Political Social Grab Bag – July 2021

Political Social Grab Bag

Trainings & Webinar Alerts

New Training! Storytelling Strategy to Defeat Disinformation…led by Sabrina Joy Stevens, August 23 & 24

Tickets for Netroots Nation 2021 are now available- it will be a hybrid online/offline in DC event in October

What am I reading?

Twitter’s Certainty Problem– An interesting take from Alex Kantrowitz on how Twitter contributes to so many of the problems we encounter on Twitter and how Twitter is starting to think about how to solve them

What Twitter Blue Gets Wrong– Speaking of Twitter read this great piece from Casey Newton about Twitter’s new Twitter Blue which is in current beta testing in Australia

Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works– Blog from Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri with more information about exactly how the IG algorithm functions (aka Ansel)

How Does the YouTube Algorithm Work in 2021? The Complete Guide– Speaking of algorithms, this one has great info about the YouTube algorithm (aka Jacque)

Six Trends in Digital Heading Into 2022– Interesting report with predictions on how digital might change going into the 2022 midterms

New Tools of Interest

Inclusivity Tracker – Cool tool that uses AI to look at the language on any webpage and offers tips for making the langugage more inclusive

Platform Updates

Facebook

It’s July which means Facebook Analytics is gone...but once more INCYMI Insights are NOT gone, just the analytics tab in Business Manager and they aren’t gone forever, they’ll be getting a new name and new data in the soon to be rolled out Business Suite aka Business Manager 2.0

Smart Crop and Smart Preview for video uploads is starting to roll out…

Audio Rooms are getting closer and Podcasts have started to roll out (slowly but they are in fact rolling out)

Now in testing: Public comments on Stories,

Also now in testing: Animated graphics for newsfeed posts

New in Ads: Optimize Text Per Person option (rolling out slowly)

Facebook is getting ready to launch their newsletter product called Bulletin but for now it’s with writers they are selecting and they are not targeting political content for this product…

Instagram

Oooo yes please! IG testing LINK STICKERS

The new group fundraisers have potential to be a big deal

You can now post on IG from desktop– both Windows and Mac (but not from a tablet)

In testing: Fan club stories (seems similar to the new Super Follows on Twitter)

From the please don’t do this file: IG is testing putting suggested posts in your timeline above friends’ posts

Twitter

More info about Super Follows is starting to trickle out

If you host a Twitter Space you can now download the audiofile

Speaking of Spaces…they are now taking applications to test Ticketed Spaces

From the asking for more trouble files: Twitter is testing new controls that would allow a tweeter to control who can mention them in their tweets (why is this bad? think elected officials trying to limit who can tweet at them…)

YouTube

ICYMI No more political ads for mastheads (all other political ads for Google still a go)

TikTok

Tiktok released this full explainer that outlines all of the platform’s accessibility options

TikTok released Jump – the ability to to link to mini apps from TikTok videos and I’m very intrigued to think about how we can use these for political actions

Clubhouse

While every other platform is building Audio focused tools because Clubhouse…Clubhouse is now building text based messaging tools in an effort to not be Meerkat 2021