snapchat
belated?
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/09/political-ad-spending-on-snapchat
Another social media giant is providing a snapshot of political ad spending on its platform.
Snapchat has accounted for more than $1.2 million in political ad spending targeting the U.S. since June 2018, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of newly-released data from the company. This week, Snap joined Google, Twitter and Facebook as the latest tech giant to make its political advertising data available to the public.
U.S. political ad spending on Snapchat totaled $594,324 in 2018 and $612,043 so far this year.
The newly-released database provides political ad figures that previously weren’t available. The data also provides previously unknown details of political ad buys in countries across the world, with the total spending since mid-2018 exceeding $2.5 million.
Presidential candidates in the 2020 election made up $72,591 of political ad spending reported by Snap. President Donald Trump spent the largest sum on digital advertising among 2020 presidential candidates and also comes out on top of Snapchat spending. Trump has spent more than $26.6 million on digital ads overall, roughly $40,000 of which went to Snapchat.
A number of candidates have yet to make their Snapchat debut. Some candidates, however, have seen Snapchat support from outside groups.
A super PAC supporting Jay Inslee’s now-folded 2020 bid spent six figures on Snapchat. Billionaire megadonor-turned-candidate Tom Steyer’s NextGen America spent nearly $100,000 in 2018, before he announced a presidential run. Both super PACs are among the top political ad spenders in Snap’s data, along with Everytown for Gun Safety and Planned Parenthood.
The biggest political ad spender on Snapchat is ACRONYM, a “dark money”501(c)(4) nonprofit that also owns a major digital firm. While many of ACRONYM’s ads are innocuous, simply encouraging voter participation, others reveal more of an agenda.
One video ad pans to a tranquil forest displaying text that “everything is going to be okay” then suddenly flashes to the word “nightmare” and Trump’s face transposed with a filter to make him look like a monster, urging users to vote to make the nightmare end. Others direct users to theGame of Elections, a website inviting users to choose who will “take the throne” in 2020. One ACRONYM ad transforms an image of Trump into a White Walker, zombie-like creatures in the Game of Thrones TV series, another shows an array of Democratic presidential contenders on the Iron Throne.
In 2018, the political ad reaching the most Snapchat users in the U.S. was an ad from now-Rep Josh Harder (D-Calif.) attacking his opponent Jeff Denham’s financial ties to “Big Pharma,” which racked up 8.7 million impressions for less than $10,000.
More than $1.8 million went toward political advertising on Snapchat across the world in 2019 alone, generating more than 96.5 million impressions, according to Snap’s data.
The political ads take a variety of forms ranging from videos displayed to users between snaps or stories, functioning more like traditional political advertising, to geofilters that allow users in targeted locations to add an illustration or filter to their snaps.
In addition to spending totals for each ad buy, Snap’s new data reveals previously unreleased details about everything from what gender and age is targeted by each ad to addresses and links to the ads themselves.
The organization name listed in Snap’s political ad data corresponds to who is responsible for creating each political ad while the advertiser name listed in the data and on the “paid for” disclosure is supposed to be the entity funding the ad, according to Snap’s documentation.
A representative from Snap told OpenSecrets the company will update its database daily.
Lawmakers push for mandated disclosure standards ahead of 2020
Digital ads are becoming an increasingly important tool for federal candidates to find donors and turn out voters, with 2020 presidential candidates already spending nearly $74 million to advertise on the biggest social media platforms.
But digital ads are still not subject to disclosure regulations that apply to TV and radio ads. The loophole helped allow Russian actors to buy and distribute roughly $100,000 worth of political ads under fake accounts without disclosing even basic information about who was behind them.
The Federal Election Commission has held several discussions on the subject but has been unable to come to a consensus about what the regulations would look like — and now the commission cannot even hold official meetings due to a lack of quorum.
At a symposium hosted at the FEC Tuesday, representatives from social media giants touted their work to enforcing disclosure rules and create databases of political ads — but election security experts said mandatory disclosure would require government action.
“Some of the companies have taken their own steps to ensure transparency and disclosure around those kinds of ads, that’s welcome, but they’re using different kinds of standards,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group formed to counter Russian efforts to undermine Western democracies.
Each of the social media giants and other big online platforms has its own requirements for how “paid for” disclaimers should appear and what information must be displayed. Rosenberger argued that the widely varying disclosure standards set by the various social media companies in some ways serve to confuse the general public.
Speaking at the event Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) plugged the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would mandate disclosure of those paying for online political ads. The bill has not received a vote in the Mitch McConnell-led Senate.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who also supports the Honest Ads Act, called on big tech companies Tuesday to exhibit “corporate patriotism” and do more on their own to fight online disinformation.
Experts agree that while creating uniform disclosure standards for online political ads won’t stop foreign actors from influencing Americans on social media, it is a change that is relatively easy to implement right away.
“There is no silver bullet to address disinformation in a manner that is true to freedom of expression,” said Susan Ness, a former FCC commissioner who now works for the Annenberg Policy Center. “The consensus, however, is that transparency with regards to political advertising is something that needs to be pursued, and it’s best to address behaviors and actors as opposed to the content itself.”
Since Snapchat has only made the data available through bulk download in zip files, OpenSecrets broke down the top spenders and more. Dig into the data yourself!
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dy7vb/why-the-right-is-dominating-youtube
no lnx
Why the Right Is Dominating YouTube
And why the left needs to own the future of online video.
Tom Whyman
Mar 18 2017, 3:16pm
"Twitter is a tiny echo chamber. I'm not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube."
Thus reads a tweet posted this Tuesday by InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson, who you may remember best as the right-wing vlogger who inadvertently promised every journalist in the world a free holiday to Sweden.
As with most things PJW does nowadays, the tweet was immediately and widely mocked. But however fun mocking Watson might be, there was a curious hollowness to the whole affair. Because on this issue – breaking the habit of a lifetime – Paul Joseph Watson is right.
PJW's tweet offers a sketch of the social media terrain that seems spot-on. Twitter isn't wholly dominated by the left, but – Donald Trump and anyone with an egg avatar aside – left-wing views are certainly better-represented there than on any other major social network. However, left-wing Twitter has failed to translate into real-world influence. Twitter conversations aren't very accessible to outsiders. The "echo chamber" trope is lazy and inaccurate – I've personally learnt a huge amount from people on Twitter, and often this has led to my political views changing as well. Nevertheless, Twitter lends itself best to the refinement of people's views in conversation with people they already share some sympathy with. It's an effective tool for dragging young Labour voters further left, perhaps, but not turning Trump voters into Black Lives Matter activists.
On YouTube, by contrast, left-wing voices are seemingly non-existent – apart from that communist child – while right-wing voices dominate. PJW himself is one, standing in front of his little world map shouting at the internet from his room; his mentor Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who likes to whip himself up into a frenzy by thinking about secret documents, is another. But it's not just InfoWars – there is a whole ecosystem of right-wing YouTubers out there at least as sophisticated as the society of woodlice you might find scurrying under a loose paving slab, a vast horde of unloved grown-up boys droning on and on about why we need to halt immigration; why we need to ban toilets; why we need to kill all girl-children at birth.
The videos these people produce are a lot of things – "amateurish" and "mind-numblingly tedious" are among the main descriptors I'd use. But somehow, they're incredibly effective. Let's face it: anyone who can get hundreds of thousands of views for a one-hour rant about Owen Jones is worthy of at least our anthropological interest, if not quite our respect.
The most famous instance of far-right views being disseminated on YouTube is PewDiePie – the site's biggest star, commanding an audience of literally millions of impressionable teenage boys, who for some reason want to watch him play computer games. He was dropped by Disney after it emerged that his videos included antisemitic jokes and Nazi imagery. PewDiePie wrote a blog post declaring: "I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes... Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive."
What PewDiePie does is very different from the likes of PJW, but this ironic racism can offer us a good example of what happens when these views, prominent in YouTube's ecosystem as they are, become normalised. Such videos are – at least anecdotally – having a measurable effect on how these kids talk about Jews, or the Nazis.
Here's my hypothesis: Twitter is the natural home of the left because Twitter – participatory; open; capable of presenting multiple viewpoints to the reader simultaneously – is well-suited to the expression of left-wing views, which are (to draw however loose a family resemblance between often disparate warring factions) typically somehow egalitarian.
Contemporary right-wing politics, by contrast, is driven largely by the unexamined prejudices and anxieties of (primarily) white men. Any white man who wants to hold on to their prejudices and anxieties is going to have a tough time of it on Twitter – but they're going to have a grand old time standing in front of their wall, alone, ranting.
So the left have the tweet, and the right have the solo rant to camera. This would, in a way, be fine – except that it turns out the solo rant to camera is a vastly better way of converting people than the tweet is. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. In contrast to the tweet, the video rant allows the speaker to set themselves up as an authority, never really having to deal with the questioning, sarcastic audience that any tweeter does (YouTube has below-the-line comments, of course, but that's a very odd ecosystem, and easy to ignore). Moreover, the fact that the vlog is an oral medium gives it a greater immediacy, so the audience can, for instance, feel the speaker's anger. On both counts, it's easy to see how the solo rant to camera might turn out to be more persuasive.
This is compounded by technological factors. The way in which YouTube is set up makes it very easy for newcomers to discover the world of right-wing rants to camera – all you need to do is find one rant, and then keep scrolling through the sidebar. It's also generally true that tech companies are increasingly prioritising video over words. Recently, a Professor of Technology speculated in the Guardian thatSnapchat might be ushering in a "post-literary" age, while Facebook has recently changed its algorithm to promote video in anticipation of a future which is "all video".
So what can the left do? Calls for, say, a "Paul Joseph Watson of the left" are bound to be misguided. The left can never appropriate the solo rant to camera – it's an inherently authoritarian method of communication. But if the future is video then the left desperately need to find a way to use it. The question is whether the medium can be used in an open, diverse, participatory w...