FWIW

What a poisoned media environment means for the midterms

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:22:34 GMT

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Hey everyone, Denny Carter from BadFaithTimes.com here. A while back I wrote for FWIW about media – particularly TV ads – reflecting a supposed right-wing culture shift in the early days of Trump’s second term. My background is in journalism and social justice issues, while my day job is as a sportswriter and football podcaster. I can be found posting incessantly on Bluesky, which I have dubbed The Official App of Sports, at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

Today I look at just how dramatically our information environment has changed since 2020, when guardrails on social media platforms and news outlets stopped Republicans from overturning a fair and free election.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

One Nation, a GOP dark money group, takes the top spot this week; otherwise, it’s mostly business as usual. American Bridge PAC, the Democratic super PAC that has spent the past year studying working-class voters, is kicking off a roughly $50 million ad campaign targeting Republicans in more than a dozen House districts and four Senate races — most of them in traditionally red territory. So this probably won’t be the last time we see them on this chart. Here’s hoping their efforts pay off in November!

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $19.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

One Nation tops this chart too, with $1.14M in spending. Texans for Greg Abbott comes in second as the Republican governor faces Trump in a showdown over the former’s decision to pause new data center projects pending a state audit. OpenAI sent Abbott a letter this week committing to pay their own infrastructure costs, along with a bunch of other stuff. Worth a read if data centers sucking up power and water, spiking electricity bills, and tech companies making promises to politicians are your idea of a relaxing evening (no judgment here!).

…and lastly, on Snapchat, the glitch continues, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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What a poisoned media environment means for the midterms

There were information environment guardrails, however shaky and battered, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election and in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory, as the Republican Party and its vast media apparatus became increasingly coup-curious.

Those guardrails on the American right’s election lies have since been crushed by those who simply could not accept that Donald Trump had lost his re-election bid. Elon Musk parted with $44 billion to ensure Twitter – the veritable nerve center of American politics – would no longer have the informational guardrails necessary for a functioning democracy. Mark Zuckerberg did away with any and all political fact-checking in the years after the 2020 election. Together, Musk and Zuckerberg – obscenely wealthy men who control the algorithms of our lives – made a conscious decision to let misinformation run free across our timelines, normalizing lies and half-truths about election integrity.

The result, as intended, is that any Democratic victory is seen by much of the U.S. voting population as illegitimate and corrupt. Headed into a 2026 midterm election that could be an historic wipeout for Republicans, our information environment – poisoned by a billionaire class hell-bent on ending representative democracy in the Western world – is going to matter. The guardrails are gone, replaced by algorithmic boosting of lies and conspiracies that are now treated with the same respect as the truth. Chaos could reign in the weeks after November’s midterms.

With election denialism now a feature of the Republican Party and right-wing media telling its gullible audience that Democrats steal elections with regularity, nearly half of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Fully two-thirds of co-called MAGA Republicans say that election was illegitimate, with just 2 in 10 MAGA Republicans conceding that their guy – wildly unpopular outside his hardcore base – did, in fact, lose his re-election bid.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how insidious the idea of stolen elections has become on the American right over these past six years. Recent polling from Bright Line Watch, an organization that measures Americans’ views on the strength of the country’s democracy, showed that a mere one in four Republicans believe “elections are free from pervasive fraud or manipulation, down from 50% in February 2025.”

It’s not just GOP voters who won’t acknowledge the results of the free and fair 2020 election. The president’s judicial nominees have humiliated themselves before U.S. Senate subcommittees by carrying on the farce that the Biden campaign somehow cheated its way to victory. Asked by Democratic senators to say affirmatively that Biden won that race against Trump, these judicial nominees – afraid of drawing the ire of the tyrant who appointed them – dance around the question.

They say Biden was “certified” as the winner of the Electoral College. They say Biden was sworn into office. What they won’t say: Biden won a fair election against the kingpin of their party. The language is careful, calculated, meant to never concede for a moment that the results of the 2020 election were legitimate.

It is a matter of dogma among every part of the American right that Donald Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed. Jurists – upholders of the constitutional order – engaging in outright election denialism is a deeply dangerous development, made possible by the acquiescence of major media outlets and the outrage-fueled social media algorithms that often (tragically) serve as assignment editors for the country’s foremost publications and news networks.

It’s notable that the right’s rampant election denialism – supercharged by loyal Trump allies Musk and Zuckerberg, along with the rest of Silicon Valley’s anti-democracy oligarchs – has not yet broken containment and significantly affected self-identified Independents and Democrats, according to polling data. But even that should be cold comfort: 23% of Independents and an absurdly high 14% of Democrats are “not sure” about whether the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. That’s because their social media timelines and the news they consume have winked and nodded and suggested for years that something fishy went on in Georgia and Michigan and other states in which Biden pulled off narrow wins.

Maybe these Independents and Democrats couldn’t even tell you what exactly happened to put Biden over the top in those critical swing states. But something happened. Maybe. No one knows for sure. The uncertainty is the whole point, and creates a path – however narrow – to denying Democrats’ election victories.

America’s information environment is about to get even worse, somehow, just in time for a potentially apocalyptic midterm election for the GOP. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced in July that it would partner with far-right conspiracy outlet NewsMax as part of Meta’s AI news-content partnership. Meta, according to a press release, “will be able to draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support Al queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

What this means in practical terms is that Meta will train its AI news products using information from an outlet that violates the most basic journalistic standards as a business model, carries water for the president and his allies, and floods its audience with lies about Democrats and pro-democracy forces not only in the United States, but across the world. Newsguard, which ranks the reliability of news outlets, gave NewsMax a score of 20 out of 100, correctly charging that the outlet “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards.”

Perhaps your parents or grandparents watch the nightmarish NewsMax cable channel and you are aware of all this. I would guess most people consuming news on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram are not. I would guess they’d never know the CEO of NewsMax is a close friend of the president who regularly dines with him.

There also looms the threat of election-denying bot swarms on social media sites, particularly microblogging platforms like Threads and X. These bots are trained to mimic not only right-wingers, but constituencies aligned with the Democratic Party. Bot swarms, according to research from Harvard Business School, are “deeply embedded manipulation that lets operators nudge public discourse almost invisibly over time. ... In cognitive warfare, AI’s relentless operational endurance becomes a weapon against limited human efforts.”

These bots learn how to talk like specific online communities before subtly suggesting that an election may have been crooked or outright stolen. The Harvard paper on bot swarms says:

None of this is going to be regulated by the Trump regime, which relies on a corroded information environment now free of the loose guardrails we had at the end of Trump’s first term. How elected Democrats deal with an information ecosystem that is in no way compatible with representative democracy is going to determine whether election denialism persists as a mainstream political idea or whether it’s reigned in, as we’ve seen in stronger democracies, namely Brazil.

An unregulated social media environment in which election lies are spread to millions without consequence represents an existential threat. Here’s hoping Democrats treat it as such.

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The Internet Knows You’re Faking It

Dillon St. Bernard — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:55:00 GMT

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Hi y’all! I’m Dillon St. Bernard, the Digital Director of Team DSB, a Gen Z-led communications agency helping organizations and campaigns engage young, multicultural folks online.

I’ve led the digital team for the largest network of young activists, a coalition of 500+ climate organizations, and insurgent congressional campaigns. My days are currently spent advising campaigns and advocacy groups on how to turn views into real-world engagement.

Political campaigns and organizations are pushing out more content than ever, but it’s not going as smoothly as they imagined.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Abdul El-Sayed takes the top spot this week as Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee gears up to take on Mike Rogers in November. Next door, in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong lost the Democratic primary for governor to David Crowley on Tuesday night, the first DSA defeat after a string of progressive wins in New York, Colorado, and Michigan.

Gina Hinojosa, Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, appears on the charts as her race with Greg Abbott heats up. A recent poll shows the two in a dead heat, putting the national spotlight on a race that could produce one of the biggest political upsets in Texas history.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

In Maine, Majority Forward Fund is going after Susan Collins, claiming she “is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.” FactCheck.org reviewed the ad and found the attack gets a little ahead of itself: it’s true that Collins does not support a full ban, but she has previously backed some restrictions on congressional stock trading.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, there was a glitch this week, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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The Internet Knows You’re Faking It

We can’t afford to ignore this lesson.

We’ve spent years analyzing the shifting media landscape and diagnosing what went wrong in past elections. The postmortem has been performed by everyone, including those of us who live and breathe digital comms and the several politicos whose complicity helped spur us into this mess.

One of the biggest takeaways has been a mandate for comms teams to expand the tactics they use to reach people: more appearances on new media, more coordination with creators, more direct-to-camera videos. More, more, more.

Campaigns and organizations are increasingly producing daily content across every possible platform, complete with a meticulous content calendar, an underfunded communications budget, and a dream.

Here’s the problem: being fluent in the tactics without first establishing your values is why so much content continues to underperform, even when it looks technically “good” on paper.

Too many people are putting out communications without knowing what they actually want to communicate, so the content they publish is devoid of any principles or conviction. AI may have nothing to do with it, but it’s slop all the same.

The result is an inauthentic online presence that feels hollow. As elections get closer and trust in legacy institutions and systems continues to erode, principles and conviction are what truly resonate with audiences and make (or break) their trust.

You can borrow tactics. You can’t rent trust.

The principle that communications should be polished within an inch of their lives does not translate well to today’s digital-first universe.

A walk-and-talk video scripted word for word won’t resonate. Neither will a content creator who isn’t allowed to make your campaign’s talking points their own. You can borrow the formats and tactics that work, but you can’t rent the trust that made them work in the first place.

It’s why a “Get ready with me while we talk about corporate greed” video from a lifelong U.S. Senator would have the internet cringing. People would see through it right away. It’s the “right” tactic, but the wrong messenger.

Voters are crying out for authenticity, driven by clear and consistent values. They want disciplined messengers who speak to what keeps them up at night and who sometimes go off script (rightfully leading to rising blood pressure among comms professionals). They want nuanced conversations and a chance to have their questions answered. They want to see the folks vying for their trust be undeniably human. They don’t want us to just meet them where they are. They want their distrust of the establishment and abandonment by those in power addressed head-on.

This is especially true for the audiences I specialize in engaging: Gen Z and people of color who have continued to navigate a broken civic landscape. When people aren’t engaged as voters, fingers are pointed at them. Disengagement gets framed solely as a cultural problem or a lack of motivation rather than as a systemic failure. Instead of addressing the concerns of folks who have been systematically excluded, structural change is traded in for ad hominem attacks, leaving us with more of the same.

If we want to communicate online effectively and build relationships that extend offline in 2026 and beyond, we have to give people the authenticity they demand. That only works if we say what we mean and mean what we say.

A five-part playbook (to use as you create content).

I know well that there are best practices for engaging audiences, such as strong video hooks, automations, and creators. But, most importantly, I’ve found it critical to set up a container for digital comms team I lead to execute those tactics effectively:

Plan content with precision.
I design my content in thirds. 33% is proactive (to introduce the candidate or organization and what they stand for); 33% is reactive (to position the candidate or organization as a trusted voice in the cultural conversations and rapid response moments people are paying attention to); the final 33% is the equivalent of an “About You” section (to communicate the grit, vision, professional know-how, and lived experiences that make the candidate or organization worth trusting).
Overplan, so you’re ready for “organic” moments.
My team’s three top-performing pieces of content for a recent Congressional race were shot by our traveling videographer: our candidate with a voter in front of an early-voting site, at the beach, and at a town hall. These moments were only possible because of our “always-on” content approach, where we capture everything, including unplanned behind-the-scenes and “between-the-scenes” moments. That means prioritizing the limited time our team has with a candidate or principal, and doing it enough times that they grow comfortable enough to forget they’re on camera.
Pass the mic to others to talk about you.
Many candidates and organizations do one thing really well: talk about how great they are. For politicians who aren’t exactly known for their humility, it’s especially important to leave space for everyday people to share why they’ve joined or support your work. It’s even more important to foster an environment where those people jump at the opportunity to do so. People want to see themselves in your content. Literally.
Bring new people in.
The barrier to entry is often too high for folks to find and join us. I usually create a “Start Here” section on our partners’ platforms that answers the questions their audience is already asking: Who are you, really? What are you fighting for? What can I do *right now* to join your movement? If your only points of engagement are newsletter signups, donations, and an ask for their vote, your audience will drop off and you won’t get another chance to engage them.
Speak to everyone, one person at a time.
Every piece of content should answer your audience’s central question: “Why should I care?” Providing value is about creating content your audience actually wants to engage with. It should inform, entertain, or inspire. It should be thumb-stopping. It should give your audience a reason to care. And most importantly: it should feel like you’re speaking directly to another person on the other side of the phone. This illusion of one-to-one engagement is the magic of digital communications. And that magic is driven by specificity, which creates authenticity.

Let’s remember what’s at stake.

Doing digital communications in 2026 is a game of whack-a-mole. The tactics and platforms will continue to shift. What works today may not work six months from now.

But the values we create our content with can outlast any single election cycle or algorithm change… only if those values are a true reflection of what we believe. Audiences are better at reading through messaging than we give them credit for. They’re savvy enough to see through the platitudes and political games.

As conversations about the horse race of the midterms and 2028 intensify, the work that will shape election outcomes begins with communicating clear, consistent values that speak to the wants and needs of the people we hope to engage. We can only build trust when we invite our people in. Because ultimately, we’re not fighting for better engagement. We’re fighting to move people and progress forward.

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Preparing for election sabotage and enforcing our win

Jiggy Geronimo — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:31:19 GMT

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Hi, I’m Jiggy Geronimo, a progressive narrative strategist, consultant, and, most recently, a budding content creator 🫣. You might know me from one of those traumatizing webinars during the Count Every Vote campaign in 2020 or my time as Executive Director of the Research Collaborative. Now I spend my time as a freelance progressive comms consultant focused on how to source, curate, and deliver content at scale to defeat fascism.

But true to form, I’m thinking a lot about what happens after ballots are cast this November. When the biggest sore loser to walk this earth sees that MAGA is in for a shellacking in the midterms, we know what he will do. He will lie, lash out, and try to cheat. And we need to start planning now for how to stop him.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15.76 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The DNC takes the top spot on Meta this week, just as Michigan’s Democratic primary wraps up (bless) and the political world collectively turns its attention to November. Progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary, defeating Haley Stevens despite more than $60 million in outside spending — including a record $30 million from AIPAC’s election arm. He’ll now face Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could decide control of the Senate.

The rest of the chart is mostly the usual suspects, with the exception of the K.A. Whitmore Information Network. The group barely seems to exist online, and their ads have been pulled down by Meta for not complying with advertisement standards. Cracking the top ten only to flame out almost instantly is… an interesting strategy (?) to say the least.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $16.9 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project slots in at #3 after pouring nearly $800,000 into a campaign that ultimately came up short (sorry, Haley Stevens). Meanwhile, SLF PAC, the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, announced a $17 million opening ad buy for Michael Whatley in North Carolina. Former Dem Gov. Roy Cooper currently leads in the polls, so it’s safe to predict that we’ll be seeing SLF consistently on the charts from here on out.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, there was a glitch this week, so we don’t have the total YTD, but here’s the data for the top 10 spenders:

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Preparing for election sabotage and enforcing our win

If you close your eyes and transport yourself back to November 3, 2020, here’s what you might remember: the elevation of your heart rate as the early vote counts showed Trump ahead, panicked texts from friends asking if we were going to lose, and the shock of watching Trump confidently declare his victory in the middle of the night with millions of ballots still left to count.

The next two months brought a stop at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, attempts to pressure Michigan GOP leaders to overturn the election, a demand that Georgia’s Secretary of State find Trump 11,000 votes, and a deadly assault on our nation’s Capitol. But in the end, lawmakers certified Joe Biden’s win, he was sworn into office in January 2021, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Don’t hate me for saying this, but I think 2026 is going to make the 2020 election look like child’s play 😬. It’s not enough to just win anymore. We have to win by margins that are too big to rig and prepare the American public to defend and enforce the outcome of our elections en masse.

The bad news: election sabotage is well underway

In 2020, the election sabotage really started on Election Day. This time around, it started on Inauguration Day. The Trump regime has already seized ballots from Fulton and Maricopa counties, launched investigations into election workers in several swing states, demanded voter rolls from states across the country while threatening to withhold funding from those that do not comply, tried to direct the USPS not to deliver mail ballots from counties that resist his orders, greenlit racial gerrymandering to eliminate Black districts in the South, and attempted (but failed) to require Americans to show a birth certificate or passport to vote.

The good news: we are winning

These are not the actions of a winner – they are the desperate actions of someone who knows they can’t win a fair fight. He’s doing these things because he knows he’s losing.

The structural fact that states control our elections is still standing between our shaky democracy and an autocrat dead set on controlling the outcome. Trump may be trying to nationalize the elections, but the Constitution clearly says elections are up to the states. And we will still count every vote. Our drumbeat from the aftermath of the 2020 election hasn’t changed and will apply come November this year too: Every ballot must be counted, period, no matter how long it takes or how loudly Trump and MAGA lie about the results.

In 2020, America hadn’t experienced a contested presidential election or insurrection in recent memory. We’re veterans now. Expectations for election sabotage are now baked into our plans and we now know that the midterm election isn’t truly over until the new Congress is seated on January 3, 2027. At the same time, six years have passed (though it might feel more like 20) and MAGA has refined their strategy, so it’s not enough to just run the exact same playbook.

The outcome we’re looking for is action, not trust.

In 2020, part of what got us through was a baseline assumption that the system would hold — that courts, secretaries of state, and election officials would do their jobs regardless of party. MAGA has spent the last six years relentlessly trying to take over control of elections and install election traitors in those very same offices. Fortunately, most election officials can still be trusted to do the right thing. We can and should remind people that election workers are our neighbors and that there are checks and balances in our election system. But we’re not trying to restore faith that the system will enforce itself. We’re trying to build a country full of people who understand that we are the enforcement mechanism. We need people ready to act when something happens — not people waiting patiently for institutions to save us.

That means shifting the entire emotional posture of this fight. We don’t build the people power necessary to enforce the results of this election through blind trust in the system. We build it through defiant energy and with millions of people who understand that protecting a free and democratic result is their responsibility, not someone else’s.

Voting is a tool and an act of defiance

Let’s be real, fam, the vibes are kind of bad. They want to overwhelm us, make us feel defeated, and silence us into submission. They’re doing everything they can to take away our votes and control the outcome. But telling people, “This is the most important election of our lifetimes” and that voting is the magic bullet isn’t the answer. Our big middle finger is to vote anyway, in the face of it all, as an act of defiance. And not only to vote, but to vote by margins that are so overwhelming that even the desperate cheeto can’t rig the outcome. That’s the vibe shift we need: from fatigue to determined defiance. Remember, Hungary ousted Orbán through an election with 80% voter turnout. Luckily for us, hearing about Trump’s desperate efforts to rig the midterms is actually motivating to most Americans, so there’s no need to shy away from talking about it.

What we need to do between now and Election Day

There are four things we need to do now – and I mean now, not in October.

Inoculate against the lies. We already know what he’ll say: some new iteration of the Big Lie. The goal isn’t to repeat the lie in order to debunk it. It’s to expose the motivation behind it (his desperation to hold onto power). If people have already internalized that by November, they’ll be primed to reject his lies.
Build social proof. People do things when they see other people doing things. Part of our job is making it visible, everywhere, that huge numbers of Americans across this country are showing up, voting, and refusing to accept a rigged election — through local organizing and mass distribution of content online.
Prime people for action. This is different from asking people to simply vote and wait for the outcome. We need people mentally and emotionally ready to do something concrete the moment it’s needed: show up to a rally, flood a county elections commission meeting, call their state legislator, join a coordinated action, or even, if it comes to it, shut the country down. We have to build that readiness ahead of time by explaining what to expect and preparing them for the actions we will need to take.
Build our coordination. Sure, we can build coordination on the fly (we did it in 2020), but it will be far more effective if we prepare now. Our organizations, coalitions, and communications networks will need to move quickly in November and December. The infrastructure for that coordination needs to come together now.

The core narrative

Here’s the story we need to be telling, over and over, between now and Election Day:

Every time there’s election news, we just return to this drumbeat. We already have proof that this works. A few weeks ago, Trump delivered a primetime Big Lie address falsely claiming foreign interference in the 2020 election that he lost. Major news outlets didn’t even air it. We analyzed social media data and found that nearly 60% of content from left-leaning accounts delivered our inoculation messaging. We mocked Trump, named his intentions for meddling in 2026, and reminded audiences that he is full of hot air. As a result, what he hoped would be a bombshell moment turned out to be the biggest nothingburger ever.

It’s our job to make his efforts in November fall just as flat. And we do that by actively priming Americans right now to reject the lies that are coming and to be ready to enforce the results once they’re in. Because they can try all they want, but they can’t stop us.

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What the Diarrhea Parasite Teaches Us About Winning Online

Gabriella Zutrau — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:08:25 GMT

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Hi everyone! I’m Gabriella Zutrau, Principal and Founder of Weird LLC, and part-time dog. You may know me as a Digital Strategy Advisor to campaigns and organizations, or maybe you read my FWIW newsletter last year about building Zohran Mamdani’s social media chatbot infrastructure. My agency, Weird LLC, helps leftists and progressives do what works online right now. It’s also totally possible you know me from my work pretending to be a dog on the internet all day on my Edna the Runt dogfluencer accounts, which I use as a lab to experiment with new tools and tactics before trying them with my clients. But I’m not just a propagandist who moonlights as a dog.

I’m also The Diarrhea Parasite.

I’m gonna break down how and why I organically grew my brand new political diarrhea RFK Jr. troll account from zero to 43,000 followers–and 2 million views–in two weeks flat.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $14.36 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Last week was a busy (and tbh kinda rough) one for the DNC—between rolling out a new early-state primary calendar and grappling with new reporting that the party is, well, “broke.” A widely-circulated New York Times story detailed the DNC’s significant financial troubles, noting that while the RNC has roughly $130 million on hand (not including Trump’s super PAC), the DNC is $2 million in debt. This is particularly alarming in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling removing limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. And yet, the Dems remain a reliable top spender on Meta platforms week after week. So here’s to getting ready for yet another “most important election of our lifetime.”

The bottom of the chart isn’t exactly a source of optimism either. Missouri Promise is helping Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe make good on his campaign promise to eliminate the state’s income tax, a matter that will be left to voters to decide in next week’s primary.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $13.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

United Democracy Project cracks the top 5 again this week with just over $500,000 in spend—worth nothing because folks, we are (thankfully) less than a week out from Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The AIPAC-affiliated PAC has already poured nearly $15 million into the race, with over $9 million supporting Haley Stevens and over $5 million opposing Abdul El-Sayed.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent about $3.23 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Reach the right voters. Measure what moves them. Optimize in real-time.

Zero to 43K followers in 2 weeks: What the Diarrhea Parasite Teaches Us About Winning Online

I started my new RFK Jr. trolling account, @thediarrheaparasite, on July 14th, 2026. Today is July 31st, 2026, and the account has over 43,000 followers. Let’s add some context to these numbers.

According to one social listening company, the cyclospora outbreak, beyond this single account, generated over 46 million impressions across social platforms between July 22nd and July 28th alone. With around 11,000 confirmed cases of the parasite across the US since May, the pathogen became a meme because it has a particularly strong story, and a very visual, visceral vibe. Also, politics aside, who doesn’t like a good poop joke?

I used lots of social media tips, tricks, hacks, and best practices to produce this explosive growth, and I’ll get into all of that in a bit. But first, we need to address the shitty messaging elephant in the room.

Establishment political figures avoided the cyclospora topic at first, just because it was gross. Broadly speaking Dems and Dem-aligned groups still have not systematized something that the right has mastered: moving at the speed of the internet. While a culture of risk aversion continues to plague Democratic communications, contributing to electoral and cultural losses, the right has built its entire online strategy on exactly the opposite instinct: claim the joke, name the villain, and move before the moment passes.

When everyone started talking about the cyclospora outbreak a few weeks ago, it was obvious that it wasn’t just a meme. It was a public health crisis. As a political communicator, I was hopeful (but not optimistic) we’d see some great content about it from Democratic lawmakers and candidates–after all, the messaging opportunity was practically gift-wrapped: Trump and RFK Jr. cut parasite prevention funding, leading to the spread of the diarrhea parasite sweeping the nation. Clear villains. Clear victims. Clear heroes. This was an obvious opening–a real public health failure with an unmistakable culprit and a genuinely gross, shareable hook. And yet, key voices were largely quiet on it until it became impossible to ignore.

I started @thediarrheaparasite because I wanted to help inextricably link Trump and RFK to this outbreak. Supporters flooded in to help make sure everyone knew this wasn’t just any diarrhea parasite, it was Trump’s Diarrhea Parasite. RFK Jr.’s appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services allowed for the mainstream platforming and spread of his “Make America Healthy Again” tagline. And, being that his career has been defined by anti-scientific rhetoric and medical conspiracy theories, MAHA is a brand that is just screaming to get brand-jammed. It’s incredibly low-hanging fruit.

So when I saw that the @thediarrheaparasite handle was available on Instagram, I couldn’t resist the opportunity, and I hard launched the account with a single video that brought in over 20,000 followers in one day–a strong sign that people want us to Make Public Health Fun Again. The video described our only goal and challenge: help us get more followers than RFK Jr. so we can troll him every day of his life.

The observant reader will recognize this as the same follow-challenge strategy Amanda McGonigle used with her JD Vance troll account, @catsonacouch. What started as an account dedicated to trolling JD Vance and getting more followers than him has grown into an account with millions of followers across platforms–and eventually helped spark a First Amendment lawsuit. Amanda, with the support of the ACLU, is now suing the federal government after being barred by theSecret Service from attending an official vice presidential event.

The best political accounts online have real-world impacts–but that doesn’t always come in the shape of a lawsuit.

During my time consulting on the Mamdani campaign, I saw what’s possible when we bring a genuine culture of experimentation to political communications. We all saw what happened when the campaign left poll-tested messaging and traditional wisdom behind for a culture of “that’s a great idea–how do we make it happen?”

Whether it’s Mayor Mamdani cheering for the Knicks, Taco Bell’s $1 lettuce-free Mexican Pizza promo, or brand-jamming RFK Jr., the common thread isn’t just “being good at social media.” It’s having fun. As social media consultant Rachel Karten recently referenced: you can’t compete with a brand that’s having fun.

To be fair, a diarrhea meme page will of course always be a more risk-tolerant undertaking than most political digital ventures should be. That said, it’s clear how much online and cultural territory we’ve ceded to the right over the last fifteen years because of our inability to move fast and meet the moment. It’s so clear that over 170 social media professionals, content creators, and new media figures recently signed a letter to the Democratic establishment, urging them to shift 15% of paid media budgets towards investing in organic social and creator engagement. Consider this account exhibit A: two million views, zero dollars spent, all in the time it takes some teams to get a single video through legal review.

So what would it look like if our campaigns and organizations took bigger swings online and leaned into the zeitgeist, instead of jumping on trends after a week of weighing the pros and cons? Taking risks online will always feel scary–it’s important to remain discerning and appropriately cautious. But there are two things I hope our side will weigh as we look towards better digital, and the second is more important than the first.

1. The internet is forever.

2. The internet is right now.

For @thediarrheaparasite, here are a few things that made the biggest difference in our explosive growth:

We had an incredibly simple call to action: “follow us so we can troll RFK Jr. together.” Follow-challenges are becoming fairly commonplace, though they produce varying results.
Because I absolutely do not have the time to run yet another social media account, after a couple days, I passed much of the coordination and content creation off to my favorite person to make poop jokes with–my sister. She now texts me diarrhea memes all day in the most chopped approvals process on Earth. For another example of how successful and burnout-proof a multi-contributor social account can be, look no further than @prettyinfformedgirls, who recently grew to over 210K followers in under a year.
We made constant requests (in comments, in DMs, in content, in bio) for other accounts to collab with us. This meant we didn’t have to come up with all of the content by ourselves, but could maintain a consistent posting cadence.
We used a mix of content formats and optimized for the three most algorithmically important signals on Instagram: skip rate, watch time, and share rate.
We moved fast. We weren’t precious about content quality. This is a diarrhea account for god’s sake.

If you want to keep up with my work, you can sign up for my email list, get real time reflections on my LinkedIn, or find plenty of free digital strategy advice, plus the occasional political shitpost, on my Instagram, @extremelyonlinefriend. But, of course, if you’d rather watch me politically post about shit, please follow our RFK Jr. trolling journey at @thediarrheaparasite.

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What we can learn from zombies, body snatchers and vampires

Nourbese — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:32:08 GMT

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Hi, I’m Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, an abortion-forward reproductive justice organization working toward a world where abortion care is affordable, available, and supported for everyone who needs it. COURIER handed me the keys to the newsletter this month, so buckle up. We’re going for a ride with this repro girly.

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $13.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Jon Ossoff leads the pack on Meta this week by a significant margin, outspending the next closest advertiser by more than 160k — a sign that Georgia’s Senate race is heating up fast. The question now is whether Ossoff’s war chest is loud enough to drown out Trump’s ridiculous primetime address and bogus claims that China interfered in the 2020 election.

As we take a collective deep breath this week, now that we’re on the other side of the Unhealthy Air Quality alerts ushered in by the Canadian wildfires (mayhaps we shouldn’t have defunded the National Weather Service, Mr. Trump!), a new name has climbed to the top of the charts. Wildfire Victims First is a utility-funded advocacy group that is facing pressure from wildfire survivors who allege the group is disguising industry lobbying as victim advocacy.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $11.4 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

He’s a recurring character on these charts, but we just haven’t been ready to talk about Vivek Ramaswamy of DOGE fame (read: weather service). But we’re sucking it up this week in light of new reporting from the Ohio Capital Journal, which found that Ramaswamy — backed by the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Ackman — spent nearly $9 million on ads over a six-week period during which his Democratic opponent Amy Acton had spent just $100k.

And shoutout to Katie Hobbs, another reliable here, who now officially knows who she is going to be spending her $$$ against. Andy Biggs handily defeated David Schweikert (73.6% to 14.7%) in Tuesday’s primary and now heads to the general, bringing his Trump endorsement and election denialism along for the ride.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent about $3.06 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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What we can learn from zombies, body snatchers and vampires

One of my favorite movie genres is mystery horror, especially when science fiction or the supernatural is involved. Not the kind where humanity immediately splinters into factions and starts killing each other. I prefer the slow-burn stories where something is clearly wrong, but no one can quite name it yet. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, World War Z, or Sinners: the clues are scattered, the threat is hiding in plain sight, and a small group of people is racing to understand how it’s all connected.

There’s always a moment near the beginning when the audience can see the danger, but the characters cannot. A door is left open. A familiar person begins acting strangely. A warning is dismissed as paranoia. I find myself willing the characters to listen. You in danger, girl. Run. Hide. Do something!

Which brings me to my point.

In recent years, reality has mimicked fiction. When it comes to women’s health and rights, we’re in the opening act of a deadly horror mystery movie - except this one is real.

The threat isn’t a horde of mindless zombies. It is a coordinated campaign to shrink women’s freedom, control our bodies, and make gender inequality feel inevitable or grotesquely, desirable.

It is quite simply a war on women, updated for the algorithmic age.

Walk with me for a moment.

At first, the clues don’t seem connected. A woman tells a doctor something is wrong and is told it’s probably stress. Another spends years fighting for a diagnosis. A pregnant patient enters a medical emergency and discovers that the law has followed her into the exam room. A woman’s body is kept functioning as an incubator after she has passed away. Clinics close across the country. Women, particularly Black women, are killed by the men who claimed to love them. Algorithms tell women that their value is only as servants. An online platform teaches men how to drug and rape their wives. Roe is dismantled while states push legislation trying to equate abortion care to homicide. Federal policies make it harder for women to vote.

Viewed one at a time, each story is easy to dismiss as a bad policy, an isolated tragedy, a fringe opinion, or just another grotesque corner of the internet.

But mysteries teach us to ask a better question:

What if these are not separate events?

What if they are clues?

When we look at all these incidents in totality, a different, much darker picture emerges.

The modern attack on women is not one villain sitting in a dark room somewhere. It is an ecosystem: white Christian nationalism; decades-long legal strategies backed by enormous wealth; anti-abortion extremism; the manosphere; “tradwife” propaganda; pronatalist attacks on LGBTQ+ people; and politicians eager to convert resentment into power. Social media and massive data sets tie these movements together like the Power Rangers’ Megazord.

These forces do not agree on everything. They don’t need to. But they do share a central belief: that women’s bodies are meant to be controlled, policed and subjugated, much like a farm workhorse used for servitude.

And why is this central to the fight for reproductive rights? Abortion is an important pillar of this story because bodily autonomy is a linchpin right. When the government can compel the use of your body against your will, every other freedom becomes less secure: the freedom to work, to learn, to leave a relationship, to care for the children you already have, to protect your health, to imagine the life you want and then build it.

Pregnancy can have multiple outcomes; abortion is one of them. Comprehensive pregnancy care is connected to maternal health systems. Maternal health is connected to racism in medicine. Gender-based violence is connected to economic security. Economic security is connected to childcare, paid leave, housing, and the ability to leave an unsafe home.

Mental health, physical safety, spiritual well-being, LGBTQ+ freedom, racial justice, disability justice, voting rights, and reproductive freedom are not competing causes. They are chapters in the same story about who gets to live safely, fully, and freely.

That is why we cannot fight these battles in silos.

So what do we do?

Turns out, we can draw a little inspiration from the movies here as well. Take the Zombie rule of threes: 1) Stay Alive 2) Stay Together and 3) Build Tomorrow.

Stay Alive

Very similar to most good horror films, we need to learn the rules of engagement. Similarly in real life we need to learn the rules of the game. Then we fight back. That means showing up in statehouses, clinics, schools, workplaces, faith communities, and group chats. Protect one another. Fund local organizers. Tell the truth about what is happening. Refuse to let the villain’s evil- doing go unanswered.

For us in the digital world, that means learning the rules of the algorithms and robin hooding them. Build out your own networks of people who are willing to amplify stories, social media posts and other important issues online to make sure truthful information spreads just as (or more) effectively as misinformation.

Stay Together

Horror movies always go sideways the moment someone says, “Let’s split up.” Our opponents benefit when we’re divided by issue, race, geography, income, generation, or identity. We need durable, committed relationships across movements and neighborhoods that are resourced for the long-haul, not just emergency coalitions that spring up when the monster is already inside the house.

At All*, we started a virtual book club as a way to create a cultural home/community. More than a year later, many of our book club participants have become some of our most reliable volunteers, helping us turn out votes between reads. People are hungry for community, and they are looking to find it through the things they love to do. Using the full spectrum of tools to world-build online, helps us create community, both online and offline, in ways that scale with our work and our budget. You can start by simply polling your email actives about their hobbies and interests and seeing where that leads you.

Build Tomorrow

Unlike the movies, our lives don’t stop at the end credits. Our goal isn’t just surviving the apocalypse; it’s building something worth surviving for, both for ourselves and the generations to come. We have to stop organizing only around what we’re trying to prevent and become equally clear about what we’re trying to build: a world where healthcare is accessible; abortion is available without shame or financial barriers; pregnancy and childbirth are safe and supported; families have what they need to thrive; and no one’s destiny is dictated by gender. Survival without purpose, survival without joy, survival for the sake of survival, is just another kind of death.

As with most horror movies, it’s not the people with the biggest shotguns that win the day; it’s the ones who notice the patterns, follow the clues and interrupt the looming crisis. I only hope America recognizes its unfurling women’s rights horror story before it’s too late.

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The Best Immigration Messengers Often Aren't Immigration Experts

America's Voice — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:19:29 GMT

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Hi everyone! We are the digital team at America’s Voice, a national immigration advocacy organization that uses research, communications, and digital organizing to build public support for immigration reform. Over the past year, we’ve worked with over a hundred creators – including immigration lawyers, journalists, teachers, veterans, faith leaders and lifestyle creators – to tell immigration stories that reach audiences far beyond the usual political sphere.

That work has fundamentally changed how we think about creator partnerships and digital organizing: The best immigration messengers often aren’t immigration experts. They’re trusted voices who understand how to connect with their communities by talking about immigration as a human experience rather than a political issue.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $11.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Call us obsessive or call us trend experts, either way we’re not done calling attention to the LLCs that keep popping up among the top spenders — especially now that numbers have normalized post-holiday dip. Last week, we reported that MAPA Web Marketing was coordinating ads encouraging seniors to take advantage of recent court rulings by applying for concealed carry permits. The following week, the group spent more than 7 times as much and was joined by 4936 Ventures LLC, which promoted a very similar CTA. Much of 4936 Ventures’ six-figure spend ran through the Facebook page belonging to a Dale Williams, who has a little over than 300 followers. This past week’s ads celebrate the passage of new legislation from Trump, the America 250 Bill, allowing for online permits valid in all 50 states— but we can’t find a record of such a bill passing (even Firearms News can’t).

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $8.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

As Kalshi tops the Google & YouTube chart, spending more than 3x times as much as the next biggest advertiser, we’d like to give a quick shout out to Popular Information’s great piece from earlier this month, “How Kalshi Infects the News.” The article details how CNN and CNBC have promoted Kalshi “extensively, frequently vouching for its accuracy” since signing landmark deals with the prediction market, while inconsistently disclosing their financial ties. So you can add that to the list of things to be alarmed about!

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.95 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

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The Best Immigration Messengers Often Aren’t Immigration Experts

Prioritizing Values, Not Expertise

People often ask how we’ve been able to grow our creator program at America’s Voice and how we’ve mobilized people online who usually wouldn’t engage with immigration issues. The answer usually surprises them.

We rarely start by talking about recruiting strategies or platform trends. Instead, we talk about the types of creators we’re building close relationships with and the audiences we’re trying to reach.

We talk about a pastor. A soccer fan. An animal welfare activist. A military veteran.

None of them built their audiences by posting about immigration law or breaking down the latest USCIS memo. None of them wake up thinking about asylum policy or the newest instance of unjust detention. And yet, some of the most meaningful conversations about immigration we’ve helped spark online have come from creators who had never posted about it before.

That may sound counterintuitive, especially for advocacy organizations that are instinctively looking to partner with creators already speaking about their issue. Ultimately, our goal isn’t to keep having the same conversations with the same people. It’s to bring new people into the fold.

That’s why we (strongly!) recommend spending less time looking for issue experts and more time looking for values-aligned communicators.

The reality is that immigration is often framed as one of the most fraught and polarizing issues in our country. Most creators aren’t going to become immigration experts overnight, and they shouldn’t have to. Asking them to memorize legal terminology or recite talking points rarely makes for compelling content. More often, it results in their audiences not being able to connect with the issue.

Our job as digital strategists isn’t to turn lifestyle creators into immigration experts. It’s to help them recognize where immigration already intersects with the communities they’ve spent years building. That’s a very different approach.

A parenting creator doesn’t need to explain humanitarian parole; they can talk about family separation. A veteran doesn’t have to talk about court cases; they can talk about service, sacrifice, and the values we cherish as a nation. And a sports creator can tell the story of immigrant athletes who have shaped America’s teams.

One of the clearest examples of this approach was our collaboration with Isabel Klee, an animal welfare creator and author known for fostering some of the hardest-to-place dogs and helping people connect with rescue animals.

On the surface, immigration policy seems like an odd fit for her audience. But the underlying values were already there: compassion, caretaking, and family. Instead of asking Isabel to explain immigration law or recount the day’s headlines, we provided her with reporting, first-hand stories, and examples from animal shelters documenting the growing trend of families facing detention or deportation being forced to surrender beloved pets, leaving shelters to absorb the fallout.

@simonsits Animal welfare is political.

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The resulting video helped her audience understand the human impact of immigration enforcement through a point of connection they already cared about.

For us, this partnership was a huge lesson: the strongest entry point into an issue isn’t always the issue itself – it’s the values, communities, and experiences it intersects with.

Our Takeaways

If there is one thing we’d encourage other digital teams to think through, it’s this: stop trying to find the perfect messenger or get your talking points repeated word for word. Instead, become a resource. Help creators find the intersection between your issue and the communities they already know how to reach.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Recruit for trust, not expertise:
Find creators whose communities trust them, not just creators who already know everything about your issue only.
Lead with values:
Discuss with creators why the issue is important and how it intersects with their own stories and niches.
Offer resources, not scripts:
Introduce creators to people affected by the issue and provide them with real-life examples. Then, trust them to tell that story in their own voice.
Measure who you’re reaching:
Success is more than just views. For us, it’s reaching people who never would’ve sought out immigration content in the first place.

The challenges facing immigration advocates aren’t going away anytime soon. If anything, they’re becoming more complex. But that also creates an incredible opportunity to rethink who gets to tell these stories and how we reach new audiences.

The internet has fundamentally changed how people build trust. Organizations and legacy media are no longer the only – or even the primary – sources of information for folks. People are increasingly turning to creators, neighbors, pastors, teachers, athletes, and friends.

That means advocacy organizations have to let go of the idea that we need to be the loudest voice in the room or that there’s a silver-bullet fix to our communications problem. Our role is increasingly to humanize the issue and provide the context and the facts for others to tell stories in ways only they can.

If we do that well, we won’t just create better content. We’ll build broader, more resilient movements.

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They Rewrote the Rules of the Game. Working People Are Paying the Price.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:49:32 GMT

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Hi all — I’m Stasha Rhodes, Executive Director of United for Democracy. We are a national coalition of 160+ organizations — spanning labor, reproductive rights, climate, education, civil rights, and economic justice — working to build a political system that works for everyday people, not the wealthy and well-connected. The Supreme Court’s 2026 term just ended. The consequences for working families are real and immediate. This is the same Court that was built — deliberately, over decades — by dark money and concentrated wealth to deliver for the powerful. And this term, it delivered.

This is not a MAGA problem. It is a structural one. And it demands a structural response.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $1.65 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Meta political spending plummeted faster than expectations for The Great American State Fair. At just 10% of the weekly totals we’ve reported recently, it appears much of the political world knew that audiences were ready to tune out ahead of the long weekend — well that and a lull in the July primary calendar. That didn’t stop a few seemingly innocuous LLCs from throwing their weight around though.

Success Vida LLC wouldn’t interpret the heat wave canceling DC’s Independence Day parade or the storm delaying Trump’s primetime remarks as biblical messages. No, its ads urge viewers to purchase a pro-Trump hat as “a testament to God’s divine will — worn out loud for the whole world to see.” Meanwhile, MAPA Web Marketing LLC is targeting senior Americans, encouraging them to take advantage of recent court rulings by applying for concealed carry permits. Here’s to 250, America.

Moving over to Google and YouTube, political advertisers spent around $9 million on ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While the primary season cools off for the next few weeks, Michigan and Minnesota’s Senate races are heating up ahead of their August primaries, offering a glimpse into what lies on the other side of Midwest-nice. In Michigan, Stevens kept her ads pretty positive in the days before McMorrow dropped out; but, two states over, North Star Dawn was running both pro-Craig and anti-Flanagan ads. The Minnesota Super PAC drew scrutiny last month after Flanagan alleged they used an AI deepfake of her in their advertising.

Over on Snapchat political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.9 million in 2026:

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SCOTUS Rewrote the Rules of the Game. Here’s How We Galvanize Working People to Stop Paying the Price.

Grocery prices are crushing families. Wages haven’t kept up. Drug companies keep raising prices while Congress looks the other way. No matter who gets elected, the system never seems to change in working people’s favor.

There is a reason for that. And the Roberts Court just spent nine months cementing it.

Yes, Trump won major victories this term. The Court handed him sweeping new power, weakened voting protections, and limited the independence of agencies designed to protect ordinary people from corporate abuse. But if we make this story only about Trump, we make a serious mistake. We allow the people and institutions that spent decades reshaping our system to escape accountability.

Long before Trump entered politics, a determined movement of wealthy donors, corporate interests, and ideological operatives understood something many Americans did not: the Supreme Court is not simply a referee standing above the political fray. It is one of the institutions that determines the rules under which our economy, our democracy, and our society operate.

The Court shapes whether working people can organize for better wages, whether corporations can be held accountable when they harm consumers or employees, whether voters have meaningful power, whether communities can protect their air and water, and whether fundamental rights are protected.

And while much of the country focused elsewhere, the right’s judicial machine methodically moved to capture it. They understood that courts write the rules of the game and if you control the rules, you can shape the outcomes — even when you lose elections.

They funded law schools, built legal pipelines, and spent forty years patiently installing judges who would deliver for them. They played the long game — and they won.

What we are witnessing today is a crisis, but not an unexpected one. It is the harvest of decades of patient investment. The Roberts Court is not a reaction to Trump. Trump is a beneficiary of a movement that spent decades building the conditions for this moment.

Look at what this term actually delivered. And look at who paid the price.

The Court expanded presidential power over independent regulators —the agencies that investigate corporate abuses, protect consumers, and enforce workplace and environmental safeguards. They are often the only counterwright to powerful corporations with virtually unlimited resources.

The Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Callais, and within weeks, a wave of Southern states moved to redraw maps and erase Black political representation. The communities most likely to demand higher wages, better schools, and accountable government were stripped of leverage across an entire region.

The Court also continued its decades-long expansion of protections for money in politics, allowing wealthy interests to wield enormous influence over the candidates and policies that shape taxes, labor rules, healthcare, and economic opportunity.

And it issued a dangerous ruling targeting transgender athletes, not to resolve a meaningful question of equal treatment, but to deliver a culture-war victory to the movement that built its majority.

These rulings are not isolated events. Together, they reflect a consistent philosophy: limit the power of workers and communities to challenge concentrated wealth, weaken the government’s ability to act as a check on corporate power, and strengthen the influence of the interests that spent decades shaping the judiciary. Every one of these decisions affects whether families get a fair shake in a system that increasingly feels tilted against them. Each one raises the same fundamental question: who has the power to shape the rules that govern our lives?

The answer, too often, has been the people with the most resources to influence the system.

The Supreme Court is not separate from the broken political system working people experience every day. It is one of the engines driving it.

That was not an accident. It was the result of a long-term strategy.

Now it is time to build a movement of our own — to build institutions that serve the American people, strengthen democratic accountability, and give working people lasting power.

That work begins with how we communicate about the Court. If we want people to see what’s at stake, we have to stop treating Supreme Court decisions as isolated legal stories and start explaining them as the choices that shape power in their everyday lives.

First, dig deeper than the headline.

Chief Justice Roberts understands how to shape public attention. While the country focused on the birthright citizenship ruling, the Court quietly issued other decisions that further weakened campaign finance laws and expanded presidential control over independent regulators—rulings that may have an even greater impact on who holds power in our democracy. Organizers can’t just react to the loudest case. We have to explain the decisions that quietly rewrite the rules of the game.

Second, connect every decision to everyday life.

Most people will never read a Supreme Court opinion, nor should they have to. What they understand is whether groceries cost more, whether their drinking water is safe, whether a dangerous product can be recalled, and whether their vote counts. When the Court expands presidential control over independent agencies, it is not just changing the structure of government. It’s changing who stands between ordinary people and powerful corporations when something goes wrong. Our job is to tell that story—to show how decisions that sound technical can have very real consequences for working families. When we make these decisions about kitchen tables instead of courtrooms, people begin to see why they matter.

Finally, give people somewhere to put their outrage.

The Supreme Court has no switchboard to flood and no bill to vote against, but that does not mean people are powerless. Congress can respond through legislation, oversight, and structural reform. After the Court’s decision in Callais, we launched an online petition urging Congress to act, and more than 80,000 people signed it in less than 24 hours. That response reinforced an important lesson: people stay engaged when they are given something meaningful to do.

Awareness without action leads to frustration. Action is what builds movements. Rebuilding the courts is not a niche issue or afterthought. It determines whether every other fight — for better wages, affordable healthcare, housing, workplace power, and the right to vote — can actually be won. You cannot build a fair economy inside an unfair system. You cannot win when the rules have been written against you.

Our task is not simply to win the next election. It is to build institutions that ensure working people have power long after any one election is over.

The question is not whether we can rebuild. The question is whether we are finally ready to begin.

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We pointed a webcam at a wall — and activated more than 100,000 people

Max Levy — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:54:36 GMT

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Hey y’all, it’s Max Levy! I’m an independent digital strategist and author of The Short Answer newsletter. In my work with progressive campaigns, organizations, and causes, I’m always on the lookout for innovative ways the left can reach people in today’s attention economy (like paid clipping, which I wrote about for FWIW last year). I’m back today to talk about another fun, creative tactic — and just how much one grassroots group was able to accomplish with only a webcam and some good old fashioned hustle to bring people together around Trump’s name coming off the Kennedy Center.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Last year, we got “Diet Pepsi” by Addison Rae by Ben Platt (IYKYK) as the song of the summer. Now, Bigger Picture US, Inc. is ~~working~~ spending overtime, dropping over $224K on Meta political ads just to promote their new song, ”Gotta Be Us (Be The People).” Guess you gotta do whatever it takes to beat out Meg Stalter’s “Prettiest Girl in America.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Annie Andrews landed at the #7 spot (not on the music charts). With her ad dollars and 350K Meta platform followers, she is gearing up to unseat Sen. Lindsay Graham. It’s a race Cook Political Report deems a “Solid R.”

Moving over to Google and YouTube, political advertisers spent around $12.2 million on ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, came in second on last week’s Google and YouTube charts. Its heaviest spending came in Michigan ($293K) and Maryland ($99.3K). In Maryland, most of that money flowed into three Congressional races, with the greatest focus on the 5th District in support of Adrian Boafo, who went on to win the Democratic nomination.

In Michigan, their spending was spread more evenly across a wider range of races, but the 12th District — home to Rep. Rashida Tlaib — stood out, drawing more $$$ than the rest.

Over on Snapchat political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.7M in 2026:

Please take our money…

We pointed a webcam at a wall — and activated more than 100,000 people

As a longtime Kennedy Center fan, I’d been brainstorming with the local group Hands Off the Arts about creative ways to draw attention to their fight to stop Donald Trump’s closure of the cultural center and save hundreds of jobs. In addition to their weekly Friday protests, we were looking for something that could break through online. Then the perfect opportunity presented itself.

A federal judge ruled that Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was illegal and ordered his name be removed from the building within 14 days.

Not only was this a huge win for Kennedy Center workers specifically, it also resonated symbolically, and the internet lit up with people saying they would pay to watch Trump’s name come down.

Clearly, there was interest. The question was how to channel it.

I’d seen enough PandaCams, Casey Wilson’s Rat-Watch, and 24/7 streamers to know there was a tool most progressive organizations overlook that could be the perfect play here: an always-on livestream pointed at the Kennedy Center until they took the name down.

Alongside a scrappy team of volunteers and video pros, we sprinted to launch a livestream that ultimately ran for 3 days. And even though Trump still used a massive (embarrassing) tarp to block the final view, the effort was still a huge success. More than 100,000 people tuned in at some point, Hands off the Arts’ email list grew by 40% overnight, and its social channels also saw real growth.

Always-on livestreams like these are a great tool that more progressive organizations and candidates should take advantage of. Here are some key takeaways for anyone looking to jump in:

In-person organizing is essential. We were operating under a 14-day timer to station a camera, set up the stream, and get out the word. The only reason we were able to find a place where we could leave a camera unsupervised 24/7 with a very specific view of the Kennedy Center in time was because of the relationships Hands off the Arts had built over the last year. Then, when construction started and we wanted to get an even better angle, a dedicated group of volunteers took time away from work to man multiple cameras from the Kennedy Center plaza, in addition to other folks remotely monitoring the livestream itself. This effort required real, on-the-ground hustle, and that kind of infrastructure doesn’t just appear overnight.

Be there first, and build an online community. Eventually, major media outlets set up their own cameras and streams to try and get in on the action, but by the time they arrived, we’d already been live for more than a day. And even though their shots were “nicer,” people stuck around with us — because we had a chat. They wanted to experience the moment together, and our chat was a real way to be in community with other people.

Capture interest for future engagement in as many ways as possible. We didn’t just stream directly to YouTube. We put the stream on TakeTheNameDown.org, which gave us a place to introduce Hands Off the Arts, collect email signups, and tell a deeper story. We also had a QR code on the feed for signups at all times, plus a rolling ticker at the bottom of the screen reiterating the “Stop the Closure, Save the Jobs” message.

Digital stunts can garner earned media to push reach even farther. What started as a single Washingtonian article announcing the stream turned into an avalanche of print, radio, digital, and television coverage, both about the livestream and for Hands Off the Arts spokespeople in general. That brought more viewers to the stream, which helped more press discover us, and the cycle repeated.

Most importantly: have fun! At its core, the livestream was about capturing an important moment on video. But it was also about creating a shared experience and bringing people across the country together to celebrate a moment of joy. Not everything in politics needs to be doom and gloom all the time — sometimes you just need to point a webcam at a wall and invite the internet to have a little fun. And if you can get a drag queen like Tara Hoot to join in too, even better!

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Organizing young people via text still works…you’re just doing it wrong

NextGen America — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:40:32 GMT

Hi everyone! We’re Sofia Garduno Araujo and Bethanie Olivan, NextGen America’s digital organizing team. NextGen is dedicated to educating and empowering young people to organize, vote, and lead on the issues that matter most to them.

Sofia brings a decade of experience — from field organizing and immigration advocacy to leading NextGen’s digital voter contact efforts and distributed volunteer team for the last six years. Bethanie has nine years of experience in distributed organizing, spanning presidential campaigns and state parties, and has managed NextGen’s text program and volunteers for the last five.

For today’s FWIW, we’re talking about our Pulse Check project: a peer-to-peer (P2P) text campaign focused on identifying the issues currently affecting young people the most. Building on our 2025 work, we expanded outreach in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, where our volunteers have contacted over 1 million people ages 18-29. We’re thrilled to share what we’ve learned.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $15 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Move over, Nate Silver and The New York Times’ Election Needle — Kalshi has devised a new way of messing with mind, body, and soul this cycle. After holding steady near the top of Snapchat’s spending charts this year, the prediction market came out swinging last week (or at least relative to the waning California spend) with a series of Meta ads, largely promoting their new American Power Index. The new feature tracks the current distribution of political power between Democrats and Republicans and who it thinks ‘will hold them next.’

Political advertisers spent around $13.9 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

On Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham secured the Republican nomination as he pursues a fifth term in Congress’ upper chamber. His primary victory — 57.6% of the vote to Mark Lynch’s 28.3% — was perhaps aided by super PAC Palmetto Action’s 41 Google & Youtube ads last week. Gotta love a good intra-GOP fight at the top of the charts.

Skipping X (formerly Twitter) once again, but over on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.5M in 2026:

Organizing young people via text still works…you’re just doing it wrong

After the 2024 election, it became clear young people did not feel represented by either major party. Rather than voting for a candidate they didn’t like or feel inspired by, many chose to opt out entirely and stay home.

Combined with the fact that a majority of young people identify as politically independent, we realized traditional voter contact methods — transactional asks at the eleventh hour — can no longer be the norm. Young people aren’t swayed by empty promises. They need to see results and a real commitment to fighting for the issues they care about.

After attending many research debriefs (s/o Analyst Institute!) and analyzing our own 2024 data, we identified the root cause of their frustration: they feel like no one is actually listening to them. This led us to build a deep canvassing call program into Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to understand how to better advocate for them and rebuild trust.

We started by asking young people to tell us what was impacting them most from a set list of issues and were completely blown away by how much people were willing to share with us over the phone. Our contact rate remained very high throughout the call campaign (averaging 9%, with some days getting as high as 14%), and we collected hundreds of meaningful stories.

Encouraged by those results, we set out to see about scaling through texting. We tried out some smaller text campaigns in those same states, adding Virginia to the mix, and were fascinated by how consistent the results were with the calls. With two successful campaigns under our belt, we set out to make this the flagship effort of the first half of 2026.

Going into this, we were often told that texting was no longer an effective way to reach young people. Calling? Forget about it. P2P’s reputation has taken a hit, mainly due to fundraising spam. Campaigns have spent the last few years overwhelming people with fundraising texts and wondering why their response rates are so low. Young people are sick of receiving asks for money as they watch the economy work only for billionaires and their tax dollars fund yet another war.

The Pulse Check campaign proved that it’s not the tactic — it’s how you use it.

We asked open-ended questions like “What issue is affecting your life the most right now?” to allow recipients to take the reins and have more agency in the conversation.

Across all campaigns, we averaged a 5.8% response rate, with some getting as high as 6.9%, higher than our initial test campaigns in 2025 and a remarkable response rate by any industry standard.

We knew the economy would be a big topic for folks, so rather than a single economy-focused response, we divided the topic into four categories — Rent/Housing Market, Jobs/Wages, Inflation/Groceries, and a general Economy bucket — to try to pinpoint the specific pressures causing the most distress.

The top five issues identified were Economy (28%, with Inflation/ Groceries being most prevalent), Democracy/Rise of Fascism (19%), Multiple Issues (13%), Foreign Policy (12%), and Immigration (6%). A central throughline across all issues was corruption. Whether it’s billionaires buying our elections, this administration pardoning their buddies, or foreign influence on our government, young people’s trust in institutions is extremely low.

Here’s a breakdown of the issues:

You can also see how the top issues changed per week:

Overall, the biggest thing we learned is that young people are not apathetic or disengaged. They are extremely knowledgeable and understand how their lives are directly affected by the actions of the Trump administration. From the attacks in Iran and Gaza to the cuts in healthcare, they clearly see how interconnected all the issues are, and they are angry, anxious, and frustrated.

If you’re planning on conducting similar text outreach, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Be anticipatory, not reactive. You don’t have to start from a blank slate; use polls, the news cycle, and social media to inform your writing. Your script will likely be longer than you’re used to, but that’s what will keep you from scrambling to answer complicated questions mid-shift or combing through responses that don’t fit neatly into any category. That said, you can’t anticipate everything, so flexibility and a willingness to add or edit responses are key.
Engage with care. It’s important to do this outreach authentically. We do this because we care and we understand the people we text are facing real issues. Centering the respondents and their situations, particularly when they’re struggling, should be top of mind, so we included two ‘Needs Assistance’ responses for Economy and Healthcare, linking folks to public assistance and resources.
Train your volunteers! This one is a given, but there will likely be a gap between them and your audience, whether by generation, race, or class. Provide a deep-dive training before each text shift, with multiple examples volunteers can access and reference throughout. Knowing Pulse Check would be more involved than a standard click-and-send campaign, we limited our efforts to seasoned volunteers, and you should do the same. This allowed us to have more nuanced conversations and send large lists with minimal strain on capacity.

So, once you’ve collected all this info from folks who were not only willing to respond but also trusted you with their stories, it’s your job to pore over the data and uplift their stories to advocate for them better.

Knowing what’s top of mind for your base means you’re able to make better strategic decisions in the future and build a stronger relationship with your list. Whether you want to post a social media series highlighting some compelling stories or name the issues they picked in your future text outreach, this type of campaign will improve how you organize digitally.

There will be subsequent phases of Pulse Check later this year. If you want to know more, stay tuned on our Substack!

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,803 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

Why Your Creator Program Isn't Working

Patrick Stevenson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:46:47 GMT

This newsletter is brought to you by the donor acquisition approach that helps you turn $1 into $2.

Hi everyone — Patrick Stevenson here. Last summer, I wrote a couple of issues for FWIW about how Democrats are navigating the digital landscape — who’s doing it well, and who isn’t. I used to oversee creator engagement programs at the Biden White House and the Democratic National Committee, and in the past year, I’ve been working with creators directly at Palette Media. The creator space continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, so let’s check in on what’s working and what isn’t.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $18 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Pete Buttigieg is calling — are you answering? Last week, an old familiar made his way onto the list of top spenders through his Win The Era PAC. Among the ads running are clips of Buttigieg dialing grassroots donors to thank them for their support.

But if you’re not ready to think about 2028 yet, there’s another trend worth watching: Ballot measure campaigns are starting to put down serious money. After Alliance Against Corporate Abuse showed their muscle on Meta, Uber seems to be flexing back on Google and YouTube (see below). As a reminder, the rideshare giant is backing a California-based measure aimed at limiting its liability when customers are harmed.

That was the biggest swap on a spending chart that looks — for perhaps the last time (sad!) — similar to what we’ve been seeing week over week. Otherwise, political advertisers spent around $18.4 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

We’re skipping X (formerly Twitter) yet again until there’s new data to share and closing out with Snapchat. To date, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $2.4M on Snap ads in 2026:

Please take our money…

Why Your Creator Program Isn't Working

The third annual Trending Up conference wrapped this week in DC, bringing together 270 creators from across news, politics, and lifestyle to connect with progressive organizations and figure out how to drive impact on the issues they care about.

This year, only three elected officials spoke: Gov. Wes Moore, Gov. Maura Healey, and Rep. Sarah McBride. And that was intentional. One of the biggest pieces of feedback the conference organizers got from creators last year was that there were too many politicians on the agenda. The response was more creators and more cultural voices.

In other words, building a conference explicitly for creators who want to engage with progressive politics means accepting that politicians aren’t actually the draw.

After feedback from creators last year, Trending Up organizers programmed their conference with more voices from culture, like podcaster and former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, instead of elected officials.

When a creator agrees to meet with an elected official, it’s rarely because they’re excited to film content with a politician. More often, they are looking to build a relationship, understand an issue better, or are just a political junkie freak (who can relate!). Too often, though, the product of these engagements is a stiff, two-shot iPhone video of the creator nodding along while some elected official (whom their audience has never heard of) recites talking points into a tiny mic.

The fix is simple: if you’re going to work with a creator, let them cook!

A reporter shows up to your event because it’s their job. Their company paid for their travel. They have a professional obligation to cover it. Creators have none of that. If a creator comes to your thing, that’s money out of their own pocket — and time away from their laptop, which is their actual business. A well-produced field video with a candidate can run $5-10k to make and will often underperform one where the creator is sitting on their couch talking about Trump.

When you invite a creator to your event, the creator incurs a financial and opportunity cost that journalists simply don’t.

According to a recent M+R analysis of the top 500 social media accounts covering politics and policy in the first quarter of 2026, creator accounts made up more than half the list. That’s the landscape organizations are trying to influence — and most of them are doing it without dedicated staff to navigate it. Instead, they continue to invest far more heavily in their own social media and traditional comms teams.

Chart via M+R

The DNC has dedicated creator engagement staff. The other major party committees do not. Across the ecosystem, many talented digital and comms staff are doing creator engagement work on top of their existing responsibilities, and they deserve credit for it. But doing creator engagement well requires dedicated staff.

Building real relationships means understanding individual creators’ niches, their audiences, their business models — and that doesn’t happen as a side project. Without proper resources, many organizations put creators on the wrong track — a weird “kind of press” track, where they get the same treatment as a Politico reporter: show up, get access, cover the thing. It doesn’t work because creators aren’t journalists.

There is no way to do effective political creator engagement at scale unless you have talented, reasonably senior staff who are resourced to spend most of their time building relationships with dozens, if not hundreds, of individual creators.

The proof of concept is right in front of us. Trending Up gets better every year — not because more politicians show up, but because the organizers understand what creators actually need and give them room to do what they do best.

Good creator engagement is structural — proper staffing, actual budgets — but it’s also simply knowing the creators you want to work with, and understanding how to let them cook. The campaigns that figure that out are going to have a significant advantage in the years ahead (and not for nothing, many of the people who seem to be running for president are on the right track…but that’s another post!).

People who get that creator work is its own thing are going to continue getting real dividends from it, and those who keep treating creators like journalists will keep asking why their creator program isn’t working.

The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 7:00 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,828 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

An AI ‘Archivist for Good’ Approach to the Epstein Files

Josh Levine — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:56:52 GMT

Hi y’all - I’m Josh Levine, Co-Founder and CEO of Thorian AI. In a modern technology ecosystem that often frames AI as a zero-sum exercise, we deploy AI-powered data tools to reinforce the social contract between citizens, companies, and the institutions that serve them. Thorian operates under a framework of ‘Principled AI’, which guides us to build applications and pursue data projects that are net positive for society.

More on that below, but first…

Subscribe now

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Team Steyer learned last week that everything’s bigger in Texas — including war chests (or at least how much a campaign might shell out any given week). James Talarico topped the Meta spending charts ahead of his official general election kickoff, happening today.

With attention starting to shift toward the November ballot, Alliance Against Corporate Abuse is gearing up for a showdown with Uber as the tech platform advances a ballot measure aimed at limiting its liability when customers are harmed.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Hey Siri, play “The Final Countdown” by Europe. With Californians headed to the polls (or very slowly returning the vote-by-mail ballots automatically sent to all active registered voters in the Golden State - yay democracy!) ahead of Tuesday’s primary, we’re entering the home stretch of charts that look like this.

And with June fast approaching, we’re starting to see one of the buzziest primaries (NY-12) start to gain some traction: Mike Bloomberg’s Stand for New York PAC supporting Micah Lasher, current New York Assemblymember and congressional hopeful, came in at number 7.

We’re fast-forwarding through X (formerly Twitter) until there’s new data to share and rounding out this week’s charts with Snapchat. To date, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.7M on Snap ads in 2026:

An AI ‘Archivist for Good’ Approach to the Epstein Files

President Nixon was impeached by the House of Representatives 52 years ago this summer. During the impeachment hearings, members of Congress reviewed evidence of the President’s crimes, concluding that his actions violated both federal law and the public trust. While Congress ultimately put the final nail in the coffin of the Nixon presidency, uncovering the administration’s crimes required the professionalism of law enforcement, the dogged pursuit of truth from investigative reporters, and a public that demanded accountability.

Conditions in our current democracy look a little different from the Nixon years: Institutions designed to protect the public from government overreach, like the FBI and Department of Justice, have become increasingly politicized, and control over major media organizations has consolidated in the hands of a small number of wealthy and politically-connected people.

On the other hand, access to information has never been more distributed. Technology now makes it easier than ever for members of the public to independently compile, analyze, and share information. When every whistleblower has a platform, and firsthand accounts of every event can reach millions through social media, total control over the public narrative is nearly impossible - as long as the public has a will to pursue the truth.

Of course, the modern information ecosystem has its downsides. The same systems that democratize access to information can also be distorted by fake expertise, AI slop, data tampering, and the sheer volume of content competing for declining attention spans.

With so much information at our fingertips, the ability to find patterns, see through falsehoods, and extract meaning has become both more difficult and more essential. Whenever possible, individuals, journalists, and companies can overcome this complexity by serving as archivists, maintaining an unvarnished, auditable record of the truth so the public can continue holding powerful institutions accountable.

In addition to traditional tools like interview notes and secure document rooms, modern archivists working in the public interest use data science, web scraping, and large language models to make information more accessible. The next Woodward and Bernstein may look very different from the reporters of the 70s.

Thorian AI, the company I co-founded, specializes in using technology to parse large and complex datasets. We partner with mission-aligned organizations to find data and make it accessible. Recently, we did exactly that in partnership with COURIER. We worked together to break down the Epstein Files, taking one of the biggest and most difficult-to-use public datasets in the current political ecosystem and making it accessible.

Why the Epstein Files

The DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein Files presents the perfect opportunity to leverage technology for archival work in service of the public.

Despite Congress’ passage of the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which created a legal requirement for the release of the files, the DOJ has only partially complied. Roughly 1.24 million files have been made available for download through the DOJ website, but the archive is extraordinarily difficult to use. The files are poorly labeled, inconsistently redacted, and presented in formats that are difficult to navigate. In some cases, victims’ names and nude photos remain visible, while other relevant information is obscured. Numerous files that arguably fall under the scope of the Act have not been released at all. Of the files that have been released, some have been removed and re-added multiple times. In other cases, the government has inexplicably changed its redactions over time, with some previously-available files becoming completely blacked out in later iterations.

This is exactly the kind of situation ripe for the work of a data-focused archivist. While the files’ current presentation is inconsistent with public transparency, advanced data techniques and artificial intelligence can be used to parse, tag, and organize the entities within them so the public can understand what’s happening. That work is essential. If the public does not know what’s in the files, it cannot hold people accountable.

How we parsed the Epstein Files

Working with COURIER, Thorian AI has produced the most detailed and fully-parsed database of the Epstein Files available to the public. We extracted every piece of usable data across the entirety of the 1.24 million files - hundreds of thousands of unique names, places, accounts, and dates, all spread across a vast and otherwise impermeable surface.

The process wasn’t easy. We had to overcome numerous challenges, and there were four factors that contributed to making this process more difficult.

First, the structure of the files themselves. Most of the Epstein files exist as PDF scans of images, flattened and stripped of a large portion of their metadata. To recover as much data as possible, we needed a system capable of combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extraction of information with AI-assisted modeling. The government’s searchable OCR results were lacking, so we re-extracted data from the files ourselves as the project evolved.

Second, the way that the files are stored on the DOJ’s website. The site contains disorganized collections of PDFs, jumbled randomly across different buckets. To make matters more challenging, accessing each individual file requires users to go through age verification, which means clicking on a button every time they want to look at something.

Third, the way the government keeps shifting the contents of the files. The collections and files have not been static. Hundreds of thousands of files have disappeared for months at a time. More than 65,000 files went through multiple shifts in their redaction schemas, meaning that information that was readable in one version ended up being redacted in another. These changes have occurred without warning, forcing us to vigilantly and continuously monitor the archives.

The immense volume of the files was an additional hurdle to overcome. Given the limitations of other approaches, we knew our extraction strategy needed to utilize AI in order to obtain as much data as possible. However, we also had to work within the technical limitations of current large language models. Even with recent improvements to context windows (the amount of data that can be parsed by a model at one time), the biggest models can only handle about 1000 pages of these documents on their own at a time. Given the structural challenges described above, a brute force AI approach would have required constant data reingestion, making the process extremely inefficient.

The fourth and final challenge has to do with the contents of the files themselves. Given the nature of Epstein’s crimes, a large number of the files detail the monstrous behaviour of him and his associates. AI models generally have guardrails that block the kind of content present in the files, threatening to blunt comprehensive analysis of the cache.

Many of the (still very good) attempts to bring transparency to the Epstein Files struggle with these challenges. Some projects achieve high quality data extraction, but do so at the expense of volume - they use the government’s search filters to identify individuals and entities of interest and then parse a smaller volume of files before making them accessible through a public-facing interface. This pathway can be very useful if you’re looking to learn about people you already know exist within the files, like Donald Trump or Howard Lutnick. However, the method falls short; users will end up with an incomplete picture of the Epstein story because search results are not grouped by subject or connected chronologically. When full story arcs are obscured by the DOJ website’s current formatting, it’s difficult to do the sleuthing needed to uncover new names and angles that have not already been in the news.

Other groups struggle with the extraction itself. Their attempts to parse the entire corpus of the files have fallen short, likely due to OCR issues and compute constraints.

How we cracked the Epstein Files and what comes next

Our company specializes in solving exactly these kinds of problems, so the methods we used in this case are, for the most part, a professional secret. In broad terms, our approach relied on a system of AI agents with differing levels of expertise operating as a unit to autonomously manage OCR processes, extract and tag data, and put the data into context with the rest of the files. Rather than using frontier models, we mixed our agents, consistently using the smallest possible open-source model for each individual task. This allowed us to keep costs manageable, especially since we run our extraction system on a regular basis, sometimes for weeks at a time.

One place where our data principles helped us was with the shifting versions of the files. Because our team is constantly looking for big public datasets on which we can run experiments, we started downloading the Epstein Files as soon as they were released. Therefore, we have every version of every file in the cache, allowing us to provide better insight around how documents and redactions have changed over time.

On the front end, we put together an interface that allows users to conduct text searches, analyze files by tagged person/entity, explore specific topics, and compile chronological stories that exist within the files. Upcoming features include LLM-enabled search, image search, and other custom topic features.

To close, we ask that you:

Check out the site and do some digging
Surface story tips and ideas for additional ways you’d like to see the data displayed
Share the site with your contacts.

In today’s technological moment, members of the public can also serve as archivist-investigators. So let’s push the story forward and bring light to the darkness of the Epstein chapter in our country.

Subscribe now

Please note: Thorian AI is a paid vendor of COURIER.

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,815 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Jack Schlossberg, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

Register now to watch live.

The Case for Amplification In The Fight For Voting Rights

Fri, 22 May 2026 18:58:33 GMT

SPONSORED BY STACKADAPT

Hi Everyone! I’m Esosa Osa, Founder and CEO of Onyx Impact. In this era of propaganda, the Onyx team is fighting the spread of harmful information, investing in independent Black media, and empowering Black communities to create healthier online ecosystems. My work is grounded in my experience as Deputy Executive Director of Fair Fight Action, where I led national efforts around voting policy reform and developed strategies to protect democracy.

All of that to say: I have dedicated my career to preventing a decision like Callais from happening, and I have an unwavering commitment to scaling power to build something greater on the other side of it.

More on that below, but first…

Subscribe now

Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $16.7 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

American Petroleum earned its spot atop the leaderboard with ads urging viewers in Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to believe that “economic success starts with oil and natural gas.” Right now, the average price of gas across those states sits around $4.50 per gallon, which is well over a dollar more than what it was in 2024. Sounds like it might be time for American Petroleum to revisit its definition of “economic success.”

A little lower on the chart, but still earning top spender stripes, is James Talarico. The Texas Democrat seems to be riding the high of his taco outing with former President Obama last week. So, that leaves pretty much everyone in the Texas Senate race having a better time than Senator John Cornyn.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $17.1 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

This past week gave Super Tuesday’s weird little midterm cousin energy, with voters in six states heading to the polls —a number we will see again on June 2. But a look at the top spenders on Google and YouTube might make you think California is the only one with a major election underway. To be fair, not every state has a top-two primary with 62 gubernatorial candidates. But while you may not get a text back, your work presentation may bomb, and your coffee may burn, there’s one thing you can almost certainly count on: Tom Steyer spending more money than everyone else.

X, formerly Twitter, needs to get its act together on its disclosure information. We are still tabulating political advertisers’ total 2026 platform spend at around $1.8 million. In case you want the evergreen reminder, here are top spenders year to date as of… well, a long time ago:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.3M on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Your political media mix has a tracking blind spot

The Case for Amplification In The Fight For Voting Rights

There are two stories colliding in the digital universe right now that we should all be paying attention to.

This past weekend, the New York Times published a buzzy story questioning the expanding—and sometimes murky—role of content creators in political and advocacy campaigns.

That same day, thousands of people from across the country came to Alabama after the Supreme Court’s Callais decision eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, removing some of the last remaining protections for Black voters in the South. The ruling targeted one of the Civil Rights movement’s most crowning achievements. And organizers responded accordingly.

The All Roads Lead to The South pro-voting rights march and rally came together to reject the wave of former Confederate states moving to erase fair representation and Black political power in the decision’s wake. Alongside those in attendance, 80 satellite events blanketed the country and millions tuned in online.

Now here’s where the two stories come together.

While parts of the Times’ critique of disclosures and the wild-west nature of the sector are valid, it assumes that creators are not leveraging their platforms to help stories break through the noise in one of the most frenetic news environments in our country’s history. In reality, it was the rapid-response creators, organizers on the ground streaming live, and local officials posting in real time who kept the conversation around Callais alive for weeks.

Mainstream media gave the decision cursory coverage. Talking heads on cable news explained the ruling almost exclusively in legal terms. But we all know that cable reaches a fraction of the audience that the right-wing blogosphere does. To win, the Left needs a multipronged approach that must include amplifying narratives from people closest to the ground and, therefore, closest to the harm.

It’s Black creators and their allies who are stepping into the gap left wide open by mainstream media that is feverishly fixated on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Creators like Elizabeth Booker Houston, Lynae Vanee, Joshua Doss, and Garrison Hayes produced content that propelled this decision outside of the beltway and onto social media timelines. Black media outlets added their own amplification lift. Roland Martin Unfiltered multicasted the rally live on YouTube, while REVOLT boosted coverage of the event and The Root collaborated with creators to expand reach across platforms.

Each of them, and many others, have authentic relationships with their audiences, along with the lived experience that enables them to provide critical historical context to the ruling’s impact and the meaning of the moment. This weekend showed us that if we want to move the base, we must adopt a surround-sound strategy that not only hooks people through social media but also engages them in a movement.

According to data collected by Defiance Dispatch and verified by Onyx Impact, content related to the Callais decision generated 948.8 million views, 99.1 million engagements, and 79,818 posts. Defiance Dispatch’s social media sweep found that All Roads garnered 82.5 million views with 11 million engagements and 9,637 posts this past weekend alone.

Given the results of this collaboration, one could argue that failing to engage creators or deploy a sophisticated digital strategy is advocacy malpractice. With the VRA, Black creators and Southern organizers are capturing the public’s attention, driving culture, shaping online trends, and moving audiences to action.

We cannot ignore the power creators have to level the playing field for audiences that don’t typically receive mainstream coverage. Black media storytellers reflect their audiences’ experiences and lived memories in their coverage, deepening connection and providing authenticity that is essential to moving information from the corners of the Internet into the mainstream. When combined with grassroots amplification accounts like the Tennessee Holler, Defiance Dispatch, and COURIER, the aftermath of the Callais decision feels fundamentally different from the post-Dobbs news cycle.

Those who assail voting rights, democratic norms, and anti-corruption practices have long understood the power of amplification to influence the barometer of public sentiment. The right has employed and deployed creators and amplification accounts designed to spread their propaganda and control narratives online to great success. Onyx’s research has found that right-wing narratives spread across the internet at rates their opposition fails to match or replicate.

The story is not merely about political strategy or an evil plot to subvert the law. This is about adaptability in the era of propaganda and regulation that has failed to keep up. For some in our country, especially our Southern neighbors, this is about a means of survival.

We’ve written reports in the past about the unprecedented efforts to erase, distort, and suppress Black history, wealth, and data from the public record, alongside the impacts of the current administration’s anti-DEI policies on Black federal contractors who make up just 1.2% of all federal contract recipients. Unemployment numbers are holding steady for most of the country, but for Black people, especially Black women, 600,000 of whom lost their jobs in the last year, the rate is much higher than that of their counterparts. The Callais decision proves the pattern we are seeing is very intentional: crush the opposition by going after and weakening its loudest voices.

Mainstream media is right to be concerned about the direction of the industry as a whole. Foundational elements and rules of engagement no longer apply in the same form. Podcast audiences continue to grow, while NPR and radio decline. A majority of Americans do not trust journalists to act in their best interests, according to a recent study released by Pew. And every day we see more and more journalists harassed and attacked, while also experiencing widespread layoffs driven by corporate consolidation.

No doubt, journalists and mainstream media are right to ask questions. They are just focused on the wrong problem.

When wielded for evil, we know social media causes massive harm on so many levels, especially our health. Study after study makes this plain. But we have yet to fully understand its potential for good and how it can amplify and socialize the idea that we the people do have the power to hold our leaders accountable.

Traditional media used to be the primary means for communicating information, but unless they adapt, they will be left behind.

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A Great Blue Battle in the Great Lakes State

Lucy Ritzmann — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:52:29 GMT

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Hey guys 👋👋👋 Lucy here again, fresh out of my first year of law school and ready to lock in on a summer full of high-stakes primaries 🫠 ICYMI, I am also writing a new newsletter called Group Chat Correspondent – if you enjoy politics x culture x tech, come hang out!!!

Otherwise, we’re tackling a big one today: the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens are battling it out.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $15.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

An account (with a very scammy/sketchy vibe) called The Patriotic Prophet spent ~$194,000 on “prophetic” economic advice videos (possibly using AI people) tied to Donald Trump’s alleged secret plans for the upcoming America 250 celebration. These ads are running nationwide, with the messaging appearing to be oriented toward people who are planning to retire soon.

On the flip side, but still very much in a religious vein, Adam Hamilton, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Kentucky and pastor of the country’s largest Methodist church, dropped ~$181,000, a spend that includes fundraising ads running mostly in Kansas (but also in Missouri, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and a few other states) that share a peek into his messaging strategy; they read: “I’ve led a diverse congregation of Democrats, Republicans and Independents – people from all walks of life united by their faith and their common desire to serve their neighbors and address the problems of our world.” The era of the white Democratic religious leader Senate candidate continues…

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $14.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Grow California, a group backed by two tech billionaires trying to install more business-friendly Democrats and Republicans as a “counterforce” to labor, spent $311,000 this past week getting involved in several CA state senate and state assembly races.

And speaking of California, which has its primary day in less than three weeks, more than $6.3 million of this week’s $14.5 million Google + YouTube political ad spend came from the Golden State alone.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.2 million on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Fmr. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign appears to have recently dropped some new Snap ads, taking a swing at Republican opponent Jon Husted for his connections to the Epstein criminal enterprise.

Please take our money…

A Great Blue Battle in the Great Lakes State

If you’ve followed politics at all this year, you’ve probably encountered the Michigan Democratic primary many times over. The August 2026 race has essentially boiled down to three major candidates: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. And, given Michigan’s status as a key battleground state, the race has gotten… pretty intense and rife with controversy.

As we head into the summer, polling shows El-Sayed with a very slight edge, though it’s looking more like a dead heat.

So how, exactly, is all of this playing out online? Zooming in on Michigan specifically, over the last 90 days (February 11 – May 11), campaigns and political advertisers have spent $5.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in the state and another $2.7 on Google + YouTube over the same period.

Looking at the candidates themselves (who are spending both inside and outside of Michigan, which is normal), here’s where things stand.

Please note, this graph only accounts for spending by the campaigns directly, not by outside groups (which is a key distinction because outside spending has been a big point of contention in this race).

FWIW, it doesn’t appear that any campaign itself is running political ads on Snap or X/Twitter.

On the organic side, here’s how each campaign’s follower count stacks up on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X/Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky.

Please note that this doesn’t account for duplicate followers, i.e., folks who are following candidates across multiple platforms. Here, McMorrow seems to have the overall edge – although it’s interesting that on Facebook and TikTok, El-Sayed leads the pack.

If you’re content-curious like me, here are the most-liked Instagram posts from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Rep. Haley Steven’s campaign accounts over the last 90 days, according to InsTrack.

And here are what appear to be the most-viewed TikTok videos (per TikTok) from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, State Sen. Malloy McMorrow, and Rep. Haley Stevens over the last 90 days.

All in all, we are 81 days from the big (primary) one in Michigan… and it feels like anything could happen. Stay tuned! 🧤

According to new data, for the first time, Anthropic has more verified business customers (i.e., businesses paying for its services) than OpenAI.

Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is officially the 2026 midterms’ biggest spender thus far, having dropped a whopping $115.5 million, mostly to support pro-crypto and pro-AI organizations and candidates.

According to Dave & Buster’s first-ever “State of Fun” report (yes, it’s a real thing!), we are in a “fun drought” with 48% of Americans stating that their lives are lacking fun.
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Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst
Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)
Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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Using digital platforms, from someone who wants to hold them accountable

Design It For Us — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:24:53 GMT

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Hi everyone! I’m Alison Rice—many people call me Ali. I’m a campaigner, partnerships builder and organizer with a background in multi-issue advocacy and paid media. I run Design It For Us, a new(ish) organization that leverages youth grassroots power and policy chops to disrupt Big Tech’s status quo. I come to your inbox with experience at The Hub Project, Accountable Tech and EMILY’s List’s IE, WOMEN VOTE!, among other gigs.

Like many readers of this newsletter, my work would not be possible without connective media products–full stop. Social media is our most critical organizing tool, and online platforms are our trusty vehicles for reaching key audiences. But we need to be real with ourselves: the honeymoon phase of digital and new media ended years ago. Expanding surveillance and increasing corporate consolidation of platform ownership have exacerbated a vast power imbalance that digital practitioners, strategists and users should take seriously.

Hold that thought as you read this week’s spending…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $14.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The conservative advocacy group Restoration of America dropped ~$288,000 this past week on Facebook and Instagram ads targeting key states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania that feature “explainer” videos that address things like how the word “diversity” has been hijacked by the Left and how there’s no such thing as “your truth.”

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent nearly $11.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The California governor’s race, which has its jungle primary on June 2nd, is heating up on Google & YouTube, accounting for 6 of the top 10 spots. Tom Steyer leads the group with a whopping nearly $1 million spend, but is closely followed by anti-Steyer PAC Californians for the People and their $850,000 spend last week.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

It appears that the only new purchases of X/Twitter political ads in the last 6 weeks (so not accounting for older ads that are still running) have come from this random AI building consultant service called Politech AI.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.1 million on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:

The next growth channel in political advertising isn’t paid social or online video…

Using digital platforms, from someone who wants to hold them accountable

It’s no secret that tech and the internet have completely transformed our information ecosystems. The “Facebook Election” of 2008 changed the nature of campaigning and social media gave us moments like “We did it, Joe” in COVID-era America. But considering all things viral-Von Dutch-brat-coconut tree, online engagement now relies almost solely on quick touchpoints like likes and retweets, and far less on the 1:1 exchanges that actually drive real-world action, like in 2008. We’re more connected than ever before, but attention alone has become the dominant—and often only—currency that matters.

Social media is not going away, nor should it, but we can’t feign innocence about how it works. Big Tech companies make deliberate choices that shape our spheres of influence as much as a trending song does. Platforms optimize for eyeballs that lead to revenue, reducing the reach of posts that contain external links and throttling accounts to encourage ad buying. Strategists have had to adjust to those policies and creators have been forced to adapt to shadow banning. The lack of accountability structures has enabled tech companies to make decisions solely in their own interest, building the infrastructure we use every day on their terms, while users shoulder the downstream effects.

Employees have raised alarms about some of the worst of these choices. Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen was the first major social media whistleblower to disclose internal documents to Congress and the SEC in 2021, exposing, among other issues, a consistent pattern of mental health harm that Facebook executives knew about and doubled down on. Another former Meta employee-turned-whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, detailed the absence of reporting mechanisms for harassment—concerns that were ignored or outright rejected by senior leadership.

Rather than responding to clear patterns of harm across their platforms, the largest and richest companies are leaning in. In a landmark case led by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a jury in late March found Meta liable for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act, fining the company $375 million. Rather than comply, Meta plans to appeal the ruling and has threatened to remove access to its platform for users in New Mexico entirely.

Their response is presumably less about the fine—though among the largest in civil action outcomes against the $214.96B company—and more about the prospect of having less control over user data through targeted advertising and surveillance-driven product design. Compliance would prohibit the use of minors’ data to personalize recommendations and require a product redesign that prioritizes integrity over engagement.

Digital practitioners often rely on the same currencies as companies like Meta, TikTok and Snap. We use demographic data to target audiences, curate experiences, and craft messages based on what testing shows is most compelling for each group. These institutional engagement tactics rely on a thriving attention economy, which treats human focus as a scarce commodity and a carrot-and-stick of our democratic infrastructure.

We should recognize that the attention economy is a lever of control for media companies as much as it is for political operators, and that’s by design. Without capturing attention, we lose—yet capturing it drives up platform revenue and reinforces data surveillance. And when only a handful of companies maintain control over a large majority of our information ecosystem, there’s no incentive to change what’s already working for them. Right now, they are the only winners.

That means it’s on us to reframe our approach to using online platforms. These companies have proven to be unaccountable and will not self-regulate. Until there are product-level accountability measures and pro-competition requirements, we carry the burden of helping shape more democratized, just, safe and private online spaces.

Digital practitioners are uniquely positioned to help disrupt Big Tech while still organizing users who depend on their channels to see our messages.

Pay creators instead of Facebook ads. As Social Currant’s Ashwath Narayanan explained in a recent issue of FWIW, users often develop parasocial relationships with creators, resulting in high levels of earned trust and credibility that no ad can replicate. With trust in national news organizations hitting record lows, investing in these influential messengers allows us to meaningfully reach audiences without contributing to Meta’s bottom line.

Diversify the tools you use for online engagement. Proactively invest in alternative online spaces that are not predicated on data exploitation to deliver revenue. Design It For Us recently launched a campaign called the Innovator Circle to support human-centered competitors that challenge Big Tech’s dominance. It centers the notion that safety, privacy, and human well-being are not tradeoffs; they’re good business. Its inaugural members include Blacksky, Newsreel, Sparkable, The Nudge and Tribela, which are just a few among hundreds of new platforms that are bucking the status quo of Big Tech’s business model. Consider building an audience on their platforms—not only do they align with better values, you might also find that they produce stronger engagement outcomes and yield a better ROI than traditional channels.

Take better care of data—yours and your audiences’. The largest social platforms need our data to operationalize their business models, often partnering with agencies and organizations that weaponize that information. They use information about us to push targeted advertising and recommend content that incentivizes us to spend more time on their platforms, increasing the likelihood that we see ads and convert.
1. Avoid leveraging transactional mechanisms, like list buying and selling, that treat humans as products to wheel and deal and increase risks of scams or unwanted third-party exposure. Instead, meet people where they are through organic partnerships and creator collaboration.
2. Emphasize transparency, use privacy-preserving defaults—including opt-ins (not opt-outs)—and consider collecting very minimal data through any social mobilization tools. Make sure you are overly transparent about what you are tracking and what it will be used for.

We won’t win by trying to restore our information economy to what it once was or by investing all of our resources into chasing the highs of simple virality. Tech companies are laser-focused on controlling the attention economy and our relationship with them is only one-sided if we fall in line with how they do business. The long game here is to reclaim some control over what platforms value: our online relationships, our trust in information sources, and our data. When we do that, the ball is back in our court.

If any of this resonated with you, feel free to reach out to me at alison@designitforus.org! I’d be glad to scheme together.

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Hear directly from:

Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado
Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst
Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)
Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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Creator Campaigns: Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics

Social Currant — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:07:40 GMT

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Hello there – it’s Ashwath, one of the co-founders at Social Currant, and I’ll be taking over today’s edition of FWIW. Since 2023, Social Currant has built an ecosystem of thousands of creators and helped over a hundred organizations reach audiences more effectively. Most recently, we’ve been expanding on our organizing work in partnership with Double Tap Democracy.

Over the past few years, the role of content creators in politics has become hard to ignore. Since 2024, more and more Democrats have begun to see creators — and the deep, authentic trust they build with their audiences — as a key piece for rebuilding relationships with voters. But much of the conversation still stops at vanity metrics such as likes and impressions. This week, we’ll explore what more meaningful impact measurement looks like for creator work in 2026.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent around $13.3 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Tom Steyer is (shockingly) at the top of this list and he invested around $40K more on Meta platforms than he did the week before. His gubernatorial campaign’s overall spend has exceeded $115M with a little over 5 weeks to go until Primary Day.

Matt Mahan—also in the running to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor of California—is the first candidate whose initials aren’t T.S. to make it on the list this year.

Steyer’s polling has been holding steady in the teens, while Mahan has yet to break out of single digits. A clear frontrunner has yet to emerge in this race so it’s impossible to say where things will land on June 2. We’ll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $11.5 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Last week was the last full week before Virginia’s April 21 special election, so it makes sense that the state was on the receiving end of about 25% of Google and YouTube’s targeted spend ($2.9M). Tough times for democracy-hater Peter Thiel’s Justice for Democracy PAC, which invested nearly $700K this month on 38 ads attempting to convince Virginians to vote “no” on the redistricting referendum—only for it to pass by a margin of about 3%.

On the plus side, at least Republicans seem to be taking it well.

Twitter/X’s reporting is still glitching… so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $1.02M on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

Creator Campaigns: Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics

Before we dig into how to measure creator campaigns, it’s important to understand why creators are effective messengers in the first place: the bond their audience builds with them over time.

Audiences often form parasocial relationships with creators, developed through months or years of consistently watching content, resulting in high levels of trust and credibility that no ad can replicate. In other words, the value of a creator can’t be boiled down to one post. It’s the relationship and reputation they’ve built over time. Add to that the fact that according to Pew Research Center, 2 in 5 Gen Z-ers get their news from creators, and you start to understand why they’ve become such a central piece of our media ecosystem. Working with them allows political organizations to engage audiences through the existing relationships of trust and credibility that creators have built.

This is a new way of reaching people, but the way most campaigns measure this work is stuck in the past — outdated frameworks from paid media and brand marketing at best, and totally vibes-based at worst. It’s understandably hard to measure how creator campaigns work, but we’re also repeatedly optimizing for the wrong things.

So what might better measurement look like?

Optimizing for Shares & Saves, not Likes & Views: We look at metrics to understand how content is performing, but we also go beyond views and likes to focus on engagement. Shares & saves are inherently more meaningful because they’re active, not passive. Saves mean a user intends to return to the post in the future, and shares mean that they are either putting their personal stamp of approval on the content to their own community or using it to start a conversation. Both tell you something views never can: that the content actually meant something to the person who saw it.

Understanding the Comment Section: While comments are a small percentage of engagement, they’re one of the richest sources of information available online about what people really think and why, especially when analyzed at scale. We started evaluating comment sections, going beyond sentiment analysis into topic modelling to understand not just what audiences are saying, but how well it aligns with what the campaign wants them to believe. From the health of a conversation to the intensity of certain topics, the comment section helps us better understand whether a message is landing as intended.

The chart below depicts content we produced in partnership with creators around immigration enforcement – there were over 2,000 comments across posts.

We then tracked the “intensity” of those topics: how long, deep, and emotionally engaged the conversations got.

Measuring The Impact of a Program on Creators: Beyond metrics and audience impact, it’s also important to understand how this work affects creators themselves — in particular, whether working with mission-aligned organizations makes them more politically active both online and off. We know creator campaigns reach audiences, but do they actually move creators – making them more confident, more vocal, and more engaged on issues that matter? That’s a harder question to answer, but it’s one of the more meaningful signals we have about whether this work is building something lasting.

When it comes to politics, viewers trust the message because they trust the messenger — not the other way around. The ecosystem has spent years measuring the message. It’s time to start measuring the relationship.

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That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

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War, in 280 characters or less

Chanda Daniels — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:44:36 GMT

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Hey there! I’m Chanda Daniels, a former Congressional aide and longtime communications strategist for mission-driven causes, working for organizations including the Mayor’s Office, the UN, and Human Rights Watch. I write the newsletter ok so hear me out…, where I explore the intersection of politics, culture, and identity. Excited to be back!

For today’s FWIW, I’ll be diving into how social media is reshaping not just how conflicts are covered, but how they’re perceived and responded to.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just over $12.8 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The top spot on this list is occupied by none other than 14% of California’s favorite gubernatorial candidate: billionaire Tom Steyer. With the exit of former congressman Eric Swalwell from the race, Steyer has seen his support jump incrementally. But polling shows that Xavier Becerra, former CA Attorney General and US Secretary of Health and Human Services, saw the biggest boost, with his support more than tripling what it was last month.

Unfortunately, most polls still show the two Republicans leading the pack, which could spell disaster, but also, who knows where we’ll be a week from now? Watch this space.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $9.6 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Advertising on Google and YouTube was oddly balanced last week amongst the biggest spenders. Both the Democrats’ Virginians for Fair Elections PAC and the GOP’s Virginians for Fair Maps RC made the list, though Democrats outspent the Republicans by nearly double. Tom Steyer is also on here (of course), but he is joined by the anti-Tom Steyer Californians for the People PAC. And the two Republicans running for governor of Georgia, once again, each spent upwards of $200K on attack ads against one another.

Now onto the “Justice for Democracy” PAC, which is very misleadingly named seeing as it’s being bankrolled by an outspoken democracy hater. Peter Thiel, the 40th richest man in the world, who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” has decided that he needs to make his voice heard in Virginia’s special election. And it probably won’t shock you to hear that the way he’s going about it is more than a little sketchy. Lisa Graves did a deep dive on the whole operation in this week’s edition of Grave Injustice—it’s worth the read.

Alas, the glitch in the Twitter/X reporting matrix continues… so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $923,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

War, in 280 characters or less

The TV abruptly cuts to a breaking news broadcast, my confusion replacing the sitcom that had been playing moments before on my screen. It’s May 2011. I watch President Obama start the long procession to the podium. With each step, the immense gravity of whatever he’s about to say next becomes more apparent. He announces the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. Quiet outside—then pandemonium.

I walk past the construction of the Oculus, a landmark that sparks flashbacks to the announcements that shaped my childhood as a New Yorker: 9/11, the endless stream of footage, President Bush declaring that we were going to war, and later, the fanfare of a warship banner prematurely declaring his “mission accomplished.” These moments formed my expectation that major military news would be delivered with gravity, in primetime addresses, press conferences, or sit-down interviews with journalists.

Cut to 2026, when that understanding came crashing down with a social post from the president stating he planned to “end a civilization” in under 1,000 characters. It wasn’t the first time a world leader (or Trump himself) had posted something like this, but it marked a clear shift in how conflict is communicated and what we have to do to respond to it.

We are faced with a bombardment of what one would consider important messages from Trump, but the sheer volume and speed dilutes their significance. And that’s not an accident – it’s tactical. What were once measured and carefully timed messages from leaders have been replaced with a constant stream of live updates that create confusion, weaken the military chain of communication, and increase the potential for escalation.

This shift isn’t trivial. It requires us to establish new rules on discretion, verification, and accountability, especially in moments when a single post can carry profound real-world consequences.

In the face of unprecedented distraction, we’ve become trained to match the pace of our feeds, leaving us to either speak without substance or excuse inaction. We need to resist both.

Social media has changed the way we view war, quite literally. I’ve watched daily, on-the-ground reporting from Gaza alongside “day in the life” videos from refugee camps. This unprecedented level of access is as transparent as it is jarring. The reality of war hasn’t changed, but our relationship to it has. We now witness it through posts, clips, livestreams, and TikTok updates.

These platforms can exacerbate harm, as seen in Myanmar, but they have also democratized and decentralized war narratives. Real-time documentation can hold governments accountable, connect people on the ground to life-saving information, and mobilize global attention, as seen in Sudan. In many ways, this exposure has humanized conflicts that once felt distant and abstract.

On the other hand, world leaders are on the same platforms, writing posts that are creating these life-altering impacts. Governments subtweet one another. We receive updates on military operations as we would a sports game.

As war is documented in real time, a strange duality unfolds. In the hands of the public, social media can enable accountability. In the hands of the people in power, it not only changes how conflicts are perceived, but how they unfold. The platforms allow people in power to bypass traditional channels—sidestepping diplomacy, evading accountability, and feeding into the contentification of war, where strategy and spectacle begin to blur.

The media was once a crucial intermediary in holding those in power accountable for the decisions they made and the impacts they had. Now, when I see the president post about war, my first instinct is to question whether it’s even real and then scramble to find confirmation.

Traditional media imposed structure. It validated information, asked follow-up questions, and shaped the stories that become history. That work hasn’t disappeared, but the administration is restricting their access. Instead, we’re in an era of live tweeting war.

In 2012, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) became one of the first to effectively declare war via Twitter.

The tweet was followed by an airstrike—and then an hour later, a video of that strike posted with the caption, “In case you missed it.”

In 2017, Trump tweeted a threat toward North Korea that its leadership took as a declaration of war.

Today, it often feels as though discussions around decisions, tactics, and operations once confined to the Situation Room are being broadcast in real time. According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal back in March, the president had posted over 90 times about the Iran war, accounting for roughly a quarter of his entire feed. He posts so rapidly and often that Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has a monitor dedicated solely to tracking his feed in real time. Trump’s posts seem to trigger a scramble behind the scenes, as staff rush to catch up, contextualize, and update everyone from military officials to members of Congress. While there’s a lot of debate around how much transparency the public is owed, we can probably all agree that key decision-makers and those serving in the military need to be read in pretty early on to ensure our world order isn’t hinged on the whims of a man and his smartphone.

When the same tools used for awareness and accountability are also in the hands of the people directing military action, they can’t be wielded carelessly. Governments live-tweeting about war is engrossing, at best, and a major security risk, at worst. We can’t deny that these messages carry life-or-death consequences. On the other side of every air strike is a family, a home, a world destroyed.

Social media isn’t going anywhere, but treating war like “content” is a deeply unserious approach to the most serious matter there is. Decisions about whether we go to war or escalate it further should not be first announced—ironically— in a post on “Truth” Social.

The result is a public left unsure of what’s real, what matters, and what comes next. Yes, we may have gained access, but in doing so, we’ve lost structure, accountability, and, in some ways, the gravity these moments demand. We scramble to react, to be present in the ‘chat,’ but when interacting with the new updates it’s important to ask: are you adding substance or to the spectacle? Contextualizing is of equal or more importance to intellectualizing. There is always a need for dialogue, but not at the cost of responsibility.

The initial reaction is to scramble to respond, to ensure you acknowledge the moment, but words with no action ring hollow. Strongly worded posts have replaced substantive action. For Democratic leaders, it’s of course important to create a solid crisis comms plan and use discernment in responding. By the time you decide to message in opposition, you should be able to explain both your perspective and steps you will take to move forward – even if that action appears small to you.

We also need to stop normalizing this new reality we live in. At any other point in our history, if a president threatened to wipe out an entire civilization, it would have been a huge deal. Meanwhile, it’s been just ten days since Trump posted that horrific message on TruthSocial and we’ve already moved on. Part of being the opposition party is making sure the awful things this administration says and does remain in the public’s memory.

War used to arrive at a podium, with the world holding its breath. Now, we hold our breath waiting for the next announcement to show up on our feed, just like anything else we scroll past. And that’s exactly what they are hoping for.

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The Billion-Dollar War Over America's Memory

idris — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:50:08 GMT

Hi everyone, idris brewster here! I am a Brooklyn artist, technologist and founder of Kinfolk Tech, a non-profit that uses immersive technology, local storytelling, and community-centered design to preserve and share untold stories of place. I have spent the last 10 years working in communities across the country, unearthing the stories that have been erased as part of an effort to reshape and broaden America’s collective memory.

For today’s FWIW, I will be diving into the current battle for control over our history taking place as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just over $13 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

A majority of the ads Jon Ossoff and James Talarico ran last week were centered around meeting their campaigns’ goals for the first FEC quarterly fundraising deadline of the year.

On the other hand, billionaire Tom Steyer, who famously has no financial concerns to speak of, ran the gamut on issue areas, hitting everything from entertainment tax credits, climate justice, and the Iran war to ICE, free school meals, and the tech revolution. He even came out in support of single-payer healthcare, contradicting his own previously held stance on the issue.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent around $8.2 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Three states—California, Virginia, and Georgia—dominated 7 of the 10 spots on this list. Nearly $2.6 million were spent on ads in Virginia alone, which makes sense considering the state will vote on its redistricting referendum in less than two weeks.

California saw $1.3 million in investments last week as the battle to replace Governor Gavin Newsom wages on. The top spenders were Steyer, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and Californians for a Fighter PAC supporting Rep. Eric Swalwell. Swalwell is currently at the center of lots of online conversation around possible misconduct, allegations his team categorically denies.

Georgia’s gubernatorial primary is on May 19 and it’s no surprise Rick Jackson and Burt Jones make up a good chunk of the $947k spent in the state last week. ICYMI, the two of them HATE each other. A lot. Like a lot a lot.

There once again appears to be a glitch in X’s political ad disclosure and the numbers have not been updated, so as of last month, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here were the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $805,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

The Billion-Dollar War Over America’s Memory

There are 48,178 public monuments in the United States. Only 0.5% honor people of color. Three times as many memorialize Confederate leaders as honor Black, Indigenous, or Brown figures.

That imbalance isn’t really surprising, but it also hasn’t been treated as what it actually is: a political project with a centuries-long head start.

Allow me to explain.

When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, it marked a resurgent obsession with white grievance politics and historical revisionism. The country’s public spaces became battlegrounds over memory itself. Confederate monuments—long-standing symbols of terror—were suddenly defended with renewed ferocity. It became clear not only how contested our history is, but how deeply power depends on controlling it.

The American monument landscape is one of the most effective propaganda machines ever built, and almost no one in progressive politics talks about it that way.

Now, the right understands how to wield the tools of narrative and culture extremely well. Trump 2.0 has put its full force behind the effort to control our collective memory.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order creating a task force for America’s 250th birthday. It called for the construction of a “National Garden of American Heroes” and directed federal buildings to reflect “traditional, classical architecture.”

It also set a clear tone: “restore Federal sites dedicated to history … to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage” and remove content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.”

In other words: Clean up the story. Decide what gets remembered and what doesn’t.

Just last month, the government ordered signage to be taken down from at least 17 national parks, including exhibits about the forced removal of Native Americans from the Grand Canyon and George Washington’s enslavement of people at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

But this war doesn’t just sit in the physical. It’s digital too.

A separate executive order, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” requires that AI companies doing business with the federal government ensure their systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” Translation: Strip any acknowledgment of structural racism, erase diverse representation from AI outputs, and ensure that the systems shaping how Americans learn and communicate reflect a single, white, conservative worldview. An administration whose playbook is steeped in ideological supremacy should not be able to define what objective means for the country.

At the same time, media ecosystems are growing increasingly imbalanced. According to Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, right-leaning content accounts for 82% of the major online programming across podcasts and streaming channels, AKA “narrative dominance.”

This conservative narrative infrastructure, from the Heritage Foundation’s $150 million annual budget, to PragerU’s $70 million operation, to Leonard Leo’s $1.6 billion war chest, is the result of billions of dollars invested over decades to control which version of American history gets told, taught, and remembered. It’s a coordinated, well-funded effort with institutional backing at every level.

So, how do we catch up? (And before you even think it, no, the answer isn’t to build a liberal PragerU.)

Progressive movements need to build long-term infrastructure rather than chasing cycle-to-cycle wins. We need to invest in the kinds of stories that ignite agency within people. What moves the needle to get people engaged in politics in the first place? An ad campaign alone won’t do the trick. We need to start a few layers deeper and speak to people through their hearts and through their values.

When people understand where they come from and can trace the patterns that connect their present to a past they actually recognize, they become harder to manipulate and easier to mobilize. Liberation becomes truly possible when we stop treating art, history, and culture as secondary to “the real work” of advocacy. They are the real work.

And there’s research to support this. The American Historical Association found that people with an active relationship to history are 8 to 13 percentage points more civically engaged. If our stories didn’t matter, Trump and his cronies wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort to erase them.

I have learned this firsthand through building Kinfolk from the ground up over the last 10 years. Inspired by Pokémon Go, we created our own augmented reality (AR) app where people could walk around their city and see history come to life through community-generated digital monuments. Each monument is the product of 3-6 months of deep engagement: building relationships with local leaders, artists, and residents, hosting community workshops, and creating spaces for shared storytelling.

Kinfolk monument activated at Columbus Circle in NYC

What started in New York City has grown into a platform with over 100 monuments, accessed by people in all 50 states.

Immersive media has the power to shift how people understand the world and each other in ways that other media cannot. Emotionally engaging, immersive storytelling activates key psychological processes, such as empathy, moral reflection, and perspective shifting, increasing the likelihood of actual behavior change.

But at the core of all of this is something far simpler: trust. If your relationship with communities, especially communities of color, begins and ends with election cycles, it’s not a relationship. It’s extraction. And people can see right through that facade.

Authenticity has become a currency, and the further we catapult into the tech bro billionaire AI dreamscape future, its value will only increase. People are craving real in-person experiences that foster connection and a sense of belonging.

Third spaces, the community gathering spots where civic life actually forms, are disappearing across the country, and people are starving for them. A nation without shared physical spaces loses the habits that make democratic life possible.

If progressive leaders want to galvanize support, they need to stop optimizing for surface-level engagement and start showing up in these spaces where trust is already built in: parks, local businesses, cultural centers, community events. That’s where Kinfolk operates. That’s where Mamdani operates. That’s where you should too. While digital engagement is critical for successful movements and organizing, we need to make sure to balance that with as much in-person engagement as possible.

The long game requires investment in cultural and community infrastructure, helping people build collective knowledge and mobilize on their own terms, in both digital and physical spaces. The future isn’t one or the other. If we want to maintain a winning trajectory, we’ll need to truly show up and support people’s agency and humanity no matter where they are.

If any of this resonated with you, you can reach out to me at idris@kinfolktech.org!

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What’s Going On Behind Your Social Media Feed

Scott Schuler — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:37:04 GMT

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Howdy hi hello; Scott here. 👋

If you work in politics, you’re likely crunched for time and budget. And with all of the focus on organic social media, it may feel like just another thing. Unfortunately, if you want to understand politics in 2026, you also have to understand what’s trending online. More times than I can count, I’ll see something go viral and have no idea what’s driving it. So, Who Broke It — a newsletter written by veteran Recount journalist Grace Weinstein — has become my go-to for figuring that out. This week, Grace and I caught up about how to decode your feed and why campaign staffers need to care about digital culture.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $13.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

While this week features most of the same players as last week, the spending went up significantly (5.6m → 13.4m) in the final days of Q1. Pete Buttigieg’s Win the Era PAC was the only new spender to last week’s list. Otherwise, Talarico and Steyer continued to occupy top spots for the Dems, while PragerU continues to lead Republicans asking for donations and driving audiences to its conservative-leaning history content.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

A top story to watch this month is the battle over whether Virginia will redraw their electoral maps to favor Democrats ahead of the midterms. That election is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21. The Democrats’ Virginians for Fair Elections >$1 million ad spend continues to far outpace the Republican Virginians for Fair Elections RC’s $188k.

The Democrats’ highest-spending ad features President Obama telling Virginians “we’re counting on you” to stop Trump and Republicans from stealing seats to continue wielding “unchecked power.” The Republicans’ highest-spending ad argues that Democrats “defied a court order” to enable policies that put “criminal aliens back on the streets.”

Meanwhile, as a follow up to last week’s story about California’s gubernatorial primary mess: Tom Steyer, Eric Swalwell (“Californians for a Fighter”), and Xavier Becerra all cracked the top ten spenders this week. The primary is in 2 months, mail ballots will be sent out in 1 month, and the two Republican candidates continue to poll at the top of the field. We’ll keep tabs on how this evolves.

There appears to be a glitch in X’s political ad disclosure and the numbers have not been updated, so as of last week, political advertisers in the U.S. had spent just over $1.8 million on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $644,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

What’s Going On Behind Your Social Media Feed

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Scott: To start us off, what is Who Broke It, and who are you?

Grace: I’m Grace, and I’ve worked in digital journalism for seven years. Who Broke It is my Substack publication that catalogs, contextualizes and entertains about the world of political content creation and alternative media. My goal is to cut out the chaos, and deliver something that’s readable and helps explain what’s going on. There’s too much to tackle if you try to do it alone. And as politicians and creators get deeper into the content space, somebody has to make sense of it. That’s what I was born to do!

Scott: How do you decide what is important enough to cover?

Grace: There are some days and some weeks where there’s an obvious answer. For example, if Trump announces that we are going to put boots on the ground in Iran. For non-obvious issues, I want to make sure that our audience is tapped into something that they wouldn’t necessarily have understood on their own.

Scott: We all have filter bubbles. How would you describe yours, and how do you recommend exploring what’s happening in other bubbles?

Grace: I’m the type of person that’s not satisfied until I’ve heard every argument about something. My absolute life blood is burner accounts. I have so many. Burner accounts are better than Twitter lists (which I do have) because they allow you to manipulate the algorithm. I have made a concerted effort to put a lot of effort into influencing what I need that algorithm to be.

Also, I do a lot of analysis on packaging. I wrote one piece about how all of the liberal YouTube stars are using the exact same set of evocative words in their headlines. It makes you understand that there are not a ton of lone wolves in these environments. These are networks.

Scott: How does this compare to the right?

Grace: It’s funny. After the 2024 election, the panic among the left was to figure out what our media space is, and how to become attractive to viewers at home. And now, two years on, there is so much cohesion on the left.

The right has fragmented into all of these smaller offshoots. You have the sort of Fox-affiliated corporate podcasts. You have Tucker Carlson spinning off, and the visuals are like, “I’m a regular American.” Or you have The Daily Wire which is filming on sets that cost millions of dollars.

Scott: For folks trying to understand this space you cover – the intersection of politics, culture, and digital media – what are suggestions of habits to build or sources of information to track?

Grace: Number one: Familiarize yourself with a key voice in every different faction. The main ones I lay out are leftists and DSA, progressives, liberals, centrists, conservative, MAGA, and then farther right. And if you can find one person that you’re checking their feeds every day to see what movements they’re making and what they’re focusing on, that’s going to give you a much wider scope than just listening to MSNBC or watching Fox News.

Number two: Build the muscle that helps you determine what is authentically viral and what is a manufactured campaign. This is all about reps. With reps, you’ll be able to see that these three right-wing major platforms all use the exact same wording to describe a presidential executive order. The more you start seeing with some sort of skepticism or curiosity, the less likely you are to be duped by some online information or disinformation campaign.

Number three: Build up your referential knowledge and institutional history. I’m not talking about Congress; I’m talking about which specific creators have been on a specific beat for a long time. For example, when Pete Hegseth was going viral for leading prayer services at the Pentagon, people were like, “Who are these dark, shadowy figures he’s praying with?” And I’m like, this all started with [conservative theologian] Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho. He is the patriarch of the sort of denomination of churches that Pete Hegseth belongs to.

Finally: Understand that the lifespan of a digital trend is much shorter than you think it is. So if you’re two weeks late to something, don’t do it.

Scott: That’s tough because I’m constantly four weeks late to everything. Really drilling in now – political campaigns have limited finances and even more limited time. Why should busy staffers care about what happens with influencers?

Grace: I think that there are two types of lawmakers. There are engineers and there are salesmen. Almost nobody is both. And this idea that everybody has to be a salesman has led people in office to make some really bad, inauthentic decisions. Bringing influencers into the fold is one surefire way that you get time back in your schedule. If everybody’s going to be breathing down your neck that you have to have a social presence, outsource that work to pre-existing influencers who know how to message to their audiences better than a lawmaker ever will.

Scott: I love this. Influencers are an organizing target to build genuine relationships with, not a new substitute for paid media. Speaking of, what are some of the best or worst examples you’ve seen of elected officials engaging online?

Grace: First, Ro Khanna. A lot of people generate hype around digital content, but are not asking what the mechanics are. I got to ask him about his social strategy and how he’s trying to create a brand online. The biggest and most important thing he said was that he’s not afraid to make mistakes. This hyperfixation on the right trend or aesthetic is so uncomfortable. There’s nothing personal, and the whole point of social media is to be personal and showcase who you are and what you believe.

I got a lot of shit for saying it – I did not like Gavin Newsom’s Trump imitations when they first came out. I know every liberal thinks that it is the best thing since sliced bread. But it is going to create a problem for him when he’s running for the White House. A year from now, he will have to start his own brand. It will, no matter what he chooses to do, look like he’s copying someone else or taking ideas from someone that’s not necessarily authentic to him.

Scott: I appreciate the take because that’s forward thinking. Consuming Newsom’s content at face value I think, “Ah, this is funny.” But you’re right; this may create a long-term problem for him.

We talked about how a lot of things seem synced up on the left versus different factions on the right. This lines up with my general perception of the Democrats being a party that is trying to empower policies that support working people, but functionally operates as a top down machine. Contrastingly, the Republicans have policies that make the rich richer, but they have an impressive amount of tolerance for letting their online advocates cook. How does that line up with your perception?

Grace: 100%. It’s like, you have these dark forces on the right disseminating money or influence whatever. They’re very open and honest about it for the most part. On the left, it’s very taboo. It’s very secret, but we all know that it’s there, which is why campaigns like Track AIPAC have been so successful.

Scott: Looking to the future, two years from today, how will today’s intersection of politics and digital culture be different? Is caring about creators a fad?

Grace: There are certain regressions in culture at large, but we’re never going back to the way that things were. And I think the slowness to accept that has doomed a lot of the legacy media. I think the money will run dry in those places. Culture has shifted so far into the world of opinion and no standards, and I just can’t see that going back.

As for creators specifically, 2028 will be the first non-incumbent year since 2016. So I think candidates will actively seek not just collaborations but endorsements. We got a little bit recently with Hasan Piker. Axios was asking 2028 candidates whether they would go on his stream. This sort of thing will be used carefully at first, and then it will snowball from there. That’s my prediction.

Scott: Grace, thank you for doing this!

Grace: Yes, thank you. I’m so excited! So glad we could.

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Faster than a Fact-Check: Our 12-Minute Experiment in AI Candidate Profiles

Jack Welty — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:38:50 GMT

Hi everyone! We’re Meg Schwenzfeier and Jack Welty, builders of Caucus AI and today’s FWIW guest authors. We come from the world of campaign data and analytics – we led analytics on the Harris-Walz campaign. Since then, we’ve been exploring how AI is reshaping the way voters learn about politics and campaigns do analytics.

AI search is the next digital frontier in politics. Instead of typing a candidate’s name into Google and clicking through links, millions of Americans now get answers from AI chatbots and AI-generated summaries. These chatbots have enormous persuasive power, but we know very little about what they’re actually saying or why.

With support from the Analyst Institute, we built Caucus AI to start building that record – tracking what ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini tell people about candidates and elections, storing every response, and pulling out the sources each chatbot cites. We’ve been publishing our findings on Substack, and recently we ran an experiment to watch it play out in real time.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $5.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

For the second week in a row, James Talarico and Tom Steyer are the only left-leaning spenders on this list. And top performer Liberty Asset Champions (see here) outspent both of them combined.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

The primary to succeed California Governor Gavin Newsom is coming up on June 2nd and in case you haven’t been following that shitshow, allow us to catch you up. So far, there isn’t a clear frontrunner in the race and this past Tuesday, USC canceled a planned debate featuring five white candidates amid controversy that the criteria were purposely designed to exclude candidates of color. In the aftermath of the decision, Tom Steyer said he would host a self-funded town hall for the whole squad that same night. Ultimately, that too did not pan out due to “logistical challenges.”

So now, here we are. Ballots will begin to go out to voters in just over 5 weeks and California’s jungle primary system means that the top two vote-getters in June, regardless of party, will advance to the general election. As it stands, polling shows the fifty jillion Democratic candidates splitting the vote so badly that Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco could find themselves facing off in November (which would frankly be embarrassing for all involved).

For the most part, billionaire Tom Steyer has been the only gubernatorial candidate to consistently make Google and YouTube ad investments worthy of top ten honors. This month, he’s been joined by independent committees backing Matt Mahan (“Deliver for California” and “California Back to Basics”), and now this week, we can add “Californians for a Fighter,” a PAC supporting Eric Swalwell’s campaign, to the list. It’s safe to assume there will be a lot more activity from California gubernatorial hopefuls online and across the airwaves over the next few months. Will it be enough to avoid a CADEM crisis in November? We shall see.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.8 million on ads in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $583,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Faster than a Fact-Check: Our 12-Minute Experiment in AI Candidate Profiles

From our earlier research, we know that chatbot sourcing isn’t random. It follows patterns. Across models, there’s a clear preference for neutral sources like Wikipedia, Ballotpedia, and the Associated Press. But there are patterns within each model as well. ChatGPT, for instance, cites its media partner Axios frequently, but almost never cites NPR. Neither GPT, Gemini, nor Grok cite the New York Times very often.

This means that by selecting a chatbot, users are also (often unknowingly) selecting into a specific information ecosystem.

Citations matter because they seem to influence what information appears in chatbot responses and how. For example, when responses cite a candidate’s own website, they tend to reflect the same tone and substance – a huge advantage for candidates looking to control their narrative. While we have not yet shown that this relationship is causal, the correlation is hard to ignore.

How does information actually make its way into a chatbot response?

There are three paths for information to surface in a chatbot response when a user asks about politics: via training data, system prompt, or web search.

Of these, web search (when a model gathers information from the internet live before responding to a query) is the easiest for campaigns and candidates themselves to influence. From our testing, when users ask about politics and current events, chatbots tend to rely heavily on web search since it allows them to overcome their knowledge cutoff (the date beyond which a model has no training data).

But unlike traditional search, where users can click through links and evaluate sources themselves, chatbot responses often present information as authoritative fact. That makes the speed at which new web content filters into those responses especially critical.

So how long does it take for something posted online to become something a chatbot tells a voter?

In the case of OpenAI: twelve minutes.

The setup and model uptake

We created two Wikipedia pages for candidates we thought met Wikipedia’s notability regulations, but didn’t yet have pages: Gregg Hull, a Republican running for governor of New Mexico, and Hallie Shoffner, a Democrat running for Senate in Arkansas. We took care to ensure these pages conformed to all Wikipedia rules related to sourcing, content, and neutrality. They were not overtly partisan and did not cite sources that Wikipedia generally disallows, like campaign sites. (Full disclosure: despite our best efforts to follow the rules, moderators later deleted one of the pages… we’ll let you figure out which one.)

We created the pages at 10:18pm on Sunday March 8, 2026. At the same time, we launched a monitoring script that ran “Tell me about [CANDIDATE]” at regular intervals.

At 10:30pm – just 12 minutes later – OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 chat began heavily citing the new Wikipedia pages. Grok and Gemini, on the other hand? Still nothing, as of this writing.

How the answers changed

Once Wikipedia entered the mix, GPT’s responses changed fast:

Wikipedia became the backbone of both summaries, making up one-fifth to two-thirds of all web citations, crowding out the wider variety of sources the model had been citing before.
GPT didn’t just reference Wikipedia, it pulled directly from it. Nearly every response for Hull began with his Wikipedia intro: “Gregg Hull is an American politician and businessman who served as Mayor of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, from 2014 to 2026. He is the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.” The summaries repeated biographical details, like the number of grandchildren he has, word for word.
Responses got flatter. Because Wikipedia pages are themselves summaries of other sources, GPT was essentially summarizing a summary. Responses became less detailed and cited fewer sources.
Opposition research faded. For Shoffner, the initial responses included partisan sources like the NRSC, Daily Wire, and Free Beacon. After her page went up, those still appeared occasionally, but were often passed over in favor of Wikipedia.

What this means

AI search matters and is a powerful, brand-new pipeline to get political information to voters.

This experiment shows how quickly new Wikipedia content can flow into chatbot responses. It stands to reason that the same can be true for many other websites as well, not just the one we tested.

There is plenty of ongoing research into biased training data, post-training adjustments, and how they shape AI outputs. Those questions are important. The need to better understand how web content filters into AI answers is also important and the need is immediate.

What we found is simple (albeit a little unsettling): new web content enters some AI responses quickly, unvetted, and without anyone on the other side watching. Chatbots also strongly prefer certain sources of information over others. This awareness is critical for digital and communications professionals looking to optimize the reach of coverage they generate.

Google AI Overviews now reach over 2 billion people a month worldwide. Two-thirds of American teenagers (aka future voters) use chatbots. This is increasingly where people go to learn about candidates, and in our case, it took twelve minutes and a Wikipedia edit to reshape what they’d find.

Campaigns and political organizations should be thinking about how to get their own information into the right places. That means understanding what sources chatbots are pulling from when voters ask about their candidates and how to influence the way those sources are ranked. The models are already assembling narratives about every candidate on the ballot from whatever they find online. And while we still have a lot to learn about how to shape that process, ignoring it isn’t an option.

To be very clear: We do not recommend campaigns edit their own Wikipedia pages.

Yes, you read that correctly. Now read it again.

What campaigns should be doing is paying attention to what is on their Wikipedia pages and understanding how coverage of their candidate from different outlets is surfacing in chatbots and AI summaries.

What content do you have the most control over? Your candidate’s own website. So make sure it is accessible to AI chatbot crawlers, contains plenty of clear, authoritative facts and figures, and is machine readable.

Because in the age where AI search is increasingly becoming people’s go-to source of information, if your content isn’t making it on there, it might as well not exist.

You can explore our tool and/or reach out at contact@caucus-ai.com if you’re working in this space – we’d love to hear from you!

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An exclusive look at the most expensive US Senate primary in history

Katie Serrano — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:04:30 GMT

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Hey y’all! I’m Katie Serrano, the DFW Political Correspondent for Courier Texas. I’ll be your guest author for today’s edition of FWIW.

I live in Dallas and cover local politics throughout North Texas. Over the last year and a half, I’ve spoken with local leaders and community members, looking at policies implemented by the Trump administration and breaking down how they impact everyday Texans.

I also write a free, weekly newsletter called The TexEd Report (subscribe here!) focusing on the intersection between politics and education throughout Texas.

For today’s FWIW, I’m recapping the Texas primary election that took place on March 3 and sharing my perspective on the chaos and confusion that took place in Dallas County on election night.

More on that below, but first…

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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:

FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent just under $12.9 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:

If you’re wondering what the heck “Liberty Asset Champions” is, well… the entity, listed as a “fan page” on Facebook, has been running ads telling people that they “don’t need to wait” to claim their stake in Elon Musk’s anticipated SpaceX IPO. The lengthy ad copy sings Donald Trump’s praises and reads like a creepy ChatGPT fanfic.

The Texas Democratic nominee for US Senate, James Talarico, comes in at #6 on this list as he gears up to face the winner of the May runoff election between Republicans Ken Paxton and John Cornyn. If you’ve been following our commentary here the last few weeks, you won’t be surprised to see billionaire Tom Steyer as the only California gubernatorial candidate on this list.

Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $6.8 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:

Interestingly, Democrats and left-leaning organizations seem to be really over-indexing on Google and Youtube investments these days. Billionaire Tom Steyer is joined on this list by Deliver for California, an independent expenditure committee aimed at boosting Steyer’s fellow California gubernatorial candidate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

Think Big (not to be confused with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s nonprofit Think Big America) is a PAC supporting Democratic candidates “dedicated to advancing AI innovation in America.” Nearly all of their $236K ad spend last week was thrown behind congressional candidates Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean, who were running in IL-02 and IL-08 respectively. ICYMI: Jackson Jr. lost his race to Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, while Bean won hers and will face off against Republican Jennifer Davis in November.

On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $1.65M on ads so far in 2026. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:

One blue square! We see you, Matt Mahan.

…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent just over $506,000 on ads in 2026. Here are the top spenders year to date:

Please take our money…

An exclusive look at the most expensive US Senate primary in history

Over the last three months, it didn’t matter if you lived in Texas or halfway across the country—everyone, from celebrity podcasters to musicians to the President, seemed to have something to say about our US Senate race.

While covering campaign launches and town halls for Democratic candidates James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett, I watched crowds grow from hundreds to thousands leading up to the primary.

As support for both candidates surged, one thing became clear: Texas Democrats were happy to finally have a hard decision to make on Election Day. (Democrats outvoted Republicans by 140,000 votes.)

On the Republican side, it didn’t take long for the race between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton to get ugly. Cornyn delivered personal blows to Paxton, while Paxton leveraged his MAGA support to quickly close any substantial lead Cornyn was projected to have as the incumbent.

So, it’s no surprise that these competitive and contentious races not only drew national attention, but resulted in Texas setting a national record for the most expensive Senate primary in US history.

Advertising spending exceeded $120 million across the two races, according to a report from the media tracking firm Ad Impact. And it’s about to get even more expensive, as the majority of that money was spent by Cornyn, who’s headed to a runoff election on May 26 against Paxton.

Cornyn received nearly $70 million in ad support ahead of Election Day, yet landed just one percentage point ahead of Paxton, who received around $12 million in the lead up.

With the runoff set, Cornyn wasted no time going back on the offensive, releasing a bizarre AI attack ad taking aim at Paxton’s alleged affair and infidelity.

On the Democratic side, Talarico defeated Crockett by six percentage points and outspent her nearly five-to-one. His campaign spent over $25 million on ads leading up to Election Day, including a splashy six-figure Super Bowl ad that aired in Houston.

Both candidates largely refrained from direct attack ads created by their own camps, remaining fairly positive and staying focused on their own policies and experiences.

Still, that didn’t stop tensions from boiling over online between their supporters.

Political influencers shaped campaign discussions and discourse on social platforms like Threads and TikTok, sparking several think pieces about the impact influencers—and the free advertising they provide—have on today’s political landscape.

But as a reminder: Twitter isn’t real life.

And although online discourse remained heated leading up to Election Day, it didn’t match what I saw on the campaign trail or at the polls.

I attended several events for both candidates and nearly every constituent I spoke to said that even though they were voting for one candidate in March, they would still vote for the other in November if they ended up being the Democratic nominee.

Ultimately, Talarico’s positive, populist campaign strategy focused on fighting billionaires and corruption while leaning into his faith as a Presbyterian seminarian paid off.

“ He’s just got something special that I think we haven’t seen in a politician in a really long time,” Katie Ryan, a voter in Frisco, told me. “He’s got a kind of special sauce of being young and being able to speak to those of us who are under the age of 50. He hits people where we are. He’s reclaiming my faith in a way that realigns who I am with my values in a political way.”

Chaos, confusion, and voter suppression in Dallas

Election night began on a high note at Crockett’s campaign watch party in downtown Dallas, where I was waiting with a few hundred supporters for results to start trickling in.

But the night quickly took a sour turn before any races were even called. To understand why, we need to back up a few months.

In January, both the Dallas County GOP and Williamson County GOP decided to ditch countywide voting. That meant that although Republican and Democratic voters could vote anywhere across the county during early voting, they were required to cast their ballot at one specifically assigned neighborhood polling location on Election Day.

(In case you didn’t know, Dallas is Crockett’s home base; Round Rock—located in Williamson County—is Talarico’s.)

Although the change was led by Republicans, Texas law requires both state parties to run their primaries exactly the same way, meaning that if Republicans weren’t offering countywide voting locations, Democrats couldn’t either.

So to put it plainly, both Republican party chairs in Dallas and Williamson counties decided to make voting more difficult in the places where Crockett and Talarico would have the most support. They claimed the move would make voting more secure—despite there being no evidence of fraud due to countywide voting.

Democrats warned that the change would cause chaos and confusion on Election Day—and tried their best to warn residents to vote early.

But despite their best efforts, chaos and confusion came out on top.

Over 10,000 voters in Dallas County, unaware of the changes, were turned away from their usual polling sites on Election Day.

Because of the widespread confusion, the Dallas County Democratic Party obtained an order from Judge Clay Jenkins to extend voting hours to 9 p.m. But by 8 p.m., Attorney General Ken Paxton (...who was also on the ballot himself) filed a petition with the Texas Supreme Court to block the extension, which was granted.

The Texas Supreme Court ordered all polling locations to set aside ballots from anyone who got in line after 7 p.m., leaving a number of votes in limbo and delaying results from Dallas County.

“People have been disenfranchised,” Crockett told attendees at her watch party to a chorus of groans and boos. She told guests that she would wait until the morning to make any further announcements about her race, given Dallas County’s size and importance as a voting bloc. Talarico shortly followed suit.

Even with the delays, the margin was wide enough to declare Talarico the winner on election night. Still, nearly 1,800 ballots cast in Dallas County won’t be counted.

But here’s the kicker: After defending the shift to precinct-based voting ahead of the primary election, the Dallas County GOP has now changed course, reversing its decision for the May 26 runoff.

“After causing chaos on Election Day, Republicans are now scrambling to undo the damage they created,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder said in a statement following the news. “For months, Democrats warned that forcing a return to a precinct-only system during Election Day would confuse voters, create long lines, and turn people away from the polls, and that’s exactly what happened. This was a completely avoidable failure that wasted taxpayer dollars and undermined voter confidence.”

Let what happened in Dallas County be a warning sign for Democrats across Texas leading up to the general election in November.

At a time when all eyes are on Texas—and when Democrats are trying to win a statewide race here for the first time in 32 years—Republicans wouldn’t be trying so hard to take your vote away if it didn’t matter so much.

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ICYMI: MAHA & the Midterms

Last week, COURIER’s virtual event in partnership with 3.14 Action drew 22K+ live viewers across platforms. The event featured Hank Green, Dr. Mary Trump, Representative Lauren Underwood, Shaughnessy Naughton, and Dr. Vin Gupta discussing how misinformation and policy decisions affect healthcare access and costs in the U.S. Missed it? Watch the full replay on YouTube.

This event is part of a broader series on science, health, and public policy in American democracy. Our next conversation, Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy, is happening Thursday, June 11. RSVP today!

That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 25,645 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.

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FWIW

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