Custom feeds are great for getting the word out about news and calls to actions, and keeping people informed about the situation. Here's what I've set up so far, along with some thoughts about scenarios they're likely to be useful in.
The Election Defense feed (also available on Bluesky, Eurosky's mu.social, and Surf) is an example of what I think of as a "disinfo-resistant feed". Posts come from a relatively-limited number of sources including voting rights and election protection groups, civil rights and tech justice organizations, secretaries of state, and non-partisan and independent media.
Of course, this isn't a guarantee that the feed will remain disinfo-free: even trustworthy accounts can make mistakes -- or get hacked. But when combined with simple manual curation (adding or removing specific posts to the feed), it works surprisingly well in practice. Back in 2020 I worked with Shireen Mitchell of Stop Online Violence Against Women using a variant of this approach in a Twitter-based news aggregator, and in the thousands of posts during the week surrounding the election I only saw one dodgy post get through.
Election Defense (Media) is a somewhat broader feed, including a wide range of content from journalists and media. This can be useful for discovering journalists or media outlets writing about these topics to potentially contact to pitch stories, and finding additional sources to consider manually adding to the more-tightly-curated feed. On the other hand, it's a fairly broad list of journalists and media, so there's likely to be some inaccurate information here, and quite possibly some disinformation as well.
US Election Chatter is even broader, so is going to have some shitposting and scamming as well as even more inaccurate information and disinformation than the media-focused feed. It's still potentially useful, for example to identify what disinfo is circulating (and what sources are spreading it). On the other hand maybe it's so noisy that it shouldn't even be associated with this account.
A "trending" version of this feed could possibly be useful, although in practice it might well wind wind up primarily featuring posts by resistance grifters.
Scenarios
Disinfo-resistant feeds are likely to be useful in several of Freedom Trainers' Election Defense Scenarios. For example, the section on Disinformation Flood: Wrong Place, Time, Day discusses the risk of "that allies of good will hear rumors of ICE at polls and quickly pas\ them along on social media, thinking they’re doing people a service when they’re just spreading falsehoods intended to keep people from polls." A disinfo-resistant channel provides a way for allies to check information before amplifying it, and also a vehicle to pre-load the audience with correct information (including pushing accurate information repeatedly) and inoculation (including alerting allies to be careful about spreading rumors)
Several other scenarios where disinfo-resistant channels are likely to be useful in relate to getting the word out rapidly.
Rapid voter education -- In response to Mail-In Ballot Deadline Changes (p. 21).
Have a drop-box backup plan If drop boxes are damaged or removed, and help voters adapt if early voting sites close or mail voting is disrupted -- in response to Sabotage of Drop Boxes and Bomb Threats (p.25)
Create rapid-response communication channels and create a repeated social media refrain -- in response to Last-Minute Voting Location Chaos (p.32).
Election Defense Scenarios focuses a lot on "phone-tree" like diffusion of information in Signal groups, group chats, email lists etc; social media can complement these mechanism by getting the word out to people who aren't already in one of these mechanisms -- and also a potential backup mechanism in case there are unexpected technical or operational problems with the phone tree. In addition to organically including this information when it comes from trusted sources, disinfo-resistant feeds also allow the ability to pin posts to highlight especially-urgent information.
State- and local-specific disinfo-resistant and media feeds are also useful
AZ election defense is an example of a state-focused feed. Activity is likely to ramp up significantly as we get closer to Election Day, so feeds ike this are useful complements to nationally-focused feeds, which may get overwhelming.
While it's possible for an outsider to create a basic feed (as I did with Arizona, starting with the Secretary of State and a couple of County Recorder offices I found with some quick searching, and leveraging existing lists of Arizona media and voting rights groups), deeper local knowledge is likely to lead to a better feed. Ideally, these will be driven by people or groups involved in different states voting rights groups, election protection coalitions, or state-specific "nerve centers" (as discussed in Act Free to Be Free). Not only do they have the best understanding of the landscape, they're the best equipped to make the call in situations where urgent information needs to be highlighted (for example by pinning posts).
In the short term, I'm planning on working directly with people and groups in a few early-adopter states to get feeds in place -- if you're interested, please let me know! After that, it might make sense to develop training materials. Using the Grazed feed building platform, reusable "custom nodes" can help here, but even so it's a multi-step project that's not all that accessible to inexperienced people (and this is not a scenario where using a simple prompt and relying on AI feed generation makes sense).