My post from Sunday, Everyone an Instapundit: How the Left Underestimates Twitter, drew a strong reaction both on Twitter and in the comment section. As one might expect in the starkly polarized political blogosphere, reaction was split. I can’t complain that it stimulated so much discussion, but there were some objections I’d like to address. To begin with, this comment by Oliver Willis represents a misunderstanding I did not anticipate, but had better explain better here:
[Y]our overall thesis seems to be that liberals aren’t on Twitter, which is not the case.
That most certainly was not my point. Consider that I’ve written two separate posts about how Barack Obama was, until fairly recently, the most-followed Twitter personality. In fact, the first of those posts openly wondered why then-President-elect Obama’s team had stopped tweeting on election day.
To the contrary, I am quite certain that there are more people on Twitter who casually identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” but they key word here is: “casually.” The difference is that Twitter users who self-identify as being on the Right are making a concerted effort to use Twitter for political ends. People who identify with the Left seem to be using it more for fun. Or as Willis put it in the same comment:
Do conservatives have more of a hashtag culture on twitter? Yeah they do. La-de-freaking-da.
Notwithstanding the power of “la-de-freaking-da” as an argument, not all of Willis’ political allies concur. Although hashtag use on the Left trails its use on the Right, there have been efforts to recreate this culture, albeit without great success. Tweetleft is a website aggregating hashtags associated with progressive causes. But if we use Flaptor’s Twist to compare #tcot and #teaparty vs. #topprog and #rebelleft, this is what we see:
The red line is #tcot; the blue line is #teaparty. The other two hashtags, among Tweetleft’s most popular, don’t even make a dent. My new Twitter friend Angus Johnston argued to me that the #amazonfail hashtag — used to identify tweets relating to Amazon.com’s recent (apparently unintentional) blacklisting of LGBT titles from sales rankings — was a good example of this. If we compare #tcot vs. #amazonfail over the past 48 hours — red again is #tcot and blue is #amazonfail — it is clear he has a point:
This demonstrates to me that a “hashtag culture” on the Left could easily outpace what the Right has now, if so organized. But it should not be overestimated, either — #amazonfail went viral and therefore pulled in many more people who may not have thought it a Right vs. Left issue. An overtly partisan or ideological effort — which most certainly describes #tcot — remains to be seen.
NYU’s Jay Rosen offered a PBS MediaShift column by my colleague Simon Owens — who also pointed it out to me — about RNC protesters using Twitter to communicate (spontaneous and not sustained) as well as Twitter Vote Report (not clearly an ideological project).
Meanwhile there are other examples of Twitter being deployed by the Right, and interesting developments therefrom:
- As I first noted in December, political fundraising on Twitter was first a Republican innovation, as spearheaded by the campaign of California Senate candidate Chuck DeVore.
- Conservatives’ use of Twitter was encouraged by Hugh Hewitt on his radio show. His producer Duane Patterson is even the sixth-most followed person on TCOT. Hewitt was also an early advocate of blogging, so his involvement here is no great surprise — but it’s a lot better than Keith Olbermann is doing.
- Among those “top conservatives” are some familiar names and brands: Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and RightWingNews. But who are Bill Austin, Nansen Malin and Rob McNealy? Two are PR types (Twitter is lousy with us) but Malin is a member of the Washington State GOP Executive Board.
Like the blogosphere before it, Twitter is already bringing forth new voices and establishing new power brokers. At a time where the Right is casting about for new ideas and new blood, Twitter might have come along at just the right time. But the question remains: Will they extend their reach before the Left develops a stronger presence?