A side by side comparison of two stories about how President Trump and Obama used social media to win elections says a lot about how the two president’s are perceived by the press.
Both are credited for the way they used of social media to win presidential elections. Obama is credited for skillfully using Facebook to “organize supporters” in a 2008 New York Times story detailing how he used social media to appear cool and rally young voters. Trump, on the other hand, is accused of using the platform to “pursue and capture” angry rural voters in the June edition of a New York magazine that portrays him as duping an unwilling country into electing him.
“‘Mr. Obama used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground,'” Claire Caine Miller wrote in The New York Times, quoting a political consultant. “‘The tools changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.'”
Regarding Trump’s use of Facebook, however, a very different take from the June edition of The New York Book Review.
“His team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook, as well as Google, the two biggest advertising platforms in the world, to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of Americans did not want,” Sue Halpern wrote. “They understood that some numbers matter more than others—in this case the number of angry, largely rural, disenfranchised potential Trump voters—and that Facebook, especially, offered effective methods for pursuing and capturing them. While this is clearly the future of campaigns, both Republican and Democratic, it also appears to be Trump’s approach to governing.”
Halpern adds, uncharitably: “What our Facebook president has discovered is that it actually pays only to please some of the people some of the time. The rest simply don’t count.”
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