Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Donald Trump doesn’t always speak with proper grammar. And he doesn’t always speak with facts. But he does speak with two other powerful tools: anger, and even more so, volatility.

The data visualization firm Periscopic lays it out in a new data visualization called On The Trump Emoto-Coaster. "If it felt like you were on an emotional roller coaster during this past Presidential election, just look at what was happening to Donald Trump," the team writes. "As shown in 10 of the major speeches he gave from July through December, there’s a rise and fall of intense emotion." As Trevor Noah so cuttingly put it last year, Trump has the unmodulated mentality of a toddler....

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this.

The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5bn a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”...

Everyone from pollsters to pundits got the result of the US presidential election wrong.

But few can have made it in such an expensive manner.

Newsweek and a partner that prints up special commemorative issues has been forced into an embarrassing recall, after it sent out 125,000 copies of its Madam President issue designed to celebrate Hillary Clinton's win....

Forget Nate Silver. There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang, Ph.D.

Haven’t heard of him just yet? Don’t worry. You will. Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what has easily been the craziest presidential campaign in the modern political era.

When the smoke clears on Tuesday—and it will clear—what will emerge is Wang and his Princeton Election Consortium website and calculations (which have been used, in part, to drive some of the election poll conclusions at The New York Times’ Upshot blog and The Huffington Post’s election site). What will be vindicated is precisely the sort of math approach that Silver once rode to fame and fortune....

These days you tend to hear about Russia in terms of its government hacking the US election. But some canny Russian developers have put their skills to something more productive: monitoring the TV appearances of world leaders.

A team of Russian developers have released an AI powered algorithm that tracks all world leaders activities in all media. Based on the information the Verso service analyzes the impact of each President/Prime Minister and shows a rating for them in real-time.

Verso is an experiment to utilise algorithms designed to rapidly recognise faces (even blurry ones) which were developed at Moscow State University,

Once a second the Verso platform takes a screenshot of a set of monitored TC channels. All the faces it detects are run through the computer vision processing, to see if there is one which matches the person the researchers are searching for.

The algorithms it uses are able to tell in milliseconds if a person is at least a 99% match, even with blurred or turned heads. The data it delivers to its site is in real-time....

Donald Trump is more popular than Hillary Clinton on Twitter -- with both humans and machines.University researchers who track political activity on Twitter have found that traffic on pro-Trump hashtags was twice as high as pro-Clinton hashtags during the first presidential debate.

But the team of academics, led by Oxford University professor Philip Howard, also found that 33% of pro-Trump traffic was driven by bots and highly automated accounts, compared to 22% for Clinton.

Bots are automated social media accounts that interact with other users. Some are able to answer basic questions and serve a customer service function, but they can also be used to spam and harass people....

We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue.

The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections.

“Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....

Speaking in early December at a ceremony to honor Harry Reid’s retirement from the US Senate, Hillary Clinton took aim at a target that would have been totally unfamiliar to audiences as recently as the summer of 2016: fake news.

She spoke of “an epidemic” of the stuff that has “flooded social media” over the past year and “can have real-world consequences.”

This was reported largely as commentary on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which had recently led to an alarming armed standoff at DC’s Comet Ping Pong restaurant. But it was also pretty clearly an allusion to her own recently failed presidential campaign, especially because she spoke favorably of the idea of bipartisan legislation to curb foreign propaganda news, arguing that “it is imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.”...

There’s a lot of talk right now that polling failed. But Trump’s win was hardly an unpredictable “black swan” event. All the evidence was there, if you knew how to read it.In fact, the polls did ok, 2016 was not even a particularly large miss by historical standards.

Most states ended up within the polling margin of error, and the more careful forecasts only gave Clinton a 70 percent chance. By the last week before the election, a Trump victory was twice as likely as losing a game of Russian Roulette.

Yet the most optimistic predictions gave Clinton a 90 percent chance, because they missed a fundamental fact: polling errors tend to affect many states at once, and in the same direction.

To understand the vast gulf between 70 percent and 90 percent it helps to convert probabilities to odds, the ratio of chances to win against chances to lose. A 50% chance is a coin flip, or 1:1 odds. A 66% chance – around where FiveThirtyEight’s put Clinton the last week before the election – is 66:33 or 2:1 odds. If you roll that die, it shouldn’t be surprising when it comes up red....

Breitbart, the website at the center of the self-described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump’s campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate.

Breitbart was always bullish on Mr. Trump’s chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: “Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content.”

It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: “Breitbart Jumps to #11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement.” In June: “Breitbart Ranked #1 in the World for Political Social Media; Beats HuffPo by 2 Million.” Late last year: “Breitbart News #6 for Most Comments Among English Facebook Publishers Globally.”

These stories were self-promotional. But the rankings, released on a monthly basis by a company called NewsWhip, which measures activity on social networks, represented a brutal leveling. They were unelaborated lists that ranked outlets in terms that were difficult to dispute — total shares, likes and comments....

Donald Trump’s foray into news-like production has taken its next step, with the launch of a nightly program on Facebook Live. The show, Trump Tower Live, started Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET. It’s hosted by campaign advisors Boris Epshteyn and Cliff Sims. Tomi Laren of The Blaze is also part of the coverage.

Monday’s program started rough. The anchors were put on without knowing they were live. You could see the boom microphone drop into the shot. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was checking her phone. We heard the director (or someone off set) count them in from 10. Just as with the program the group produced last week on debate night, the picture is poorly lit and out of focus.

And just as with that debate show, none of those flaws matter to Trump’s core audience.

As of 9 p.m. ET, just after the program ended, it had more than 1 million views. That’s not the same as one million viewers, but it’s a respectable number for sure. It had more than 30 thousand shares and 130,000 reactions. CNN reports the stream averaged 40,000 – 60,000 viewers in its first half hour. People took notice. The program this team produced on debate night has had more than nine million views. There is an audience for these shows long after their original broadcast.

This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.

The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.

Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore....

The TV media no longer conceal their disdain for Donald Trump’s ludicrous spinners. Jake Tapper raps Rudy Giuliani for defending Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and chides Paul Manafort: “These things, just because you say them, they’re not true!” CNN’s Brianna Keilar takes Kellyanne Conway to task for insisting Trump did not mean to say he’d lock up Hillary Clinton. (“I’m talking about what your candidate is saying, which is more important than what you are saying about this. He is saying she has to go to jail. He is not talking about she has to stand and be judged. He is saying she has to go to jail.”) And practically everyone treats the hapless Jason Miller as a liar, a fool or both.

Bias? No, these TV journalists can no longer bear to pretend Trump’s people are saying anything resembling the truth and are annoyed they have to put them on air essentially to lie to the American people....

In September, Hillary Clinton released a devastating attack ad on Donald Trump, in which young girls are seen looking at themselves in the mirror while Trump's offensive remarks about women—in particular, their looks—are heard in the background.
The ad, titled "Mirrors," has gotten more than 5 million views on YouTube, and has been hailed by many as one of Clinton's strongest ads of the year.

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, told Slate last month: "I do think that Clinton will look back, particularly in suburban areas where they will be able to really drive good margins with women, that the ads helped. That ad where they show Trump's words and children listening? That stuff works!"

Now, Kathy Griffin has springboarded off the famous spot with a great parody of it. It's not subtle, but it is hilarious. Check it out below. Note: It features lots of NSFW language....