 campaign fundraising texts that were meant for someone else. I tried to find out why—and uncovered a labyrinth of politicians, data brokers, and shady tactics.
Conservative PACs have paid at least $1.6 million to the extended Metric Media network this election cycle, a Tow Center investigation reveals.
Nonprofits and political action committees (pacs) are using Metric Media’s extended network of local news sites to provide a range of campaign services to conservative candidates in the run-up to the November midterm elections, new research by the Tow Center shows. The tactic of using partisan newspapers to launder advocacy is being taken up […]
Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information
For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?
Stop and Consider:Our campaign
During a federal election there is a large amount of information being distributed, much of it online, which is seeking to influence your vote. Some of this may be disinformation, or false information.
Election results | Tech Influence Watch
Results from the latest federal elections, and how candidates backed or opposed by crypto- and AI-focused super PACs and donors fared
Ted Cruz campaign using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users
Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters
Inside the Secretive World of Campaign Ads Funded by AI Super PACs
Bellingcat analysed more than 300 online video ad campaigns promoting or opposing candidates for the upcoming US midterm elections.
This tool makes everyone a campaign finance expert
Introducing PaidForBy.info, a new app created by Popular Information
Someone Is Manipulating Your AI to Swing Your Vote | VisionHeight
A network of 37 anonymous “local news” sites, set up in a single evening, is feeding ready-made midterm answers to the AI chatbots voters increasingly consult.
Home - LogiVote
Complete Solutions for a Campaign Management System and for Digital or Online Voting
How Technology Is Shaping Modern Politics
Discover how technology is reshaping politics, from digital campaigns to AI, and the challenges of misinformation and election security.
Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become a primary interface between users and the web, companies face growing economic incentives to embed commercial influence into AI-mediated conversations. We present two preregistered experiments (N = 2,012) in which participants selected a book to receive from a large eBook catalog using either a traditional search engine or a conversational LLM agent powered by one of five frontier models. Unbeknownst to participants, a fifth of all products were randomly designated as sponsored and promoted in different ways. We find that LLM-driven persuasion nearly triples the rate at which users select sponsored products compared to traditional search placement (61.2% vs. 22.4%), while the vast majority of participants fail to detect any promotional steering. Explicit "Sponsored" labels do not significantly reduce persuasion, and instructing the model to conceal its intent makes its influence nearly invisible (detection accuracy < 10%). Altogether, our results indicate that conversational AI can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, and that existing transparency mechanisms may be insufficient to protect users.
Websites pretending to be local news are boosting Democratic candidates
The websites of unknown origin are targeting key U.S. House races. They are getting picked up by ChatGPT's responses but Google's products avoid promoting them.
Politicians are being sold AI-powered 'digital fighters'
A new app gets around bot bans by recruiting real people to post political messages generated by AI.
Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.
Jake Grumbach
We found that as of right now 73% of your campaign donation goes back to the consultants and vendors (!!!), four times more than just 20 years ago. Only 13% to ads. Even I was shocked.
