Politics

Democrats and Twitter want to autoreply you into voting

With a new campaign, the Democrats will automatically send people tweets reminding them when and how to vote in their state.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the DNC

The DNC is asking Twitter users to opt-in for automatic updates on voting this year.

Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

With a little over a month to go before Election Day, the Democratic National Committee is launching a Twitter campaign that will automatically send people tweets reminding them about when and how to vote in their state.

On Thursday evening, the Democratic party in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., will send out tweets asking people to opt in for updates. Anyone who likes or retweets that message will get autoreplies in their Twitter mentions, including real-time information on registration, mail-in ballot deadlines, early voting and polling hours, among other things. The outreach is an attempt by the Democrats to cut through the morass of confusion and misinformation about voting this year being fomented online — including from the president himself.

"We're in a historically digital-first election. We're always looking for ways we can lower the barrier to entry and make sure that voting is easier and people are getting more accessible and authoritative information," said the DNC's deputy chief mobilization officer, Heather Reid. "We just view this as one of the arrows in our quiver that we're using to do that, in addition to all the other ways that we can contact voters."

Voters who opt in to such alerts from their state Democratic party are likely to be pretty engaged in the process already. But Reid said the Democrats are working with each party to find influencers and community leaders who can retweet the message, too. That way, Reid said, "It's not just people who typically already interact with or follow their state party, but maybe people who follow their pastor on Twitter, too."

For campaigns, the ability to contact voters through social media has become increasingly alluring and necessary. While both parties' voter files are busting with addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, matching those voters to their social media accounts is a trickier task. Reid declined to discuss whether data from subscribers would be collected for future use, but a DNC spokesperson said this campaign "isn't focused on collecting data."

This isn't the Democrats' first stab at this type of outreach. The convention committee launched a similar campaign during the Democratic National Convention, amassing 60,000 subscribers. Reid said that campaign was such a success that "for a while, Twitter had to catch up to how many people wanted to interact with us."

A Twitter spokesperson said that the autoreply tool, which is most often used by movie studios and the entertainment industry, was offered to both the Democrats and Republicans before their conventions. Only the Democrats took Twitter up on the offer. The spokesperson confirmed that so many people subscribed to the Democrats' updates that the number exceeded the Twitter API's limits for how many tweets can be sent at once.

Twitter has launched its own election-related push, too. On National Voter Registration Day, it prompted every user in the U.S. to register or check their registration status at the top of their timeline. The company also has an Election Hub, which appears at the top of the Explore tab for every U.S. Twitter user. As part of the Election Hub, Twitter offers an autoreply option users can subscribe to, as well. But Reid says that while Twitter has stepped up its efforts to actively share authoritative information on voting, that outreach isn't tailored by state, which she says is crucial. "We think about a national campaign as really just a patchwork of state by state campaigns," Reid said, noting that the Twitter replies will be powered by IWillVote.com, the Democrats' central voter information website. That site is staffed by a full-time team that updates information from the states as soon as it's available.

In their efforts to spread authoritative information about voting, the Democrats are swimming upstream amid a deluge of misinformation, particularly about mail-in voting, coming from the highest level of government. During Tuesday night's debate, in front of an audience of some 73 million viewers, President Trump called mail-in ballots a "disaster" and falsely claimed that they're being "dumped in rivers" or thrown out because election officials "don't like them." That's in addition to his frequent social media posts on the subject, which tech platforms including Twitter and Facebook have — sometimes to confusing effect — slapped with information labels. It also stands in stark contrast to the messages his campaign has been sending in thousands of ads urging swing state voters to request ballots to vote by mail.

Combatting those messages is a far tougher problem that no one, including the Democrats, has quite solved. "I have found it's more effective cycle over cycle to really just double down and keep doing the work, pay less attention to the noise and more attention to doing the work that is at hand," Reid said. "We are going to focus on making sure [voters] have that info in every way possible."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins