Obama’s Organizing for Action leaking personal details of supporters

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Yesterday I received an email fundraising pitch from Obama’s new Organizing for America:

Email from OFA

Looks safe … click to enlarge

At the bottom of the email is a link to click to :

Looks innocent!

Nothing there to worry about, right?

But the text you see is not the actual link that is in the email.  That link is really:

Doesn't look like much

Doesn’t look like humans can read it, does it?

There’s a lot of information in that link, most of which does not appear to be human readable.  It turns out that it is encoded using a very common system known as “Base 64”, which is a way to take a bunch of data and put it into a URL like this.  But there’s no magic to Base 64, and when you decode it you see:

A little bit clearer now!

Hey, that’s me!

I’ve replaced my email address (to @secret.com) and zip code (with 99999), however if you are sufficiently energetic you can type in the base 64 text and see what it really is…

Anyone else I share that link with, when they click it, will be taken to the Organizing for Action page and shown my email address and zip code.

Other people appear to have their email address and zip codes exposed clearly in the links they’ve shared on Twitter:

Identifying information blurred by me...

Identifying information blurred by me…

It’s not a terrible security breach, and I’ve only found about 30 or so people who’ve accidentally done this in the past week.  But given that the OFA web site holds credit card information, the leaked data represents two pieces of personally identifiable information that could theoretically be used to assist in identity theft.  And if you share such links on Twitter you may find that people who oppose your views find it an opportune time to start up an email conversation you did not solicit…

Regardless of the risk, I am fairly certain (just about all of) the people involved did not intend to publicize their email addresses and home zip codes on Twitter.

Hashtag Wars: #ThingsConservativesHate

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Another week, another hashtag war: who will dominate #ThingsConservativesHate — Conservatives or their detractors?

Based upon a random sample of 370 tweets out of about 10,000 captured since 1/12/2013, the breakdown is:

Percentage Type
56% Anti-Conservative
29% Pro-Conservative
15% Indecipherable

This # of samples gives us 95% confidence of being +/- 5% of these values.

Before we celebrate the triumph of liberalism, however, it’s worth knowing that #thingsliberalshate has gotten about twice as many tweets in roughly the same time…

Florida’s 2014 Governor Race: Charlie Crist Dominates Twitter in December

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The month of December 2012 isn’t quite over, but it’s clear that when it comes to Twitter it’s been all Charlie Crist:

Click to see full-size version

Click to see full-size version

Crist’s re-registering into the Democratic Party — considered by most a harbinger of his entry into the 2014 race — generated huge commentary on Twitter.  His testifying before the US Senate Judiciary Committee produced a second blip for him later in the month, although a poll showing Rick Scott to be unpopular boosted Scott’s Twitter mentions that same day.

So far, for the month, it has been 19K+ mentions of Charlie Crist that had an overwhelmingly positive sentiment, 10k+ mentions of Rick Scott, and just under 1K mentions for Alex Sink, the 2010 unsuccessful democratic candidate (and who is thought to be interested in running again).

The challenge for Charlie Crist will be to sustain his lead in Twitter.  Switching parties generated a lot of buzz — both pro and con — but other news events (like his testimony) generate far smaller reactions on Twitter.  I believe that Rubio’s masterful use of social media combined with the governor’s very limited social media efforts helped Rubio knock Crist out of the senate race in 2010.  Crist will need to work harder to stay on top-of-mind in social media this time around.  There’s few block-buster events he can count on, and it’s going to be a long grind before people start to focus on the 2014 race.

Alex Sink will need to begin to engage in social media if she’s going to make a run for the office again; to be fair, though, there can be no criticism of her delaying those efforts (or a decision) for a few months given her recent loss.

And for Rick Scott? He’s constantly being mentioned on Twitter, but his sentiment scores tend to balance out.  He’s going to need to find a way to improve the conversation about him on Twitter.

Translating Twitter activity into results at the ballot box is not particularly reliable, but in the recent senate race Connie Mack’s early domination of Twitter predicted his success in the primaries.

Don’t like the election results? Have a Mulligan!

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As the last votes from election 2012 trickle in, people on both sides of the political divide have moved on from their initial reactions to the election towards planning for the future.  But the questions of could-have should-have still linger in many people’s minds: could a change in effort or focus have switched the results?

To answer that, it’s good to know how close the election really was.  We all know how many votes separate the two candidates, but apart from finding 3.5 million more declared, dedicated Romney voters, what would have changed the outcome?  There’s a lot of what-ifs that people will play in their mind, and most are impossible to quantify.  But one set of what-ifs are fairly easy to model: what if the demographics of the electorate had changed?

For example, what if the african-american vote had been lower? With enough fewer votes, Romney would have won:

Click on picture to enlarge

About 4 million fewer african-american voters, and Romney could have won.

Want to play with the demographics yourself? You can!  Just visit my Election Mulligan web page:

http://socialseer.com/apps/mulligan

You can test such things as changing the male/female balance in the votes, adding in more rich voters or removing poor voters, seeing what happens if more latinos vote, or reducing the youth vote.  See what it takes to put Romney in the White House (if that’s your goal) or see how really hard it would have been for Romney’s Get-Out-The-Vote efforts to overcome Obama’s impressive campaign (if you like what happened)!

It’s fun, fast, and easy,  And you may be surprised how hard it would be to change the election.

The data for this app is based upon election results updated to 11/21 and exit polls conducted at the time of the election.  Note that exit polls are subject to error, and the results of this app are purely hypothetical.

Catching up with MSNBC

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There’s no doubt about it, MSNBC has been on fire on Twitter as we close in on the election — people are talking more and more about MSNBC’s shows.  Let’s take a look at how the “Point of View” shows (which start at 3pm with The Cycle and run through Last Word plus Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry on weekends1) have been doing4:

The large spike was the night of the second presidential debate (or, “The return of the Jedi” as I like to call it) — about 100,000 mentions that night.  Just amazing. (Conversely, the drop in the middle of the chart was from the Olympics, which preempted much of MSNBC’s programming).

Here’s the charts for the individual shows.  For each chart, I’ve plotted the 7-day moving average2:

Up with Chris Hayes:

It really is going up.

Melissa Harris-Perry Show:

The Cycle (my favorite weekday show on MSNBC, I must admit)5:

(the recent spikes are around the debates).

Martin Bashir:

Chris Matthews:

His spike occurred during the Democratic National Convention, which is not surprising, since it was kind of all Chris all the time…

Politics Nation with the Rev. Al Sharpton:

Considering that the show doesn’t push social media as much as others, the Rev. is doing pretty good!6

But the next show in the line up3, The Ed Show, is the master of social media engagement:

Although the 7-day average doesn’t show it, on the night of the second presidential debate Ed got over 25,000 mentions.  That’s a lot of engagement.  I don’t know who on his staff handles social media, but they are a social media god.

Ed leads into Rachel Maddow who has the best rated show on MSNBC.  And while she doesn’t focus on social media like Ed does, she still pulls in strong engagement on Twitter:

Which leads us to the nightcap of MSNBC, the Last Word with Lawrence:

Considering that The Last Word has been a 4 day a week show compared to the rest of them up until the final sprint to the election, when Lawrence has been running 5 days a week, these numbers are quit competitive.

If you want to see, overall, how the various shows are doing, here’s a total of mentions over  the last few months:

I will point out that the daytime shows took a hit due to the Olympics, which did not affect the evening shows as much. Still, you can see that Ed is the king of social media at MSNBC….

 

Footnotes:

1 I have come to realize that many of the other shows should be considered “point of view” shows as well — certainly Morning Joe, Tamron Hall, and Alex Wagner have distinctive voices.  After the election I will track all of the MSNBC shows more closely.

2 A 7-day moving average adds up the most recent 7 days and then divides by 7, so the # gives you a sense of activity with the day-to-day noise filtered out.  It’s a good way of knowing if there’s a fundamental shift in activity as opposed to a one day spike.

3 Strictly speaking, Ed comes after the repeat of Hardball.  But we’ve already covered Chris’s mentions, so there’s no point in repeating his counts, just like there’s no point in watching Chris a second time in day ;-).  That time slot (or the earlier 5pm slot) would be better filled by a Joy Reid show, I know we can all agree. Come on, MSNBC, make it happen. If you’re holding that slot for Olberman to come to his senses, well, it’s time to move on…

4 I only track explicit mentions of shows, so thinks like the Education Nation or generic MSNBC references are not counted.  You can infer that the actual numbers would be higher…

5 It’s hard to get ratings for The Cycle (well, without paying for them), but I have to imagine that they’ve been given one of the worst time-slots available.  So I wouldn’t consider their level of overall social engagement to be a bad thing.  Still, there’s a lot they could be doing to better engage with social media besides having Touré hold down the night shift on Twitter by himself.

6 Funny thing about Al Sharpton: 25 years ago, I thought he was an opportunist and was suspicious of his motives at times.  Now I hold him in high regard.  Although we’re both older and more mature, I have to admit that I was wrong about him.  Sorry about that, Reverend.