From techPresident

• The Obama campaign isn't just trying to understand the electorate using big data — with the help of academic researchers, it's trying to understand itself.

• A European initiative will map cyber-repression around the world.

Around the web

• In an extensive blog post, a Romney supporter who tried to participate in the campaign's "Project ORCA" mobile poll-watching system describes the problems he had with it. Politico has more details.

• The Sunlight Foundation evaluated the return on investment of outside spenders during the election campaign and found that Republican leaning groups had lower success rate than Democratic-leaning ones. A Breitbart.com blogger commented on the findings and noted that "Republicans are addicted to broadcast TV ads as their primary means of communication."

• But the outside groups also spent on online advertising, as Derek Willis from the New York Times has been cataloguing on Twitter in the past several months. Some examples include:

  American Future Fund reports $2.8 million in ads supporting Mitt Romney, including $1.7 million in Google ads.
  Crossroads GPS spends $1.8 million for tv & web ads opposing Tim Kaine in #VASEN.
  Tea Party Leadership Fund spends $69k on emails opposing President Obama, incl $15k orig planned to support Allen West.
  Planned Parenthood Action Fund spends $1 mil on emails, web & radio ads & direct mail opposing Mitt Romney.
  NRA does $639k of online ads opposing President Obama
  Our Country Deserves Better PAC reports $187k on online & cable TV ads supporting Mitt Romney
  Black Men Vote, funded by rapper Pras, spends $190k on radio & Internet ads supporting President Obama

• The New York Times noted the Obama campaign's use of Amazon Web Services and open-source software.

• For the Atlantic, Rebecca Rosen wrote that Facebook's Voter Tool was used in a way that will allow researchers to investigate its effect on voter turnout:

  But here's the catch: four percent of people didn't get the intervention. Two percent saw nothing -- no message, no button, no news stories. One percent saw the message but no stories of friends' voting behavior populated their feeds, and one percent saw only the social content but no message at the top. By splitting up the population into these experimental and control groups, researchers will be able to see if the messages had any effect on voting behavior when they begin matching the Facebook users to the voter rolls (whom a person voted for is private information, but whether they voted is public). If those who got the experimental treatment voted in greater numbers, as is expected, Fowler and his team will be able to have a pretty good sense of just how many votes in the 2012 election came directly as a result of Facebook.

• According to Facebook, "Big Bird" was the most popular phrase on the site during the election season, just above "Binders Full of Women." "Both saw a slight resurgence on Election Day -- with "Big Bird" winning by a factor of 10."

• The "White People Mourning Romney" tumblr has gone viral, with 257,000 likes or shares on Facebook.

• Researchers mapped racist tweets reacting to President Obama's reelection.

• Twitter explained how it fortified its infrastructure to handle Election Day traffic.

• The New York Times was running promoted tweets for the keyword Nate Silver. According to a reporter from Ad Age on Twitter, "50% of visits to the @nytimes politics section on Tuesday were from @fivethirtyeight" and "27% of all visits to @nytimes came from @fivethirtyeight. "

• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie congratulated President Obama on the phone, but sent an e-mail to Romney.

• In a post-election interview with ABC News, John Boehner said that the House does not have a Tea Party Caucus. On Twitter, he also walked back his concession that "Obamacare is law the of the land."

• The senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology.writes for the New York Times that replacing the unreliable technology used for voting today is a key factor in addressing the election problems alluded to by President Obama in his Election Night speech.

• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is accusing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) of violating House ethics rules with anti-Obama video uploaded to the Oversight Committee’s official YouTube channel and promoted by Issa's Twitter account.

• In what the AP described as the first foreign policy announcement since Obama's reelection, the administration has imposed financial sanctions against Iranian officials and government bodies blamed for jamming satellite broadcasts and blocking Internet access for ordinary Iranians.

• A Washington Post columnist outlines Silicon Valley's second-term wishlist for Obama.

• The New York Times reported that the need for more spectrum would likely be the FCC's focus during Obama's second term.

• Netflix accounts for one-third of bandwidth use in the United States, according to a study.

• AT&T is moving to phase out its copper landline network. AT&T has also reversed its decision to block the FaceTime video calling application over its cellular network.

• Politifact's Bill Adair defended the importance of fact-checking during the campaign in response to a David Carr blog post which suggested that effort was ineffective because candidates continued to make false claims.

• A spider web crashed a voting machine in Massachusetts.

• According to the Pew Center for the States, a Washington State mobile elections app was at one point the fourth most-downloaded app for iOS devices on Election Day.

• WNYC took a look at how the New York MTA worked on issuing a modified New York City subway map to account for the restoration of service after Hurricane Sandy.

• New York state is delaying the release of teacher ratings because of privacy concerns, as "technicians still are developing a system to redact, or block out, data in cases where individual teachers might be identified because the numbers involved in a district or school are so small," the Huffington Post reported.

• Google has launched a new service called the Free Zone aimed at people in developing countries that allows phones with an Internet connection but limited functionality access basic Google products and Google Plus for free.

• Quartz reporter Tim Fernholz criticizes Google executive Sergey Brin's call for the election winner to abandon his political party.

• The Wall Street Journal reported that Stuxnet infected Chevron's IT network.

• The New York Times tweeted yesterday that its story "How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away" was "our most e-mailed article in the last 24 hours."

• Wired reported on the ongoing U.S. criminal probe into Wikileaks, as Reuters reported further on a possible plea bargain by Bradley Manning.

• Data brokers admitted to House lawmakers that they regularly scour Facebook and other social networks to sell personal information to third parties for advertising and other purposes.

• A jury acquitted a Florida blogger who was arrested while documenting the eviction of Occupy Miami protesters on video.

• The Seattle Times recently reported on concerns over drone use by Seattle Police.

International

• Unesco warned that restrictions which directly limit Internet access appear to be on the rise, and called on governments to "to implement policies that facilitate broadband connectivity instead of putting up barriers particularly during political developments," according to a UN news report.

• Both Reuters and the New York Times reported on how even though India's technology sector is concerned about Obama's tough rhetoric on outsourcing, they welcome his reelection and believe it could be a boost for business.

• An influential Saudi Arabian cleric tweeted in response to Obama's reelection: “Obama isn’t good.But he is the lesser evil.”

• British Prime Minister David Cameron warned against a "trial by Twitter" after a TV moderator handed the prime minister a list of suspected pedophiles during a TV appearance and part of the list was briefly visible on TV cameras.

• A British man has been given a suspended six-week jail sentence for posting offensive comments on Facebook about a missing five-year-old girl.

• The Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament has endorsed the idea, supported by MEP Marietje Schaake, that digital freedom should be a priority of EU foreign policy.

• EU officials say that two of their laptops were hacked while attending the Azerbaijan Internet Governance Forum.

• The Index on Censorship is accepting nominations for its Freedom of Expression Rewards.

• A new report details the sacrifices poor people in developing countries such as Kenya make in order to keep their mobile phone in credit.

• Thailand's king has pardoned an American who spent more than six months in prison for posting links to a critical biography of the ruler.

• The family of a Malaysian man who was detained for allegedly insulting a state sultan on Facebook is calling for his release.

• An Iranian blogger has reportedly died after being arrested.

• Univision detailed how Argentineans were using social media organized protests against the government yesterday.

• The Washington Post reported on online Internet conversation in the face of censorship in China as the country's National Party Congress gets underway.

• Hackers who claimed affiliation with Anonymous posted a list of British Navy e-mail logins after breaching the Queen's Harbour Masters websites.