The Midterm Monitor is a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. It’s an interactive tool that provides a snapshot of social media messages and narratives shaping the conversation around voting and election administration in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections.
The Midterm Monitor tracks social media posts for a subset of candidates for office, news outlets, and other key messengers. Users can browse, filter, and search this pool of posts for messages on a variety of voting- and election-related topics: election security, voting by mail, vote counting, and more.
The Midterm Monitor:
- Compiles posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube
- Posts are updated daily
- Tracks posts from:
- Candidates for US House and US Senate
- Candidates for governor and secretary of state
- The most influential national news outlets in English and Spanish
- Most-influential national media personalities
- The most-followed local or state news outlets in 10 battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin—denoted with purple on map below)
- State media and diplomats associated with the governments of China, Iran, and Russia
- Allows users to filter posts from those accounts by:
- Voting- and election-related topic (for example, election security or vote by mail)
- Social media platform
- Engagement (for example, number of likes or other metrics depending on platform)
- Type of account (for example, news outlets or candidates)
- Date
- Candidate’s political party
- English- and Spanish-language content
- More
How to Interpret the Midterm Monitor
The Midterm Monitor offers a curated slice of the social media conversation about voting and elections. It is not and should not be mistaken for a complete capture of the discussions happening on these subjects on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
About the accounts associated with foreign actors: These accounts often engage with hashtags, people, topics, and URLs that are in no way affiliated with the Chinese, Iranian, or Russian governments. It would be incorrect to, without further analysis, label anyone or anything that appears on the monitor as being connected to state-backed propaganda.
Click here to read FAQs and the methodology behind the monitor.
This is a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
