For politicians, social media holds promise and peril
If Sarah Palin is betting on the political promise of social media, Anthony Weiner is demonstrating its peril.
Both politicians — the former Republican governor of Alaska and the Democratic representative from New York — have seized on the power of Twitter and Facebook to reach supporters, evade the media and burnish their brands.
But while the dawn of instant, personal broadcasting through social media sites has opened up new possibilities for political outreach, it has also proven to be a dangerous tool that can make the impact of a scandal nearly instantaneous.
In Washington, Weiner has been known as one of the most prolific Twitter users in Congress, his fingers dashing off 140-character Tweets to his 50,000-plus followers just as fast as he could find a microphone to deliver a quick retort or a sharp-edged critique of Republicans.
“What’s #ConflictedClarenceThomas hiding?” he tweeted last week, noting the irony of the decision by the Supreme Court, sometimes called “scotus,” to release financial its disclosure forms late in the week. “Friday dump scotus style.”
But when a picture of a man photographed below the waist and wearing nothing but underwear was briefly posted from his account, addressed to a woman who regularly followed his Twitter commentary, it took only moments for the news to skip across the Internet and make its way into the political blogosphere and the mainstream media.
By comparison, the famous “macaca” video that helped to doom the reelection campaign of Senator George Allen of Virginia in 2006 took days to find its way from the camera of a Democratic operative to YouTube and broad notice.
Weiner has insisted that he did not use his Twitter account to send the picture, saying initially that he was the victim of a hacker. Later, he called the incident a “prank” and said he could not say “with certitude” that he was not the man in the photo.
But he is finding out that Twitter is not a forgiving medium. And it’s not a medium that is particularly helpful in putting out a political firestorm — in fact, the scandal continues to echo through the Twittersphere in an endless stream of messages by political reporters and observers, among others.
Twitter’s power is mostly one-way: a megaphone that turns a short utterance into a shout-out heard by, in Weiner’s case, tens of thousands of people in an instant.
Or, in Palin’s case, several million eager supporters.
The number of people who regularly follow the musings on Palin’s Facebook page passed the three million mark last week, even as the former governor began her “One Nation” bus tour that might — or might not — be the precursor to a presidential campaign.
For months, she has used that platform, and her Twitter account, to augment the political commentary she offers regularly as a paid analyst for Fox News.
But it wasn’t until the start of the bus tour that it became clear that she views the direct communication with her supporters as much more than just an extra tool. She sees it as the primary way to bypass what she calls the “lamestream” media.
From the moment the tour started, Palin refused to provide reporters even the most basic information: where she would be going, when she would get there, and what she would do once she and the bus arrived. Instead, as she told a favorite Fox anchor, information about the bus tour would be posted on her Web site and passed onto the millions of her supporters who follow her via the social media sites.
“We’ll do a stop, we’ll do a lot of OTR’s, off the records, we’ll meet a lot of great Americans and then I’ll write about that at the end of the day,” Palin told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren during the only extended interview of the first week of the bus tour.
The idea, according to Palin and her advisers, is to make the traditional politician-media relationship unnecessary. Why bother trying to woo the network correspondents or newspaper reporters into writing a positive story when you can write one yourself and distribute it to millions of people in an instant?
And like the old shampoo commercial — she tells one friend, and they tell one friend — Palin believes that by seeding her Twitter and Facebook followers with her carefully crafted message she will quickly reach the vast conservative audience that might make her the Republican nominee for president.
For the moment, Palin’s approach seems to be working for her. Her dismissive stance toward the media during the initial days of her bus tour seems not to have caused her any grief. And word of her activities is clearly getting out to her supporters — both through her own methods and through the mainstream media, which followed her every move in any case.
But Weiner’s recent experience could be a warning to politicians like Palin. It takes only 140 characters to create a scandal.
And it takes a lot more than that to clean up the mess.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service