Social media is in the news again as the national conventions of both major political parties approach, and the Romney and Obama campaigns gear up for the final months leading up to Election Day.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, during a four-day period this June, President Obama’s social media machine was churning out four times the content on twice as many platforms as was Governor Romney’s, and Obama’s Facebook boasted 27 million likes, while Romney’s has only 4 million. However, content from Romney’s page garnered more shares and comments than did Obama’s, and more of his fans discussed him than did Obama’s.
But I’m not sure if this—almost any of it—means anything. Does it matter that Obama’s team generates four times the content of Romney’s? That might; according to a 2011 Digitas survey, 94% of social media users had watched a political video or other political message online, and 39% of those shared them with an average of 130 other users, so having more content out there would seem to grant Obama an advantage in terms of exposing his message to more people.
As for the rest of it, here’s the problem, or set of problems, with how those numbers work:
1. To comment on a Facebook page, or even see the posts made by, say, Romney’s or Obama’s pages, you have to “like” it, whether or not you actually like it. So if you were curious about the opposing side’s messaging, or just wanted to see posts from both candidates, you would have to click like on both pages, even if, in actuality, you firmly support one over the other.
2. People “like” pages on other people’s Facebooks as a joke, pretty much whenever they get the chance.
3. “Shares” and comments aren’t necessarily positives. I’ve shared photos I disagree with to point out why I disagree with them; I’ve posted dissenting comments on plenty of content. People follow and respond to those they disagree with on Twitter; it’s called, in some cases, “hatefollowing.” A huge part of Internet dialogue is debate, often highly vitriolic.
It’s a mistake to assume all publicity is good publicity, especially because Internet culture’s favorite thing to do, other than look at pictures of kittens, is to mock stuff. The same day that Paul Ryan was announced as Romney’s VP pick, several sites posted memes about him; a Tumblr devoted to “Other Things Todd Akin Learned from Talking to Doctors” was established almost before the news of Akin’s public failure of science and empathy hit the mainstream media.
Tumblr is an interesting case; both candidates for president have one, but they’re almost never discussed alongside the campaigns’ other social media efforts, on Facebook and Twitter. Obama’s campaign Tumblr contains primarily the same images as his Facebook page. I’m imagining, though, that as Tumblr gains prominence as The Next Big Thing on the Internet, a future of election .gif files, user-made graphics, and maybe even—God help us all—fanfiction. As it stands, the Obama Tumblr already has expanded .gifs and captions like, “Let’s all take a second to appreciate the fact that there are not one but two adorable children with mohawks in the latest set of behind-the-scenes White House photos”—a syntax that is the natural jargon of the New New Media. Romney has a campaign Tumblr, too—less customized than Obama’s, mostly consisting of videos from the campaign trail and a few Facebook graphics. There’s also much less user-generated content, unsurprising, perhaps, given that the mission statement of the Obama Tumblr is “We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it.” The Tumblr also notes, “There will be trolls among you: this we know,” further evidence of its makers’ comfort with Internet culture. Perhaps it’s this greater familiarity with Internet culture that garners the average post on Obama’s site about 600 “reblogs,” akin to Facebook “shares”; Romney’s posts get only around 30.
Tumblr is unique in that it is the final frontier of youth on the Internet, at least for the moment; it’s so new that I barely even understand how it works. According to Comscore, half of Tumblr users are younger than 25; 70% are under 35. (Users of the Internet as a whole are much more evenly distributed, with 23.2% of users under 25 and 41.9% under thirty-five). This means that while other social media have grown increasingly multigenerational, Tumblr remains almost entirely the bastion of millennials, especially young millennials. This is because Tumblr provides a particular type of content, precisely tailored to—because it was created by—its audience. Tumblr is the epicenter of Internet mockery, and the virtual place where the political leaders of the future are currently wasting hours of their time making sarcastic memes and tweaking .gifs. Thus, the future of political campaigns may even be Tumblrs written by the candidates themselves, the snarkier the better. I could be wrong; perhaps we’ll grow out of our Tumblr addictions and love of the sardonic. But this long and bloody campaign isn’t bringing the young on either side anywhere near sunny optimism, not so far as I can see, and it makes the mockery of the Internet the best escape from the political and economic anxieties we’re not sure we’re mature enough to face.
