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?
tcot still seems to be a poor case for the power of twitter: an echo chamber of back patting and bama-bashing where not even talking points can survive intact, instead having to be whittled down into what amount to “dey took ur jobs!”-level grunts. Putting the call out for immediate events and causes and then spreading the word far and wide is precisely what twitter seems to excel at, and in that sense the tea parties seem too telegraphed and long-in-the-planning to really fulfill that potential.
Which is not to say that anyone on the left should scoff at twitter. If I had to bet, I would say that, barring burnout or yet another next big thing coming along and supplanting it, it’s going to become impossible to ignore within a couple of months to a year when things like mobile payments go fully live and legal, and donating small amounts to to candidates and causes becomes faster, simpler, and even more potentially viral than it is with more conventional online calls for moola.
So your argument that Twitter is a grassroots con tool is – lemme get this straight – a radio host, a radio show producer, PR people, consultants, and a GOP state party employee? Look, maybe you guys will make magical politics ponies on Twitter, but my guess is the way there is not by a bunch of consultants twittering “#tcot” every 5 minutes. I know you guys really want to have one of these things be yours after the left has had so much success with blogs, but history shows that its probably not going to be consultants leading the charge. When the right won the radio it was guys like Limbaugh, radio people with a knack for telling a story (no matter how untrue) that broke through.
Keith Olbermann isn’t a great twitterer? I’ll concede that. But at the same time he’s doing a liberal cable news shows that conservatives think is so unworthy of comment they write about it almost every day.
For myself, ill use hashtags if theyre short like tcot and not monstrosities like topprog. Its 140 characters for chrissake.
Oliver, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking there is no one whom you would accept as being honest-to-goodness grassroots. I’m sure you know quite well that TCOT is the creation of N.Z. Bear, he of the old Truth Laid Bear and PorkBusters and you name it, who is based in California. A number of these campaigns and much of the tea party organization was done by Eric Odom, who works for the Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago. And if you think the red-haired lady from a state party in the Northwest is just another member of the good ol’ boys’ club, then it really wouldn’t matter if you were arguing in good faith or not. Your talking points are set. (Myself, I’ve got an open mind about what will happen over the course of the next few years.) And of course, I am sure the irony that you work for a left-wing think tank receiving funds from none other than George Soros is lost on no one.
I responded to you over on my blog but I wasn’t working at Media Matters when I started blogging (the liberal blogosphere started up in 2000-2001, MM didn’t exist until 2004). I had never even had anything to do with politics. And the same is true for most of the liberal blogosphere.
And then you keep giving me counterexamples that prove my point: Republican political consultants and old hands organizing on Twitter, yet its supposedly grassroots.
As to the first point, so at one time you were a political outsider but now you are an insider — just like most everyone in politics. As to the second point, you’re not being specific so I suspect you don’t have one.
I doubt I would seriously be considered an insider even now, but you seem to be unwilling to see what I am writing in plain text: We weren’t consultants, we weren’t party chairmen and women. We were regular people who decided to engage in this thing.
So far on Twitter and in the blogosphere that isn’t the case with the right.
Digital is no longer the “under dog” of the marketing world, campaigns and strategies are now built
around digital media with digital media becoming the centre piece of any activity.