Super PAC App

Super PAC App: Comment on Non-Profits

Posted on December 5, 2012December 4, 2012 by Sam Kornstein in Politics

In response to my previous posts here and here, Dan, co-founder of the Super PAC App, provided some context in the comments on the “non-profit” organizations that sponsored political ads: Definitions are important here. “Non profit organizations” is a catch-call designation for anything that is not a PAC, Super PAC, official campaign, or the national party (RNC or DNC). The disclosure rules for these groups (501c’s) are different and lighter than other organizations (don’t ask me why). The most famous is probably Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (often called Crossroads GPS). So when you think “non profit”, don’t think Make-a-Wish Foundation or Red Cross. Think of people who are choosing to register as non-profits from the menu of organization types–and they’re

Super PAC App: More on Who Lies Most

Posted on December 4, 2012December 3, 2012 by Sam Kornstein in Politics

As I previously wrote about here, the Super PAC App has published all of their data so that anybody interested can take a look. Last week I looked into which types of organizations had the highest proportion of ‘Fail’ ratings for the ads they sponsored. It turns out that the clear ‘winner’ — and by ‘winner’ in mean the organization type that was found to ‘Fail’ most often — was non-profit organizations. I provided a few reasons as to why this could be the case. To sum them up, it seems likely that these organizations either (1) were more crude in their argument construction and execution, leaving them open to easy criticism, or (2) they may have simply had less

Super PAC App: Who Lies Most?

Posted on November 26, 2012November 26, 2012 by Sam Kornstein in Politics

I’ve previously written a bit about the Super PAC App, an iPhone app that allows users to rate election cycle ads based on whether or not the claims appear to be accurate. It was co-founded by my friend Dan Siegel, and throughout this past election cycle, the app appears to have been a success. According to a recent email from Dan and the other co-founder, the app resulted in “119,815 user sessions. 50,014 claims explored. 38,351 ad ratings. 122 countries represented.” Pretty impressive. They decided to post all of their code and data online so that researchers and others can dig in and see if there’s anything interesting going on. You can download the code and data here. So I decided

The Super PAC App!

Posted on August 22, 2012August 22, 2012 by Sam Kornstein in Current Events, Technology

As I previously mentioned here and here, my good friend Dan Siegel has been hard at work developing the Super PAC App, an iPhone app that helps people who are interested in researching election-related commercials funded by Super PACs identify (1) which organizations are paying for the ad, (2) what other political initiatives they support, and (3) what research has been done to substantiate their claims. Today the app was officially released in the Apple App Store. I’m obviously a bit biased, but I must say I’m very impressed. The first thing I did was pull up an election ad on YouTube and try out the Shazam-like tagging feature. While the ad was playing, I pressed the tag button in the app, and