One of the reports about the Uxbridge and S Ruislip by-election concentrates on the way in which anti ULEZ propaganda was circulated on Twitter. The report was posted on Twitter by Valent Projects, who claimed to be a consultancy specialising in combating fake news with a preference for working with progressive causes. They might seem to be useful allies in public campaigns. Here my notes and links …
I wrote on my wiki article, about the by-election, “Equally interesting, Valent Projects, did some research on the twitter foot print of the anti-ULEZ campaign (or on twitter) and discovered that much of it was programmatic. I wonder if Facebook is as vulnerable?” Valent Projects identified at least one product that can act as a bot-net brain and analysed the roles of seeds and propagators. Progressive causes should be able to avoid these tactics as they have their members and subscribers to act as their echo chamber, and lying is wrong.
Facebook has has a much bigger reach than Twitter.
I also wonder if causes I support have looked into this, how does one build an effective Facebook campaign. Most of what has been written is focussed on advising commercial firms. I found this …., which has a number of cross references, and also this, from social sprout. I found them using this google query, which also brings up a lot of “how to” pages and videos. NB For Facebook, there are additional registration steps to place ‘political’ ads.
I also wonder if stepping away from Nationbuilder was a mistake; it was focused on an activity funnel with fund raising functionality. It was however hard to use and necessary to understand that it was more than a web site and mail delivery system.