Campaign Ads and the 2012 Election: Join Our Google Plus Chat
How exactly do campaigns define and track voters? How much do they really know about us? And what privacy issues does it raise? Join us for a live discussion of campaign ads in the 2012 election this Friday on Google Plus.
Candidates and interest groups are using increasingly sophisticated methods to find and target likely voters online.
Whether shopping, emailing, Facebooking or jamming to Garth Brooks on Pandora, Americans are encountering election ads targeted to them at nearly every turn.
At ProPublica, we’ve been digging into the new techniques, documenting the nuances of email marketing with our Message Machine project and exploring how campaigns (and interest groups) are targeting voters based on their surfing habits.
But how exactly do campaigns define and track voters? How much do they really know about us? And what privacy issues does it raise? Join us for a live discussion of campaign ads in the 2012 election this Friday on Google Plus.
When: Friday, Aug. 10, 1 p.m. ET
Where: ProPublica + Google Plus
Who:
Lois Beckett reports on technology and privacy issues in the 2012 campaign for ProPublica
Jeff Larson manages ProPublica’s Message Machine project, collecting and analyzing hundreds of campaign emails
Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor in journalism at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, studies politics and digital media
Joseph Turow, associate dean for graduate studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studies digital media and marketing industries.
What questions do you have about campaign ad targeting? Circle ProPublica on Google Plus to pose your questions for our panel (or post them in the comments below). We hope to see you Friday.
Buying Your Vote: Dark Money and Big Data
ProPublica is following the money and exploring campaign issues in the 2012 election you won't read about elsewhere.
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2 comments
Alessandro Machi
Aug. 8, 2012, 9:27 p.m.
I’m still on my mission to gain support for the Debt Neutrality Petition. Are any of these politicians really going to do something about the 3 trillion dollars in consumer debt?
Are any of them really going to say we must reduce consumer debt so consumers can rekindle local economies and reduce overall consumption of the world’s precious resources.
Debt Neutrality means consumers can pay down their existing consumer debt with no more interest rate charges, penalties or fees, however they cannot run up new debt of an equivalent or greater amount.
It is my belief that credit card and student load debt (including the zombie credit card debt and debt taken off the books that is still being collected on via court orders) should be between 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars, NOT the 3 trillion dollars that it probably is.
Please support The Debt Neutrality Petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/congress-create-debt-neutrality-rights-for-paying-down-credit-cards-student-loans
the Debt Neutrality blog, http://www.debtneutrality.blogspot.com
and like on facebook, http://www.facebook.com/debtneutrality
Dennis Costea Jr.
Aug. 10, 2012, 11:04 p.m.
In regards to this upcoming discussion, it would be incredible to see a graphic similar to the “Who are the Super PACs’ Biggest Donors?” chart shown here detailing where the Presidential candidates are spending money! Perhaps such information in detail will not be completely available until well after the elections are over, so in that case… How about a graphic showing United States government spending by department or program? Such a graphic would potentially be one of the most informative items ever generated in the public interest.
Certainly to know whether our tax dollars are being spent widely, what the voting public needs is a detailed accounting of dollars spent on tangible public infrastructure, cost analysis/feasibility studies and the administration of all public sector programs. There may be tens of thousands of programs the government is responsible for these days, but we now have the technology to document all these things. Open accounting with “drill-down” breakdowns would be highly informative.
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