News and Research articles on Political parties

Discussing three factors that characterise the activities of political campaigners, this article demonstrates variations in who is using data in campaigns, what the sources of campaign data are, and how data informs communication.

This paper analyses the spread of misinformation in the context of 2018 Brazilian elections. We give a general overview of the Brazilian political context, its media ecosystem and the weaponisation of the country’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp, as a political persuasion tool. The current architecture of the platform does not allow, once appropriated for purposes of election campaigns, users to notice or become aware that they are being monitored and managed.

This article highlights what we know about the empirical effects of data-campaigning in political campaigns and how those findings fail to live up to claims about its power.

Personalised political messaging undermines voter autonomy and the electoral process. Use of voter analytics for political communication must be regulated.

NationBuilder is a global, nonpartisan political technology firm that sells to anyone. Through a review of its use, this paper questions whether NationBuilder should sell to extremists, spammers or frauds.

This paper discusses how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe, from the perspective of data protection law, freedom of expression, and political advertising rules.

This article identifies factors that could explain the increasing pressure to regulate Québec’s political parties’ uses of digital voter information.

This paper examines how Google Search ranked 29 junk news domains between 2016 and 2019, finding that SEO — rather than paid advertising — is the most important strategy for generating discoverability via Google Search. Google has taken several steps to combat the spread of disinformation on Search, and these strategies have been largely successful at limiting the discoverability of junk news.

Will the same cross-device technologies that track our journeys through the commercial marketplace now follow us into the polling booth?

This paper analyses the selection, dissemination, and framing of media messages in day-to-day politics topic communities on Twitter

The Brazilian 2014 elections were the first to heavily apply Whatsapp as a micro-targeting tool. This paper aims to test the effectiveness of Whatsapp compared to more traditional approaches. First, we find that short videos delivered via WhatsApp are a powerful method of increasing turnout among teen voters. Second, we add Brazil to the list of countries in which the traditional method of door-to-door canvassing has been proven a powerful method of mobilising voters.

This study examines the conditions under which political behavioural targeting occurs in multi-party democracies, and explains differences between parties.

This article reveals restrictions on micro-targeting and data-driven canvassing in parliamentary democracies with strict data protection laws.