WATCH: Tim Murphy Talks Political Data-Mining on Democracy Now!

I was on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman on Monday morning talking about the Obama and Romney campaign’s use of online and offline data-mining to learn more about you (and then ask you for money). Watch:

You can read my profile of Harper Reed, Obama for America’s Chief Technology Officer, here. And here’s the how-to guide on how the Obama campaign learns more (and more, and more) about you.

On Sunday, the New York Times covered a lot of familiar ground in a big piece on campaigns’ use of consumer data—they’ve been using these databases since at least 2002—but one interesting nugget in there is the discussion of online shaming. Advocacy groups and campaigns have already experimented in sending out passive-aggressive mailers to voters (citing things like voting history) in order to coerce them into showing up at the polls or volunteering. Now they’re branching out into the Internet as well, and using your own circles of friends to do it. (Here’s a good example of this kind of pitch, from the Obama campaign, providing an online tracking number and gently asking you to correct the record if it’s really true that you haven’t given any money.)

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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