The first head-to-head match-up between President Obama and Mitt Romney on Wednesday is also the first presidential debate where both campaigns will be engaged in a virtual showdown on Twitter.
The Twitter debate is crucial not only because it will signal the most memorable moments of the live event, but because the social network is expected to hold the key to which candidate the public believes came out the winner.
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“The spin room which traditionally followed the debate will now occur in real time on Twitter,” predicted Peter Greenberg, Twitter’s head of political advertising.
Andrew Rasiej, a digital strategist who has worked for Democratic campaigns, went further, calling traditional spin-doctoring “obsolete.”
“Social media and Twitter has upended the power structure of the campaigns in being able to spin the results of the debate,” said Rasiej, the co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a group that analyzes social media in politics. “Spin-doctoring is now simply fielding social media reaction to the debates, as opposed to setting the direction of the coverage with the mainstream media.”
Neither campaign wanted to tip its hand on strategy ahead of the debates, but Romney’s digital director, Zac Moffatt, said Twitter is “going to fundamentally change rapid response and fact-checking” in debates, just as it did during the national conventions. Moffatt said the campaign expects thousands of viewers to watch the debate with one eye on a second screen.
Read more at The Hill
