Tag: elections

Campaigning Without Ads

I’ve seen some stats on what’s been spent on political campaigning this year — and it made me wonder what if they didn’t put so much money into advertising and cross-country tours. What if each party selected something from their platform and put the money into “fixing” the problem. Maybe the Republicans could take three billion dollars and build a private organization that patrols the border. The Democrats could take five billion dollars and create a non-profit that pays for medical procedures. It would certainly be reported by the news — you’d hear about who was doing it and what they were doing. And, instead of ClearChannel and whomever making a load of money selling airtime … the campaigning would actually accomplish something the party thinks needs to get done.

Censorship?

This may be a paranoid thought, but … a bunch of high-profile people’s Twitter accounts were hacked today, and the messages posted asked followers to send Bitcoin. Twitter shut down these accounts for a few hours.

There’s obviously a profit motive here — as of 11:30 today, they’ve garnered over 118k (and have been clearing the money out, so money isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of the hack).

The target list that is hyped includes a lot of big names, and it’s interesting to see which names seem to create the biggest bump in transactions to the wallet.

But the one that stands out to be is Joe Biden — and, yes, it looks like his account was hacked.

This looks like a proof of concept test to me. Now, it’s possible that Trump wasn’t hacked because it is so implausible that he’d be giving back to the community. But forcing the platform to shut down a bunch of accounts, including a number of your political opponents, is a brilliant approach to disrupting campaigning. Seems like a next level move from a government-sponsored intel group looking to interfere with elections after their troll accounts and advertising attempts get shut down.