Keyboards for Kamala Playbook
This is a copy of our original playbook that was published on Notion in the fall of 2024.
Keyboards for Kamala: a guide to doing politics online
2/ 🔥 How to begin
👋 Introduction
Elections are coming. And in a world of robots spewing talking points or TV ads, there’s something really wholesome about talking, human-to-human, about politics and convincing people to vote your way.
One way to have a wholesome, large impact on issues you care about is do it where you’re already talking to your friends, fellow hobbyists, and family – online. This guide is our best shot at helping you, a normal person, do just that.
Who you are
You are a normal person who cares deeply about this country, and wants to help Democrats/Kamala win in 2024. Maybe you have a sense that persuading people online matters, but you’re not sure where to start or what to do. If so, amazing! This guide was written with you in mind.
Alternatively: you work for a campaigning organization. You’re looking for information help you set up or upgrade your volunteer program. Maybe you call it online relational organizing, or social media canvassing, or something else. This guide will also be quite helpful to you.
Plus: you can partner with us! We can help you.
Guide + app + you = profit??
This guide is meant to help you talk to people who already know and trust you on politics. To support it, we also built a web app – keyboards.forkamala.fyi ****– where we share videos, articles, and ideas that we think are likely to be persuasive.
Why us?
We’re a group of experts in online persuasion. We’ve fought hate speech, harasses, hoaxes, and propaganda online on behalf of big social media companies. We know how hostile intelligence agencies and political trolls push their message online. We also have experience with super PACs, message testing, community organizing, campaigning, and experimenting at scale.
We aren’t going to teach you the dark arts that the bad guys use. But we can teach you a lot of tools of persuasion that are evergreen and useful.
Enjoy!
Sahar Massachi, Elise Liu, and Shug Ghosh.
🫡 1. Why you should be a keyboard warrior
1.1. We live online now
Real people understand the world through what they see on the internet. After all—here you are, reading a page on the internet.
Yet, for decades, the voter mobilization strategy in mainstream politics been to knock on doors of strangers or call them on the phone or text them. But if you don’t buy stuff from door-to-door salesmen (Girl Scout cookies don’t count) or appreciate spam texts from strangers, these probably also won’t work on people like you.
Luckily, the people you will be most able to convince are people like you, using what works on people like you.
Luckier still, it turns out that the people who influence others are also extremely online. The people who give you your news—newspapers, online publications, TikTok influencers, all of them—and across lines of age, gender, race, subculture, and political affiliation—are also Extremely Online (TM).
So while we are certainly not here to tell you to spend more time in front of a screen, if you happen to find it easier, more comfortable, or more suited to your talents to talk to friends and strangers from your device, you should feel fully empowered in the knowledge that it works, and it can work for you.
1.2. You are essential
This is a guide for you, a normal person - not a political professional - who wants to change the world from where you are.
At its root, democracy is people to people. Campaigns may ask you for money to pay the professionals - like ordering takeout - but sometimes the best thing to impress your friends is a humble meal cooked from scratch.
What you have to offer that professionals can’t do better:
Relationships of trust with real people in your lives.
You are embedded in many online communities. Facebook groups, WhatsApp chats, Discords, etc. You can speak the language of those communities because you are truly part of those communities.
You may have enthusiasm and joy to help in your networks while professionals have their attention split too many ways.
1.3. Internet communities are participation pyramids
A quick definition: by “internet communities,” we mean:
Crucially, not all communities are explicit. You are in a community of people like you—your network—on every social media platform, whether you mean to be or not. Your community is the people who will receive your Twitter blast with a given hashtag. You’re also in explicit communities, maybe, like Facebook Groups, Reddit subreddits, and your favorite streamer’s Youtube comments.
All of these communities operate as extreme pyramids. For every commenter, there are 10-100 lurkers. For every top line poster, there are 1-10 commenters. For every person making original content—even memes—there are 1-10 only posting content made by others.
The higher up on the pyramid you are, the more your leverage. A few minutes of participation in a content pyramid has a lot more impact on real people on other screens than you’d think—even if they don’t click the Like button or say anything in return.
1.4 You are an ambassador between communities, and a validator within them
Internet communities are becoming polarized information bubbles, and a cluster of them represents any given person’s online world.
This has a huge impact on a political world, because people do not make decisions rationally: they make decisions based on their sense of what is normal and expected by their peers. We convince each other by
Getting people close to us (friends!) to see things (i.e. vote) our way
Getting people who share an identity with us to think “people like me of identity X vote for Y”
Increasing the salience of identity X for the people whom it applies
And, crucially, not provoke people who are opposed to X to act against us
As a keyboard warrior, you’re an emissary of all your visible identities—including, in this case, of the community of people who support the Harris-Walz campaign—and also as an emissary of all the silent people in the online community who are not speaking.
That’s a ton of power and sway baked-in.
Luckily, as a bundle of interlaced identities—from your cultural background to your hobbies to your profession to your neighborhood to your fandoms—means that with anyone you may want to convince, you can find something in common. This is your top chance of being persuasive online.
In the next section, we’ll talk about how to do just that.
🔥 2. How to begin
2.1. If you only spend 30 minutes on politics for this entire election
Let your broader circle understand, quickly and easily, for whom you’re voting.
The people of your online community trust you and look to you for cues. Let them know where you stand. Showing your support for Democrats opens the door for them to do the same — both publicly and privately.
Change your profile picture / avatar on all social media. You could:
Add a little button or icon to show how you’re voting.
Add a border of logo to your picture to show who you’re voting for.
Add a little sentence in your bio about a policy you care about that advantages Democrats. E.g. “I’m voting and I care about healthcare.”
Let your closest circle understand, in your own words, why and how you’re voting.
💡 This kind of action may feel vulnerable, and it should. Vulnerable, authentic, direct communication is often the most effective and relatable to other people.
Make a personal statement to share with your friends and family, in a heartfelt and wholesome way, why and how you’re voting.
This could be a 1-3 minute video speaking from the heart, for TikTok
It could be text: a few paragraphs as you would write an email to a friend. We recommend sharing this with a personal photo of yourself (your friends like your face!)
It’s probably not: a single meme or sentence—which is likely to turn people off and also reassure people who already agree with you
Open a conversation: To be most effective, your post or video might want to tell your audience that if they’re unsure about how to vote, you’d love to get on the phone and talk more. In that call, respectfully listen to them and share information you find compelling.
Share where you’re comfortable: Your new personal original content can be shared now or later with all the close people in your life. You can:
Direct message to loved ones whose politics you’re unsure of
Post on your personal profile(s) — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok— where you feel comfortable
Share it in [small] friend and family group chats you’re on
For more on how to design messages like this, check out 😎 4. How to be persuasive on the Internet. We’d also love your examples and feedback on our Discord.
2.2. Identify your audience and people you want to persuade
Next, make a list of online communities you really, truly, are a part of. Remember: the best thing you can do is keep talking to people you already like, and who like you.
You might consider the following:
Your old high school buddy groupchat
the 10-person discord you play fortnight with, your fmily whatsapp group
your local neighborhood NextDoor
a Swifties Facebook group
or even the bread stapled to trees subreddit.
You may rank them by how active a participant you are, or how likely they are to reach swing voters and those outside your Democratic filter bubble.
2.3. Prepare your approach
For each community, your goal is to share content they are likely to find persuasive. That is, coming from you, that they’d find informative, personal, and useful. The key here is to add a new ingredient to your conversations, not to swap out everything you would normally have said and replace it with propaganda.
To do that, brainstorm what informative, personal, and useful looks like in light of this community and its conversations.
What shared values or cultural touchstones people in this group have?
What topics have people discussed in the last few months or years?
What are the topics that are not explicitly political that are implicitly political that are topics of conversation? (I.e. masking, vaccines, schools, cost of living)
Now combine the two — what are the values/cultural artifacts/memes/tropes/perspective you can share, that is logically connected to “vote for democrats” but within the bounds of normal discussion?
💡 Beware a common pitfall: do not mindlessly copy/paste to your friends. Bots already spam talking points. Your job is different — high trust, high quality, thoughtful conversations.
These notes are for you as you get ready to take small, tangible steps as an ambassador and validator in each of your online communities.
🌞 3. What you can do today
Remember this handy chart on how typical online communities are structured in participation:
(This pyramid is not to scale: the ratio between creators and inactive users in any given community is usually more aggressive than that.)
The more time you have, the higher a level on the pyramid you can target your efforts. But even a little time helps.
3.1. If you have 1 or 2 minutes
Liking and emojis on chats and feeds
Liking is easy! Here’s how to make it higher leverage:
Like fresh content. The first likes are the most important - they help content gain visibility in feed algorithms. So if your platform lets you sort chronologically (default in chat apps, easy on twitter, facebook, reddit, etc) – do that.
Like replies on popular content. The algorithm boosts replies that have more likes.
Change your avatar (if you haven’t already)
Your Facebook photo, your Twitter bio, etc: change them to include
A little badge or icon showing how you’re voting
A little thing in your bio text that says either how you’re voting, or what issue you’re voting on (that Democrats have an advantage on)
Add comment in chats
There will be ongoing conversations in the chats you’re in. Hop in and give positive reinforcement to people saying things you agree with.
Optional: Do one copy/pasted post a day
We don’t love spamming, but there are some groups that have made an art of “if you post one thing every day, post this.” Try our friends at Pamphleteers who do this well.
3.2. If you have 5 - 10 minutes
Do more of the above, and also try:
Comments on feeds
Comments are great! The first comment under a post (or the first reply to a new topic in a group chat) sets the tone for how it will be received. Comments under popular posts get a lot of traffic. They can also get your ideas across, without taking the “hit” of “how dare you introduce the subject in the first place”. Most of all, comments demonstrate social pressure—you speak for the group, not just yourself.
Try these things:
See a post you like? Reply with an affirmation and agreement.
See a post you don’t like?
If they don’t have much activity — ignore them! Social media feeds boost things with activity. Controversy or disagreement is activity. So try not to grow things you dislike.
But if they’re already hopping — add a comment agreeing with someone else who has already replied in opposition. Or add your own first comment with pushback.
Look for new posts and give them that crucial first comment. Help set the tone for the conversation.
Share new posts in chats
When people talk politics in chats, you can dive in.
Follow the thread of conversation in the chats that you’re in. When you see the opportunity, express your point of view (why you’re voting for Democrats) and maybe include a link to something you found that buttresses your claim.
(Want to know what to share? Read 😎 4. How to be persuasive on the Internet, or find something from keyboards.forkamala.fyi)
Share new posts in feed
Whatever information, link, video, etc you found and want to share — share it! And do it with some writing and context of why you found it compelling.
(Want to know what to share? Read 😎 4. How to be persuasive on the Internethttps://keyboardsforkamala.substack.com/p/keyboards-for-kamala-playbook?open=false#%C2%A7how-to-be-persuasive-on-the-internet, or find something from keyboards.forkamala.fyi)
3.3. If you have 10 - 20 minutes
Do more of the above, and also try to
Keep in mind the keys to persuasion: authentic, trusted, new information, on a topic useful to people.
If it scans as “apolitical”, good!
Make your posts fit the community context you’re in. (Both in content and style).
💡 Reminder: These posts should be in the groups you picked in Pt 2. While posting content on your profile is fine, it is not the same as what we’re talking about. You can be more thoughtful about where to post than that—meanwhile, many platforms (e.g. Facebook) explicitly down-rank political content on main profiles.
Double-check your posts for persuasiveness in context
Whether in chat or in groups, think about what framing is best for the place you’re in, and find messaging that pushes it. (This is a step better than the earlier tactic of finding a thing you want to say first, and then polishing it for the audience.)
We’ll still stand by content from keyboards.forkamala.fyi, but now ask you to double check that they’ll work with your target audience.
Be personal in the caption
The more personal you can make your content, the better. When sharing someone else’s post or video, add just a lttle: in your own words, say why you’re sharing—use content as a citation to buttress a point you’re making on your own.
Or it could mean making your own content. (See below!)
(If needed): Talk about policies instead of politicians
If you think the context you’re posting in is not going to be amenable to explicit naming of politicians, here’s a thing you can try:
First, find issue areas or policy where Democrats dramatically hold the edge over Republicans. Next, post about that specific policy or issue area and why you think it’s great or important.
Not sure what that could be? Our friends at Tavern built an AI bot that can help you do it easily – just ask it something like “which policies do democrats currently propose (and republicans oppose) that are quite popular?”
Current examples are: Negotiating Lower Drug Prices, Capping the Cost of Insulin, Providing Free Vaccines, Raising Taxes on the Wealthy and Corporations, The Inflation Reduction Act, Opposition to Republican Tax Plans, Codifying Abortion Rights
For the full guidance read 😎 4. How to be persuasive on the Internet.
3.4. If you have more than 20 minutes
Do more of the above, and also try:
Make something new:
Things you made yourself – your own words, your own context around a link, a video of you talking, attaching a photo of yourself, etc – work! The more it is clear that this specific post could only could have been made by you, the better.
So, record a video of yourself, or make a meme that works with in-jokes in your community, or do a funny photo. Then share it.
Try these things:
The most important thing: Record a video of yourself talking about why you’re voting (with references to the community you’re sending it to)
If you’re stumped, look at other people’s Tiktoks and so on. Use them as a model.
A long heartfelt letter to your friends and family laying out how you’re thinking also is great. It could be in the form of an email, a blog post, a Facebook post, a video of you reading it out loud.
You can use their standard templates! The actual creation can take just seconds of clicking. The real work is in thinking what to say.
You can also upload your own images for an even more handcrafted style
Longer conversations
Often, the best way to really tip a friend over into voting the way you want is through an old fashioned conversation. On Facetime, Zoom, or whatever. If, through doing all the above, you think someone has gotten to that point — it might be time to call them up.
3.5. If you have lots of time
Do more of the above, and also try:
Talk to us and go deeper
Talk to us about advanced strategies. There’s more than we can get into here!
😎 4. How to be persuasive on the Internet
4.1. Be attractive. Don’t be unattractive.
Persuading people can be hard! But it doesn’t have to be too mysterious. In the age-old wisdom of Reddit:
Remember, you’re asking your interlocutor (or audience) to do something precious and meaningful — to trust you and believe you. Read on to see this basic advice applied in more detail.
4.2. Use a tried-and-true conversational motif
The way you persuade people online in a small group, or 1-1 setting (chat threads) will be different than in larger, more open arenas (Twitter). But these four keys will be useful everywhere.
Tell people something useful that they don’t know.
A provably winning tactic in political persuasion is to **add new, useful facts that people don’t already know.** As a corollary – the less they know about a candidate or cause, the more space you have to convince them. As a result, facts about tangible things in their real life work best.
How to do it:
“Kamala Harris wants to do X, Y and Z good things that I support”
Examples:
i.e. “Your insulin is now $35 because of Democrats”
Within your group, demonstrate consensus
The key to marketing is: “people like us do things like this”. Make it normal, expected, and part of someone’s identity that they’d do or believe the thing you want.
How to do it:
Cultural signifier: “I’m just like you. We both X. I believe Y”
Statements of consensus: "I'm a fellow X and I'm voting Y"
Across groups, find unexpected similarities and agreements
Getting someone to agree to a bounded point is easier than having them overturn something bigger. In other words, “Joe Biden did this thing X, and I like it” is much easier than “I like Joe Biden”. Go for the former, at least at first.
How to do it:
Find areas of agreement: “Joe Biden did X thing and I like that” is easier to get someone to agree with than “I love Joe Biden”
Unexpected validator: “Given X about me, you might think I Y. But actually I Z”
4.3. Adapt to the platform and setting you’re on
Each platform works differently. Here are some example tactics that work specifically well (or differently) on specific platforms. You can use these, but the bigger idea is just: be thoughtful about the norms and idiosyncrasies of your platform and context and act accordingly.
If you’re in a family/friends small chat: go 1-1
You’re in a situation of high trust and deep context. Listen, have direct conversations, and do what feels most authentic to you.
Try these tactics:
Move from the main chat to 1-1 DMs and conversation.
Call people! Have a long conversation. Listen to where they’re at.
Speak from the heart!
If you’re in a subreddit or discord based on shared interests: create
These are places that reward images, in-jokes, and original content. You want to entertain with jokes that could only come from true appreciators of that shared interest: memes, image macros—effort is rewarded, but even small effort helps.
Try these tactics:
Upvote! Upvote new stuff you like. Upvote new comments.
Find people you tend to agree with and keep giving them positive reinforcement (comments, DMs).
Find things that work in other, related places (other subreddits, instagram, etc) and copy them into here.
On Twitter, being the reply guy works well
The key to new followers is piggybacking off people who already have it figured out. Posts can go big – but the first comment people see under it also matters. Going viral is hard and unpredictable, but when an original poster has already struck gold, you can easily reach a lot of eyeballs by looking in the same stream. You have a chance to shape the narrative on a thing that many people are looking at right now.
Try these tactics:
Reply often to popular posts. Be respectful, helpful, informative—adding value to the thread or post you’re replying to.
Give positive reinforcement—drop a like.
If you do post yourself:
Be wary of links, which get downranked. if you make a thread, make sure put your link in the second post, not the first, of your thread.
Try using 1-2 hashtags and tagging influencers you think might find it useful.
The key to LinkedIn is politics in moderation
Don’t post a lot about politics on LinkedIn. When you do, tie it into how it is linked to your work or job.
When in doubt, check out what Roy Bahat is posting and commenting and learn from him. Or better yet, join our friends at The Pamphleteers. They’re focusing on LinkedIn specifically.
On Facebook, use groups
Facebook, right now, downranks politics in the main feed.
Groups, however, are a great place to:
Reach people who aren’t your friends already
Reach people who share a common identity
There definitely are other tactics out there
If you have specific ideas you’ve used and know work, we’re happy to hear about it—hit us up on Discord.
4.4. Be political even when you’re not
Some online spaces are apolitical by explicit group rules or implicit norms, and that's okay! But it doesn't mean you can't make an impact here.
There are three strategies to deal with this. Here they are, in descending order of our recommendation:
Stay “apolitical” but push those boundaries a bit.
After all, there’s political and there’s political. Don’t talk about a specific candidate, but maybe…
Talk about a policy you support, relevant to the community in question.
Share an idea or meme you think is fun—Kamala dancing! There’s a lot of content that implicitly pushes team D or team R without being too on-the-nose about it.
A lot of the skill here is finding things to talk about that fit the norms of what counts as apolitical in your space, but are still implicitly arguing in favor of a worldview that pushes the candidate you care about.
Keep it more chill.
Changing your avatar is particularly impactful as a means of signaling in these spaces, because it is not likely to be rejected.
Consider non-partisan sharing of factual links to official voter registration websites, election info etc, if you think a majority of the group is likely to support your candidate if they vote at all.
Stay issue-based and never mentioning names of politicians helps. Or – maybe this isn’t a good community to even try persuading in.
For either of these two strategies, you could also try finding the moderators/admins, building a relationship with them, and working out with them what they’d find acceptable.
Push ahead and start posting political things anyway.
This can be scary, and there might be social risk. But, the benefits can be very large. Especially in places that are dominated by a consensus of “we’re all Republicans here” and you can come out and break that consensus.
There’s a sort of domino effect that happens when breaking consensus (even “we don’t talk politics”) where other people jump in and join. So – it often surprisingly works! But it could backfire, and you absolutely don’t have to go for it if you don’t want to.
In the end – you know the vibe best – do what you think will work.
🧑💻 5. How to use keyboards.forkamala.fyi
And now the obvious question: Given all, this, how does it connect with the app?
5.1. In a hurry: click Share
If you’re in a hurry, you can find stuff to quickly share with your friends and family. We have curated persuasive content for you already.
Hit “Next” a few times, pick a post that resonates with you, click “Love”, share it to a group chat you’re in, and go on with your day!
5.2. More time: Share with context
Better, you can share with context — find something you find compelling, and then share it with a caption (of text you wrote yourself) about why you find it compelling and informative. See pt 3 and pt 4 of the guide for why and how.
5.3. Ideally: use it as inspiration
Ideally, the best content you could share is stuff you make yourself from the heart. You can use the videos and articles in the app to inspire you and give you a sense of what is generally persuasive.
Watch some videos on the app. Record your own. Then share it with your people the way you normally do.
✨ 6. Closing thoughts
Zooming out, here’s what’s going on online: Thanks to social media design, and algorithms, and self-selection, people are generally sorted into bubbles. When they see content from outside the bubble, they often see the more extreme and off-putting stuff, rather than the most reasonable, because social media algorithms reward conflict.
You can have a lot of impact in the bubbles you’re in. You live there, and know how to speak their language.
But even more than that, you can have impact as an ambassador to other bubbles. Show them that their friends, neighbors, and fellow hobbyists are kind, sweet, thoughtful, normal, and voting for Democrats. Show them that people like us do things like this.
Not only do we think that this is the more persuasive way to go, it’s also a better way to operate. Being positive, friendly, helpful, and listening is the way we should talk to our friends and neighbors.
We can win.
6.1. Want help? Want to help? We’re here
We’re building an online community on Discord to help support you:
When you are in an online discussion and want help on "How do I respond to this?"
If you want emotional support in a tough interaction
To celebrate your wins, validate your struggles, and provide cheerful accountability
Maybe you have extra bandwidth and want to help other folks doing this critical online canvassing work by:
Sharing example conversations and strategies that have worked for you
Submitting memes you think should be on Keyboards.forKamala.fyi
Volunteering to “own” a future set of content for <your community>.forkamala.fyi
6.2. What’s next?
In the future (and with your help) we hope to have sub-tags for specific communities – think knitters.forkamala.fyi, or whitedudes.forkamala.fyi, or swifties.forkamala.fyi. We’d like to expand this guide with an FAQ as it’s used by more people in their canvassing work and tools/resources requested by our community. And we want to create more web apps, each that takes a certain type of action laid out in the guide and makes it easier.