President Barack Obama's hands typing in a Twitter session. White House Photo by Pete Souza.
I found this downright creepy. Why doesn't anyone else?!
TechPresident was bragging today about Obama's Twitter tracking. This is paid content but you can see the first paragraphs:
President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign built a set of sophisticated tools to analyze thousands of Twitter conversation, using that knowledge to figure out whether its ideas were being hijakced or surrogates were staying on message, a former Obama for American staffer said Friday.
Michaelangelo D'Agonstino, Obama's former senior analyst for digital analytics, described all this at -- what else? -- Rootscamp. What did the Obama For America team do with all this mined information?
"There were times that I think our social media team would reach out to people, and reach out to someone who was vaguely a surrogate that wasn't in line with messaging, and they would contact them," D'Agostino said
They used a program called Visible Intelligence to mine and "score" tweets.
Michaelangelo "thought constantly about hashtags that would get hijacked or co-opted" It would get turned around and used mockingly, he complained.
Of course, the left is expert at this far more than the right -- I recall with what exasperation I fled Flood Zone A and tried in vain to get real news about Hurrican Sandy with the #Sandy hashtag, only to find some asshole doing "Romney Storm Tips" as a form of parody. Thanks a lot guy. Or Steven Levy acting like a total asshole, retweeting the report that the stock exchange was under water and the storm had "occupied it". It was false. He took glee in it. He doesn't see his book's wealth as tied to the stock market at all, I guess. I confronted him over doing this -- he shrugged.
Yet the left earnestly believes that it is innocent and it is only the GOP that "hijacks" hashtags.
Of course, let's stop a minute here. Erm, hijacks? You mean...uses the same hashtag in a conversation you are using, but *criticizes* the things you gush about? You mean...people *daring* to criticize the President! Gasp!
See, this is really creepy stuff!
Then this puff piece, The President Doesn't Always Tweet, But When He Does...
Sigh.
In this piece, we see the eight "typical Americans" that the President engages with. We're supposed to be persuaded that they're from "all walks of life" and represent "different viewpoints". Of course they don't. The social media managers are expert at plucking out certain libertarians they can talk to on the left like Daryl Issa and pairing them with their lefty pals who have the same sort of techno-utopian vision. Matching the segments of the left and right that agree on getting rid of SOPA, possibly for different reasons, and then pretending you have had a "bi-partisan debate". This was like John Perry Barlow, Bob Weir, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Gary Johnson getting together on a Yahoo music show special to "Get Out the Vote" and pretending this was all "bi-partisan".
Says TechPresident:
The White House had bought its #My2k post from several days ago as a promoted Tweet, while House Majority Leader was promoting his tweet "Mr. President, time to get serious. Let's protect small businesses and families from a harmful increase in tax rates and cut spending. #my2k"
Conservative-leaning website Twitchy, meanwhile, documented efforts by Republican supporters to "hijack" the Q&A, and mocked initial confusion among reporters about what the right hashtag for the event was, as well as his use of the expression "tweet your member." But Twitchy did not seem to curate any of the actual questions and answers.
Documented efforts? Again, this "hijacking"? Why the hell can't "nonprogressives" use the same hashtag and speak of the topic critically?! Do the progs think the hashtag system is only for them to woot about their enthusiasms?!
Once again, we see the same methods and messages used by whitehouse.gov and all its related accounts on getting ObamaCare passed -- they seem to think that social media exists not to actually debate questions, and not to actually take accountability by answering the public's hard questions, but to use social media by one half of the country as a means to gang up on the other half of the country and "bring them around" -- and essentially browbeat them to death into accepting whatever the proposition of the day is. It is -- I can't say it enough -- profoundly creepy.
One of the things discussed is the private DM that some operators of these accounts engineered to influence people. I was one of those people who got a DM from Joe Biden -- Joe Biden! Real, verified Joe Biden! He followed me! In order to DM me! And wrote "Cathy, use your influence on Twitter to get out the vote!". Little 'ol me, still seen as someone to help Joe Biden GOTV!
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