After an election cycle largely defined by Twitter moments, it's hard to imagine where campaigns on social media could go from here.
In a paper from a 2013 fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Twitter's major role in this year's race was only hypothetical. Former CNN reporter and now head of news for Snapchat Peter Hamby delved into the way that intra-campaign conversations on Twitter shaped the communications of the 2012 presidential race. He believed that the value of being a "boy on the bus," or a traditional presidential campaign reporter following the candidate's daily happenings by traveling with the campaign, was steadily decreasing in favor of the easy-to-follow buzz generated by Twitter. In fact, Hamby argued that "Twitter is the central news source for the Washington-based political news establishment." But what particularly stood out to me was this tidbit toward the end: But according to {NBC News Political Director] Chuck Todd, it's all but certain that some candidates in 2016 will find a way to harness the social media beast and run with it.
Welp.
Let's take a quick peek at a "hypothetical" candidate, shall we?
Which makes you wonder - what comes next? (After draining the swamp, apparently.)
Will Twitter, despite its recent troubles, still be the leader for live postings and campaign news in 2020? Or will the next big thing be a newcomer like Hamby's Snapchat, virtual reality along the campaign through Facebook, or a nascent technology that hasn't even emerged yet? Maybe it will be Tinder for candidates, but with Snapchat's stickers and filters. Any candidate running for a top office from now on has to have a mastery of some form of social media, and it'll have to be organic. Watching Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her core followers of female Baby Boomers try to figure out how to Tweet and Snap has been painfully awkward. You can't ask people to make memes for you - that's like Jeb Bush asking people to clap, and no one wants to go down that road again.
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Sure, you can go to a debate watch party. But what better watch party than the ones happening on your social media channels, with gifs and filters galore?
Here's a breakdown of how Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat allowed users to cover the last debate of the 2016 presidential election.
To see play-by-play reactions of professional journalists and commentators, it was easy to watch essentially a livestream of remarks on my Twitter feed. Twitter had partnered with Buzzfeed to provide a broadcast of the debate itself, and for past debates and even the convention I had watched the video there. But I was more interested in seeing individuals' reactions rather than a full video of the debate last night.
However, it was difficult to find Tweets that were a) from people that I didn't already follow and b) that were actually substantial. My Twitter homepage had buzzy remarks and instant quote replays from the journalists I follow, and the #debatenight hashtag took me to either a feed of second connections on Twitter (Tweets from people who are followed by people I follow) or a general "Top Tweets" feed of literally anyone. It wasn't the most satisfying experience - though I did get to see this gem from Merriam-Webster.
Some of my Facebook friends were posting instant reactions to what was said, but because of Facebook's algorithm, that made it clunky to follow along on an instantaneous basis. The app had an alert for the debate but it was still set as an announcement more than a half hour after the event had started.
There were gobs of livestreams from news organizations throughout my News Feed. Some were more creative than others: CNN International had a livestream of a group in Japan watching the debate for a different perspective, and Stephen Colbert's Late Show arranged for a quartet to accompany the debate on their own Facebook Live video. Both of those I found thanks to my own Facebook friends sharing them. But I also wanted to see what people were saying and thinking beyond my own bubble. Because I was using the app on my phone, I couldn't see the Trending News bar that shows up on your Facebook when using a laptop. This morning, the Trending News algorithm told me that "US Presidential Debate" was buzzing with 25,000 people - though it wasn't the trendiest news topic. If you clicked on it, you would see a fact-checking article from AOL (who knew AOL was trending anymore?) followed by livestreams from the night before and "Top Posts" from the Washington Post, CNN International, and Donald Trump's channel himself. It seemed as though Facebook wanted the news organizations to provide the live content rather than aggregating it itself, like Twitter was trying to do. This kept many of us in our bubbles - unless you sought out livestreams to watch and commented to interact with different people, like this user below. Snapchat
Snapchat was quiet last night, but the real treasure trove came after the debate.
Some of the people and organizations I follow on Snapchat were posting on their stories about the debate. Most of the individuals just used the filters to enhance Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's voices (when you hear the same stump lines again and again, it's more entertaining to hear them at a higher pitch). But then this morning I watched the curated Campus Watch Party and the US Presidential Debate Stories. This was as close as I'd get, it seemed, to finding different takes on the debate beyond the people I already follow. These stories allowed me to see people's reactions from Brigham Young University to Rutgers on the Campus Watch Party story. The main story took viewers behind the scenes at the debate with cameos from Snapchat's Head of News Peter Hamby, house DJ Steve Aoki, former NFL player Emmett Smith, reporters from CNN and the Hill (among others), and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who gained entry to the debate hall.
The main debate story also included footage from the event itself with comment cards on the screen fact-checking the candidates' claims by Politifact. For people who didn't have the interest or time to watch the debate or their social media feeds yesterday when it was actually happening, this provided a recap of the moments people talked about and a review of the facts discussed as well. Plus, though the Campus Watch Party story showed many Snapchatters aghast at Donald Trump's "bigly" language, it also included Hillary Clinton toilet paper.
It's easy to forget that there are real people on both sides of this election that aren't Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Social media can bring us together but also drive us apart, and these Snapchat stories can help viewers connect with people on all sides of the spectrum. I just wish I didn't have to go hunting it for during the debate. |
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