Communication examines how political messages are made and delivered: framing and message testing, audience targeting and segmentation, spokesperson strategy, government information campaigns, and measurement of effect. Coverage draws on persuasion research and states where evidence is thin. Read by campaign staff, communications teams and researchers studying public opinion.
How campaigns and governments build, target and measure messages, and what persuasion research shows about which techniques actually move opinion.
A note doesn't go public because a majority of raters like it — it goes public only when people who usually disagree agree it helps, a design choice now shaping correction systems on both X and Meta's apps.
Gabriela Montoya
Meta and TikTok both publish searchable archives of political and social-issue ads. The European Commission's preliminary finding that both give researchers only partial or unreliable data shows what these tools promise and where the promise breaks down.
Gabriela Montoya
From the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cameras to the mute button of 2020, every debate format change tracks a broadcast capability — and the current format negotiation is the first one platforms, not networks, will run.
Gabriela Montoya
The Oval Office address once commanded the Big Three networks simultaneously; today the same speech reaches a fraction of that audience, and the White House's incentive is to skip the request entirely.
Gabriela Montoya
A push poll is a persuasion call disguised as a survey — thousands of calls, no data collected — while legitimate message testing looks similar on one call and completely different in aggregate.
Gabriela Montoya