During the ABC-Facebook Democratic and Republican debates in Manchester, N.H., Saturday night, the social-networking site launched a politics "Soundboard" (screenshot shown here) that racked up more than 35,000 comments during the East Coast broadcast alone.
MANCHESTER, N.H.--It sounded like a good idea at first: let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board.
But it turned out to be one of those ideas that may be better in theory than in practice. During the East coast broadcast of the debates, Facebook users posted around 35,000 "Soundboard" messages, meaning that at perhaps 50 characters each, that's some 1.75 million characters to read during an approximately three-hour period. All of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is only 700,000 characters.
To read all those messages, at 20 per page, you'd have to refresh your browser's screen 1,750 times. That's not even counting comments posted by west coast Facebook users (Facebook, which co-sponsored the debate here with ABC News, said the west coast figures were not yet available).
No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well.
Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing.
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NASHUA, N.H.--First it was Google co-sponsoring two YouTube presidential debates with CNN. And now it's Facebook co-sponsoring debates Saturday here in New Hampshire.
But while the YouTube/CNN debates were relatively inclusive, this week's Facebook/WMUR/ABC debates will be relatively exclusive. The reason for that is that a slew of candidates likely will be barred from participating, including Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Chris Dodd, former Sen. Mike Gravel, Rep. Duncan Hunter, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
As the primary season continues, some winnowing of the field is inevitable, of course. Rep. Tom Tancredo, former Gov. Tom Vilsack, former Gov. Tommy Thompson, and, alas, Stephen Colbert have already dropped out voluntarily.
But the Facebook/WMUR/ABC debates are drawing fire because those candidates will likely be excluded even before the nation's first primary takes place here on January 8. (The Iowa caucuses are this evening, starting at 6:30 p.m. local time for the Democrats and half an hour later for the Republicans.)
"It is a perversion of the New Hampshire primary process to have serious, if long-shot, contenders excluded from this possibly significant TV exposure. All New Hampshire citizens should be insulted and affronted by it," wrote Joseph McQuaid, publisher of New Hampshire's Union Leader, in a front-page editorial on Thursday. The paper has endorsed Sen. John McCain.
The reason that I hedged a few paragraphs above by saying some candidates "likely" will be excluded is that the final lineup hasn't been set yet. Candidates hoping to be included will need to accomplish any one of three tasks: (a) place in the top four positions in the Iowa caucuses, (b) obtain 5 percent or higher in recent national polls, or (c) obtain 5 percent or higher in recent state polls.
The final lineup will be determined Friday morning. Saturday's debates will take place at Saint Anselm College with the Republicans debating first, followed by the Democrats. On a related note, Rep. Ron Paul--the only anti-war Republican--has been excluded from a follow-up Fox News debate on Sunday.
It's too early to know how these exclusions will play out, but it's fair to say that New Hampshire residents guard their traditional political role zealously and don't like companies (or anyone else) to limit their choices. While media organizations that have sponsored debates for decades are used to weathering this type of storm, Silicon Valley-based companies like Facebook may be about to realize that injecting themselves into politics can have costs as well as benefits.
Iowa what?
Amid the frenzied press coverage over Thursday's too-close-to-call caucuses in the Hawkeye State, 153,226 MySpace.com users have already cast their (unofficial) votes.
In a set of "virtual primaries" held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Republican Rep. Ron Paul and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama were declared the winners of the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's polls.
The poll was conducted entirely through MySpace's Impact political site. And for those who have been following Election 2008 on the Web, neither "victory" is particularly surprising.
On the Democratic side, MySpace users selected Obama nearly 2 to 1, with the Illinois senator taking 46 percent of the vote, followed by Hillary Clinton with 31 percent and then John Edwards with 8 percent. Obama's triumph among MySpace's young and tech-savvy user base is no surprise--he has proven a favorite among many young voters hoping for change, as well as a sizable portion of left-leaning geeks.
But in Thursday's Iowa caucuses, Obama doesn't enjoy such a clear advantage--the outcome remains too close to tell.
Ron Paul, however, is a different story. The Texas congressman is considered quite the long shot, failing to poll above more than a few percentage points nationwide. But his libertarian views and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq have found a welcome home on the Web, and MySpace is no exception. In the social network's virtual primaries, Paul won by an impressive margin with 37 percent of the vote, followed by more legitimate offline contenders Rudy Giuliani (18 percent) and Mike Huckabee (16 percent).
"Exit poll" questions in the MySpace primary revealed that 83 percent of participants plan to vote in their states' actual primaries, and 91 percent plan to vote in the general U.S. election. They also named the economy and jobs, the war in Iraq, and health care to be the three most important issues facing the country.
Representatives from the social network, which has launched an extensive youth-voting initiative and political awareness campaigns for the 2008 election, have stressed that the results of the primary represent the "MySpace generation," and consequently probably don't reflect the nation as a whole.
Additionally, it should be noted that while the poll was offered only to members of MySpace's main U.S. site (not its international editions), it did not require respondents to be of legal voting age. And while MySpace has said the average age of respondents is 29 years old, such a figure should be taken with a grain of salt because no age verification system was in place.
But when it comes to the political leanings of avid social network users, MySpace's results may not be far off base. Rival social network Facebook has also launched a politics site in conjunction with ABC News, and ongoing presidential-candidate polls show Obama and Paul as the front-runners there too.
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