The Method How a red box is found

Methodology

This project detects red-boxing — publicly posted messaging or media-buy guidance whose function is to direct an outside group (such as a super PAC) on what advertising to run, for whom, where, when, and with what message, without a private conversation. Federal rules bar private coordination; posting guidance publicly is lawful, and this practice exploits that opening openly. It is not per se unlawful.

How a candidate enters the universe

Candidates are drawn from FEC data: funded candidates (above a receipts floor) in contested party primaries, plus an overlay of competitive general-election races. Each candidate's official campaign URL is resolved and labeled as either human-verified or auto-resolved; a flagged site's attribution to the candidate is confirmed by a human reviewer before any finding is published.

How pages are evaluated

Sites are crawled with a real browser (visible and hidden page text, plus linked PDFs), politely and identifiably. Extracted text is classified by its function, not its styling — segmented audiences paired with directives; channel/timing/geography cues that only make sense as media-buy instructions; prescribed themes, contrast framing, or assets to feature; dated "more to follow" cadences. Standard press kits, donation/volunteer calls to action, and ordinary issue pages are not flagged. A decisive test is audience: red-boxing is guidance whose intended reader is an outside spender (a super PAC) who will run paid advertising. Directive language aimed at the campaign's own press shop or at journalists (internal press notes), or content written to persuade voters directly, is not red-boxing even when prescriptive.

Evidence and the human gate

Every positive or ambiguous detection is archived at detection time — full-page screenshot, raw HTML, extracted text, and a Wayback snapshot — so a claim survives a take-down. No positive is published as a finding until a human reviewer approves it, having viewed the archived evidence and quoted spans. Negatives are recorded as dated "no guidance detected as of [date]" statements, never as "does not red-box."