Glossary
Short definitions of the terms used in digital campaigns and movements, each with what the evidence says, a limit and a source. Every entry links to the cases on this site where you can see the method at work.
Algorithmic amplification
algorithmic reach · recommendation algorithm · amplification
Algorithmic amplification is the extra reach a platform's recommendation system gives some content or accounts compared with what they would get from a chronological feed or from their followers alone.
A large experiment on Twitter found that its personalised timeline amplified right-leaning politicians more than the left in six of the seven countries studied, measured against users randomly kept on a chronological feed. Campaigns can earn this reach legitimately with native formats and real engagement. Gaming it with fake accounts, bought engagement or coordinated reposting is manipulation; Romania's Constitutional Court cited the abusive exploitation of algorithms when it annulled the 2024 presidential election.
See it in: First in the feed, The candidate who came from the feed, From TV studio to feed
Astroturfing
fake grassroots · manufactured support · sockpuppets
Astroturfing is a deceptive practice in which a party, campaign, company or other organized interest poses as a grassroots movement to create the illusion of broad, spontaneous support. It is a manipulation risk to recognise and report, never a tactic to use.
Online it takes the form of fake accounts, paid posters, influencers who hide who pays them, or networks that post the same message at once. Warning signs include accounts created at the same time, identical wording and sudden spikes with no visible organizing behind them. It breaks platform rules and often election and consumer law, and once exposed it discredits the cause it claimed to support.
See it in: The candidate who came from the feed, The WhatsApp machine
Source: Astroturfing, Media Manipulation Casebook (Harvard Shorenstein Center)
Barnstorm (mass organizing meeting)
barnstorming · mass meeting · organizing meeting
A barnstorm is a large public organizing meeting in which a campaign explains its plan and asks the people present to sign up for concrete tasks before they leave, often forming local teams on the spot.
In Sanders's 2016 campaign the format was refined so that meetings ended with teams formed and shifts scheduled, and volunteer leaders later ran barnstorms in other regions. Success is measured by tasks scheduled and done in the following days, not by attendance. Without follow-up within a few days, the energy in the room is lost.
See it in: Big Organizing
Civic tech
civic technology · open-source civic technology · g0v · vTaiwan
Civic tech is technology built, often by volunteers and as open source, to help citizens understand government, take part in decisions or check information, such as open data sites, consultation platforms and fact-checking bots.
Taiwan's g0v community, founded in 2012, works on information transparency in the open; during the 2014 Sunflower occupation its volunteers streamed, transcribed and translated the protest, and its Cofacts bot later let people check rumours on LINE. In Kenya in 2024, a chatbot trained on the Finance Bill's text let anyone ask what the bill would change in their life. Tools matter only when someone with power commits to respond, and open platforms need moderation.
See it in: Sunflowers and g0v, Humour over rumour, #RejectFinanceBill2024
Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB)
coordinated inauthentic behaviour · CIB · influence operation · fake account network
Coordinated inauthentic behavior is a term coined by Facebook for networks of accounts and pages that work together to mislead people about who is behind them or how popular their content is, usually relying on fake accounts. It is an abuse that platforms remove, not a campaign technique.
Platforms judge the deception, not the opinion: a network can be removed even if its message is legitimate. Meta, TikTok and others publish reports on the networks they take down; in 2024 TikTok removed a network of inauthentic pro-AfD accounts. Real supporters who coordinate to post in their own names and words are not CIB, but identical texts posted at once by many accounts can look like it.
See it in: The candidate who came from the feed, First in the feed, From TV studio to feed
Source: Coordinated inauthentic behavior, Media Manipulation Casebook (Harvard Shorenstein Center)
Creator and influencer outreach
influencer marketing · creator campaigns · paid partnerships
Creator outreach is a campaign's work with social media creators and influencers, from briefings and interviews to paid partnerships, to reach audiences that follow them rather than news outlets. Paid political content must be disclosed as such.
In 2024 about one in five Americans, and 37% of adults under 30, said they regularly got news from influencers on social media, according to Pew. Campaigns invite creators to briefings and open Q&As, appear on long-form shows and supply facts, while creators keep their own voice. Undisclosed payment deceives the audience and breaks platform rules and, in many places, election law; in Romania in 2024, a paid influencer campaign without political labels ended up boosting Călin Georgescu, whose first-round win was annulled.
See it in: Tax justice, The podcast route, Mamdani, The candidate who came from the feed
Source: America's News Influencers, Pew Research Center (2024)
Debunking
fact-checking · rebuttal · correcting misinformation
Debunking is correcting a false claim after it has spread, usually by stating the fact, warning that a myth follows, explaining why the myth is wrong and repeating the fact.
The Debunking Handbook 2020, written by more than 20 researchers, recommends leading with the fact when it is clear and explaining the fallacy behind the myth. It also finds that backfire effects, where a correction strengthens the false belief, occur only occasionally. A rebuttal can still give a fringe claim more reach, so many teams answer only rumours that are already spreading.
See it in: Humour over rumour, The Discord assembly, Janonismo
Source: Lewandowsky, Cook, Ecker et al., The Debunking Handbook 2020
Distributed organizing
distributed organising · big organizing · volunteer-led organizing
Distributed organizing is a model in which volunteers, not paid staff, do much of a campaign's work from wherever they are, with shared tools such as web dialers, texting apps and chat groups, inside a plan set by a small central team.
Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign used it at scale: volunteers ran phone banks, canvasses and public meetings and, according to Becky Bond and Zack Exley, made more than 75 million calls. It lets a campaign grow faster than its payroll. It depends on clear tasks, fast follow-up and volunteer leaders, and on a central plan everyone can see; without them, sign-ups go cold and work is duplicated.
See it in: Big Organizing, Momentum, People vs. money
Door-to-door canvassing
canvassing · door knocking · doorstep campaigning
Door-to-door canvassing is the practice of volunteers or staff visiting voters at home to talk about a candidate or cause, identify supporters and remind them to vote, logging the result of each conversation.
Canvassers usually work in pairs from a list, with a short script and an app that records each door. In Alan Gerber and Donald Green's 1998 New Haven experiment, being reached at the door raised the chance of voting by about 9 points, far more than mail or commercial phone calls, and later studies confirmed that personal contact mobilizes reliably. Its power to change minds in high-profile elections is much weaker, and it needs many trained volunteers and time.
See it in: Mamdani, People vs. money, A million doors, Together for Yes
Earned media
free media · press coverage · earned coverage
Earned media is attention a campaign gets without paying for it, such as news reports, interviews and posts shared by other people, as opposed to paid ads and the campaign's own channels.
Campaigns earn it with news value: a striking image, a confrontation, a number or a story journalists want. Marketing firms put a price on it, such as the roughly $1.9 billion attributed to Donald Trump by March 2016, but these estimates treat very different coverage as if it were advertising and are rough. Coverage raises visibility but does not organize voters, as Led By Donkeys saw when pro-Brexit parties won in December 2019.
See it in: Led By Donkeys, Climate strike, Kansans for Constitutional Freedom
Framing (narrative framing)
narrative framing · message frame · frame
Framing is the choice of which aspect of an issue to emphasise, for example freedom, health or cost, so that people understand the issue through that lens. A frame shapes which considerations people weigh when they form an opinion.
Political scientists Dennis Chong and James Druckman describe framing effects as small changes in how an issue is presented that produce larger shifts in opinion. Campaigns often choose a frame that their base and persuadable voters can share, as the 2022 Kansas campaign did with constitutional rights and freedom from government interference. Frames compete, and a frame loses force when people also hear a strong counter-frame.
See it in: Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, The green wave, The students win, From the square to a majority
Source: Dennis Chong and James N. Druckman, Framing Theory, Annual Review of Political Science (2007)
Get out the vote (GOTV)
GOTV · turnout campaign · voter mobilization
Get out the vote (GOTV) is the phase or program of a campaign that makes sure identified supporters actually vote, through reminders, a voting plan, information on where and when to vote, and help getting there.
GOTV contacts people already identified as supporters, so it depends on the earlier work of finding them. Donald Green and Alan Gerber's review of field experiments compares the cost-effectiveness of canvassing, phone calls, mail and email, and gives special attention to friend-to-friend outreach. Nonpartisan turnout drives aimed at groups that rarely vote, as in Poland in 2023, use the same tools without backing a party. Reminding the other side's supporters by mistake helps them, so the list matters.
See it in: Together for Yes, Momentum, The multi-campaign, Equality Campaign
Hashtag activism
hashtag campaign · tweetstorm · online campaign
Hashtag activism is the use of a shared hashtag on social media to frame an issue, gather people around it and push it into public conversation, often at an agreed time.
A good hashtag names the demand or the stakes and gives people something to post, such as a photo, a story or a date. Beautiful Trouble notes that a hashtag on its own cannot change the world: #BringBackOurGirls drew about 2 million retweets but did not secure the girls' release. Coordinating real people is legitimate; inflating a hashtag with bots or paid accounts is manipulation and breaks platform rules.
See it in: The green wave, Equality Campaign, #RejectFinanceBill2024, Yes Equality
Humor over rumor
humour over rumour · 2-2-2 rule · rapid-response memes
Humor over rumor is the approach Taiwan's government adopted from the end of 2018 to counter viral falsehoods: a quick, funny, shareable correction from an official account, posted within about two hours, that spreads faster than the rumour.
Audrey Tang, then digital minister, described the rule as a clarification within two hours, in about 200 words and two pictures. Independent fact-checkers and the civic project Cofacts check claims separately, and platforms add context instead of removing posts. Humor needs a clear fact and a tone the audience already likes; on grief, violence or tragedy, a joke can backfire.
See it in: Humour over rumour, The students win, Mamdani
Source: Interview with Audrey Tang (Yedioth Ahronoth), Taiwan Ministry of Digital Affairs
Internet shutdown
internet blackout · social media ban · platform block
An internet shutdown is a deliberate disruption of internet or mobile data access by the authorities, whether a full blackout, a slowdown or a block on specific platforms, often imposed during protests or elections.
Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition counted at least 296 shutdowns in 54 countries in 2024, including Bangladesh. Movements prepare before it happens: VPN instructions sent in advance, offline contact lists, SMS and phone trees, and spokespeople who can reach journalists. VPN use is restricted in some countries, so check the law.
See it in: The 36th of July, The Discord assembly, Diomaye mooy Sonko
Source: Emboldened offenders, endangered communities: internet shutdowns in 2024, Access Now
Ladder of engagement
volunteer ladder · engagement ladder · leadership ladder
A ladder of engagement is a planned sequence of asks that moves a supporter from a small first action, such as signing up or sharing, to bigger commitments, such as volunteering every week and leading a team.
Each rung is concrete and a little harder than the last, and the next ask comes soon after the first action. Campaigns measure how many people move from one rung to the next, not just the total of sign-ups. It works when someone follows up in person; a ladder that exists only as an email sequence tends to stall at the bottom.
See it in: Mamdani, Obama 2008
Source: Daniel Hunter, Building Leadership Capacity: The Ladder of Engagement, Commons Library
Leaderless movement
horizontal movement · networked protest · leaderful movement
A leaderless movement is a protest or campaign without formal leaders or a central organization, coordinated through open assemblies, social media and messaging apps, in which decisions and spokespeople come from the collective.
Movements choose it to avoid co-optation, backroom deals and the arrest of a few figures, as Kenya's Gen Z protesters did in 2024. Zeynep Tufekci argues that digital tools let such movements grow very fast but can leave them without the capacity to change policy or adapt their tactics when the government responds. Lasting movements usually build some structure, such as assemblies with clear rules and rotating spokespeople.
See it in: #RejectFinanceBill2024, The students win, Till the end, every night, From the square to a majority
Message testing
A/B testing · frame testing · message research
Message testing is research that compares versions of a campaign message, through surveys, focus groups or randomized experiments such as A/B tests, to find which one moves the intended audience before money and volunteer time are spent on it.
Campaigns test wording, messengers and frames, then retest as the debate changes. An analysis of campaigns' own experiments found that ad effects are small and vary, and that experts and common theories predict poorly which message will work, which is the main argument for testing. Testing at scale costs money, so it favours well-funded campaigns; small groups can still compare two versions on the doorstep.
See it in: Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, Together for Yes, The green wave
Micro-targeting
microtargeting · political targeting · data-driven targeting
Micro-targeting is the use of personal data and analytics to divide voters into narrow groups and send each one tailored messages, usually through online ads. It carries real risks for privacy and transparency, and some forms are now restricted by law.
Campaigns combine voter files, online behaviour and bought data to predict who is persuadable and what will move them. The UK Information Commissioner's 2018 report, written after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, warned of opaque messages, voters unaware of how their data is used and the risk of voter surveillance by default. In the EU, Regulation (EU) 2024/900 allows targeting of political ads only with explicit consent and bans the use of sensitive data such as political opinions.
See it in: Momentum, Kansans for Constitutional Freedom
Peer-to-peer texting (P2P texting)
text banking · P2P texting · peer-to-peer SMS
Peer-to-peer texting, or text banking, is a method in which volunteers send individual text messages to voters or supporters from a platform, one conversation at a time, so that every reply reaches a real person who can answer.
Because a person sends and answers each message, it can handle questions and sign-ups that a mass blast cannot. Field experiments find that text reminders can raise turnout, especially when the message is noticeable and the election matters to the recipient. Rules vary: many countries treat unsolicited political texts as spam, and lists need consent.
See it in: Big Organizing, People vs. money, Momentum, Mamdani
Persuasion and mobilization
persuasion vs mobilization · persuasion vs turnout · persuasion and mobilisation
Persuasion means changing the minds of people who will vote but are undecided or lean the other way; mobilization means getting supporters who might stay home to vote. A campaign plan sets a separate audience, message and goal for each.
A study of 49 field experiments by Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that the average persuasive effect of campaign contact and ads in US general elections was about zero. Exceptions were contact long before election day, whose effect faded, and cases where a candidate held an unusually unpopular position and the campaign targeted persuadable voters. Mixing the two audiences wastes effort, and reminding the other side's voters to vote helps them.
See it in: Mamdani, Momentum, Yes Equality, A million doors
Phone banking
phonebanking · calling party · volunteer calls
Phone banking is a campaign method in which volunteers or paid callers phone lists of voters or supporters to persuade, recruit or remind them to vote, from an office, a calling party or their own homes with a web dialer.
A good call sounds like a conversation, not a recording. Field experiments find that quality matters: interactive, conversational calls raise turnout, while rushed scripted calls do much less. Calling needs accurate phone lists, and data protection laws in many countries limit them to people who gave consent.
See it in: Big Organizing, Equality Campaign, People vs. money, Obama 2008
Plenum (student assembly)
plenary assembly · open assembly · general assembly
A plenum is an open assembly in which all members of a community, such as the students of a faculty, debate and vote on decisions, usually one person one vote, with working groups that carry the decisions out and report back.
Serbian students used plenums from late 2024 to run the blockades of their faculties and decide strategy and logistics, with no permanent leaders and with rotating moderators and spokespeople. Researchers describe them as horizontal, participatory assemblies. They are slow, depend on attendance and can be dominated by the most persistent participants, so rules on voting, mandates and rotation matter.
See it in: The students win
Source: Škorić, Čikić, Škorić and Kišjuhas, Anatomy of the Plenum (2026), nonviolent-conflict.org
Political ad transparency
political advertising rules · ad library · paid for by disclaimer
Political ad transparency rules require paid political ads to say who paid for them and to be recorded in public libraries or reports, so that voters, journalists and regulators can see who is trying to influence a vote and how.
In the EU, Regulation (EU) 2024/900, applicable since October 2025, requires a label and a transparency notice on every paid political ad, with the sponsor, the amount paid and the targeting used; Meta and Google stopped selling political ads in the EU in response. Platform ad libraries let anyone search current and past political ads. The rules do not cover unpaid posts by real supporters, and undisclosed paid influencers are a common way around them.
See it in: The candidate who came from the feed, Together for Yes, From the square to a majority, Humour over rumour
Source: Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, EUR-Lex
Prebunking
inoculation theory · psychological inoculation · pre-bunking
Prebunking is warning people in advance about a false claim or a manipulation technique they are likely to meet, with a weakened example and a refutation, so they are better able to spot and resist it. It is based on inoculation theory in psychology.
A prebunk names the tactic (fake experts, scapegoats, false dilemmas) or the rumour expected, and explains why it misleads. In a field study on YouTube, short inoculation videos shown as ads improved people's ability to identify manipulation techniques by about 5% on average. The effect is modest, so prebunking works best alongside fast debunking.
See it in: Together for Yes, The light stick revolution, The podcast route
Rapid response
rapid rebuttal · war room · rapid-response unit
Rapid response is a campaign team and routine that monitors news and social media, checks attacks and rumours, and answers within hours with evidence, a designated spokesperson and approved wording.
The team follows keyword alerts, decides quickly whether an attack deserves an answer, and keeps templates and legal advice ready. Before the 2017 French runoff, Emmanuel Macron's campaign prepared its staff for a hack, planted decoy emails and issued a statement minutes before the legal media blackout when its files were leaked. Answering everything amplifies small attacks, so the team also needs a rule for what to ignore.
See it in: Listen, organize, shield, Yes Equality, We are here, Humour over rumour
Source: How to weather a hack: Lessons from the Macron leaks, Atlantic Council (2019)
Relational organizing
relational organising · friend-to-friend organizing · relational texting
Relational organizing is a campaign method in which volunteers contact people they already know (friends, family, neighbours, coworkers) instead of strangers from a list. The ask is usually simple: register, vote, come to an event or join a shift.
Volunteers list their own contacts, often in an app matched to the voter file, and send them personal messages or calls. In a study of the 2018 US midterms, people texted by friends through the Outvote app turned out about 8 points more than comparable voters, one of the largest effects in turnout research, though it is a single study. Reach stops where volunteers' networks stop, and uploading contacts raises consent and data protection questions.
See it in: Mamdani, Momentum, Yes Equality, Big Organizing
Short-form video
short video · vertical video · TikTok video · Reels
Short-form video is vertical video, usually lasting seconds to a few minutes, made for platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, where an algorithm recommends it to people who do not follow the account.
Political short videos work when they are native to the platform: a person speaking to camera, real sound, one idea and a call to action. The Reuters Institute found that the share of people who consume news via social video rose from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 across its markets. Views measure reach, not persuasion or votes, and clips cut out of context are easy to distort.
See it in: Mamdani, First in the feed, From TV studio to feed, #RejectFinanceBill2024
Small-dollar fundraising
small donors · grassroots fundraising · crowdfunding
Small-dollar fundraising is raising a campaign's money from many people who give small amounts, usually online, instead of relying on a few large donors.
Each donation is also a sign of commitment and a contact for later asks. Some public financing systems multiply small gifts: New York City matches eligible donations from residents eight to one for candidates who opt in, according to the Brennan Center. Donation limits, bans on foreign money and reporting duties differ by country, and campaigns must keep records of who gave.
See it in: Led By Donkeys, Mamdani, Together for Yes, The students win
Source: Small Donor Public Financing, Explained, Brennan Center for Justice
Snowflake model
snowflake leadership · leadership development · distributed leadership
The snowflake model is a way of structuring a campaign or organization as interconnected teams in which leaders develop other leaders, so that responsibility is spread out instead of resting on one person at the centre.
It is associated with the organizer and Harvard lecturer Marshall Ganz, whose ideas shaped the field program of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, built on neighbourhood teams with defined roles. Each team leader recruits and coaches others, so the structure can grow and absorb losses. It takes months to build and cannot be set up in the last weeks before a vote.
See it in: Obama 2008, Mamdani
Source: Shea Sinnott and Peter Gibbs, Organizing: People, Power, Change (2014)
WhatsApp channel (broadcast channel)
WhatsApp Channels · Telegram channel · broadcast list · Instagram broadcast channel
A broadcast channel is a one-way feed on a messaging app, such as WhatsApp Channels, Telegram channels or Instagram broadcast channels, where a campaign or leader sends updates to followers who chose to join.
Messages arrive in an app people open every day and do not depend on a feed algorithm. In Brazil in 2026, André Janones used a WhatsApp channel that grew to 10.9 million people to send daily missions; Volodymyr Zelensky posted daily messages on Telegram during the 2022 invasion. A broadcast list sent to people's phone numbers needs their consent, and buying lists or mass messaging without consent is illegal in many countries.
See it in: Janonismo, We are here, Mamdani
Source: Introducing WhatsApp Channels. A Private Way to Follow What Matters, WhatsApp Blog