Monday 17 November 2014

Facebook slams the door on political campaigns

An upcoming code change means Obama’s ground breaking 2012 outreach on the site won’t happen again. Barack Obama’s reelection campaign pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material.
But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken.
 
“It’s a fairly significant shift,” said Teddy Goff, who was Obama’s digital director in 2012, and oversaw the effort that helped the Obama campaign gain a Facebook following of 45 million users that year. Goff’s team used Facebook and other tools to register more than a million voters online and to raise $690 million online in 2011 and 2012.
 
“The thing we did that will be most affected — by which I mean rendered impossible — by the changes they're making is the targeted sharing tool,” Goff said.

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