Twitter Campaign. Politicians, you’re doing it wrong

This is the ‘real real’ of a Twitter campaign. Not what a staffer insists because everyone else is doing it. Social media doesn’t want to see pictures of you standing bravely, shaking hands or dishing food at a pantry. And your policies, meh.

Twitter Campaign

Computational politics are the analytical tools used to profile at the individual level. It is asymmetrical warfare. ‘They’ have a machine gun and ‘you’ have nothing, not even the awareness of all the battles you lose.

• Broke: Survey questions, supplemented by a layer of “latent data” that gave correlational guidance at the group level but not precise individual targeting
• Woke: User generated, persistent data collection. The always-on trail of harvestable imprints

Twitter campaign is one supply line of an attack

Twitter narrowly defines ‘you’ and ‘your’ attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. These are the deepest parts of a person’s identity

As the fragmenting of groups is now unrecoverable, elections will be fought more aggressively at the margins of extreme polarization and low turnout.

Twitter environment

The quantity and quality of persistent surveillance extracted from online conversations, likes, retweets, comments, your language, sentiment, empathy all correlated, political engagement, employment, home address, cell phone records, search history, purchases, financial interaction and all those people on your periphery, has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount and type of data available to Twitter campaigns that can afford the access

1. Campaign sciences have aborted the philosophy of the ‘rational human’ and adopted a ‘realistic model’ of human behavior allows for enhanced, network–based social engineering
2. Twitter enables real time, quickly iterated messaging and methods
3. Data, tools and techniques that comprise these methods require access to proprietary, expensive data
4. Twitter has a significant role in information sharing among politicians, journalists and citizens
5. Twitter can make it easier or harder for political campaigns to acquire user information, or may decide to package and sell data to campaigns in ways that differentially empower the campaigns

Let’s agree on these definitions:

• Sockpuppet: False identities used to praise, support or defend a person or organization
• Bot: Fake twitter identity. A program that autonomously tweets, retweets, likes, follows, unfollows
• Astroturfing: Masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear grassroots

Botnets, bots and sockpuppet are force multipliers. They are used to:

• Broadcast information or misinformation
• Make a hashtag trend
• Promote a story, have it detected by Google and promoted to the top of the results page for a query
• Amplify messages and shape public debate
• Jam the opposing campaigns twitter feed, bombard accounts in an attempt to get them suspended

There is no action on social media that does not have a target. Everything is a campaign.

Q: How do you measure the success of a campaign?
A: By the amount of diffusion and iterations that people create from the kernels that are planted

Twitter is a instant information infrastructure. Think of it as collective Intelligence

The route to amplification is visible. It does not take place in editorial board rooms but in real-time on the streets and social media

During this year’s US election, what is the most common form of political communication?

• Is it TV, print, or online advertisements? No.
• Is it TV, print, or online journalism? No.

The most common form of political messaging is found on social networking. It’s called a meme.

A meme is an image and with a bit of text that conveys a very precise emotion or idea.

Memes are built for consumption on smartphones and visual modes of social networking. They are also built for speedy consumption, a quick emotional hit

Get your base to make memes, you will then have the currency of attention. Bringing attention to someone’s creation is a fairly egalitarian way of rewarding their contribution.

h/t to John Robb, a thought leader in how politics cascades on social media

Twitter Campaign. Politicians, you're doing it wrong. - Adam Townsend