The Long Tail of Politics: social media and the Tea Party movement

This is good stuff and for me these are interesting thoughts and observations, and while it is clear that the Tea Party movement have made clever use of social media and have out flanked the Democrats at the Mid Terms – I think it might also be useful to point out (still in keeping with the apolitical standpoint) that there appears to more to the Tea Party movement than it first appears…

There are claims that the movement is actually being part funded by the corporate dollar, and is not a grass roots movement.

For emaple the New York Times economist Paul Krugman wrote that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects…”

The speaker of the House of representatives – Nancy Pelosi stated “It’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

This has also been picked up in an article in the New Yorker in August where Jane Mayer examined allegations that the billionaire Koch brothers, David H. Koch, Charles G. Koch and Koch Industries are providing financial support to the tea party movement through ‘Americans for Prosperity’.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has received seven grants totaling $1,181,000 between 2004 to 2006, including $1,000,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, one of the Koch Family Foundations… this has all come out due to US press freedom laws, so this is surely just the tip of the iceberg for the amount of cash that has really been sunk in.

This link to the Huffingtom Post: http://current.com/1bd034c
is interesting, and has a clip made by a film-maker intent on exposing the (Astro) Turf wars.

The Koch’s run what is considered the largest private energy company in America. They have invested millions in organisations that have fought health care reform and proposals to reduce industrial pollution and cap greenhouse gases over the years so the ideological link to the Tea Party would appear to be obvious…

A little left field for a media blog I’m aware, but I believe this is relevant – as however good the Tea Party campaign has been in the run up to the mid terms, and however savy it was with the use of social media in particular, it seems they might just have had a little extra help along the way!

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Helen & Maggie, Michael Taggart. Michael Taggart said: NEW BLOG: The Long Tail of Politics: social media and the Tea Party movement: http://t.co/2YhHi9Z #midterms #sm [...]

Fascinating addition to my points Matt – thanks. Yes, I’d heard a bit about this ‘astro-turf’ idea, which is, frankly disgusting if it’s true.

The Guardian recently ran a piece on how BP and other multi-nationals are bank-rolling Tea Party candidates who deny man-made climate change – so I think there are certainly questions that need to be answered.

It’s difficult to know how to deal with it other than to ostracise those caught doing it.

Thanks for contributing.

This is a really interesting post Michael.

I’d be intrigued to hear your thoughts on whether the Tea Party movement would have gained any traction at all had it pursued, for instance, a traditional media relations strategy?

My impression, from this side of the pond at least, is it’s such a rag-tag conglomeration of disparate interests that – only by teasing those strands together via the social web – was the movement ever in a position to give the impression of coherence.

That suggests a high degree of opportunism among a small number of influential activists who sought to galvanise the sense of a national movement by branding it as the Tea Party. As a brand case study, it’s a fascinating reversal of the traditional brand model and definitely a phenomenon of the social web era as you suggest.

Thanks for a really thought-provoking post.

Mike – as ever another very interesting and thought-provoking post. I also need to make it clear that my response is not interested in the political dimension, but like you, someone who is a “communications purist” who shares a keen interest in all things related to social behaviour and the role of communications.

Your post is echoed by Sonia Verma of The Globe and Mail who argues that Republicans – and most notably the Tea Party – learnt from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in terms of harnessing the power of social media.

Furthermore, Courtney Spradlin of TheCabin.net reported back in January this year that Tea Party members were actively encouraged to use social media. So there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Obama paved the way for a new form of political campaigning. But my interest lies in the power of social media and its ability to spread messages far and wide with the single purpose of uniting people around a single narrative.

One of the key aspects of social media is its ability to create communities of interest – this binds disparate communities. As Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine recently pointed out – the web is dead.

He is effectively saying that the notion of open and closed online system is becoming more powerful in the new world of social web (actually he argues that the closed system is probably edging ahead).

Social media applications like Twitter and Facebook are ‘closed systems’ in that they bind together communities of shared interests and connect them over geographic territories both local and global. It’s a bit like living in an online gated community where you can spread and reinforce your shared world views. The difference is that social media can encourage people to act because of the feeling of belonging and sense of identity within this space.

During the mid-term elections I think the Tea Party were able to harness a very simple narrative – anti-big state – a powerful rallying cry for most Americans. While this narrative may have been handed to the American Right by a challenging set of circumstances inherited by the Obama administration, social media was the “connector” that enabled the electorate – no matter how disparate – to coalesce around this anti big state narrative. Thus creating a community with a shared agenda and purpose – anti big state; and their logic being “Obama likes big state therefore we must also be anti Obama”. Simple yet effective (a form of reductive reasoning).

This narrative gained traction for a number of reasons – too long to go in to now – but social media helped unite the American right and spread the message in a more coherent manner. I call this “the snowball effect” ie find a nice piece of snow and a decent slope then let it roll…eventually it will gather pace and grow. Now the snowball effect works powerfully within closed systems because you are encouraging people to connect with like-minded people and bring them together.

To illustrate the my snowball effect theory – take for example the alternative narrative that Obama failed to get across, which is that the US economy is showing small signs of recovery. He failed because the Republicans and Tea Party had already found the slope and a decent pile of snow, and started to let it roll. Obama was too late in getting his up and running. Social media is more like the slope in that it helps the snowball (narrative) to grow.

[NB: I added links to some of my references but these may not show up - so email me if you want the articles]

Hi Ian and thanks for dropping in.

I think in response to your question, the Tea Party did employ a very successful traditional media relations campaign – but it had different objectives than those served by the digital activism. The Tea Party used digital to build a movement and traditional media to tell the story of that movement so that non-participants would answer its call-to-action.

In other words, it wouldn’t have been possible for the Tea Party to adopt only a traditional media relations strategy because there wouldn’t have been a Tea Party to publicise.

That said press, TV and radio (mostly notably on the Fox Network, Wall Street Journal and in the New York Times) came at the precise point when the movement needed a bit of publicity to get non-participants to support its aims (by voting for the candidates it was endorsing).

The story, of course, was of the sudden national anti-tax, anti government groundswell, which was beginning to look like an uprising. And that groundswell would not have been possible without the ability to connect in the way my blog describes.

What I didn’t say in my blog was that the Tea Party movement seems to be built on Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘weak ties’ (see my previous blog). So I would expect it eventually to be dismantled by in-fighting, back-biting and personality clashes.

Importantlty, social media seems able to build movements but not to sustain them.

Thanks again for commenting.

[...] the old fashioned way…with a microphone. However, hold the presses, it was the Tea Party who invented itself using social channels; even more to the point, the Tea Party used social media to engage a [...]

[...] While it has formed itself out of many different and distinct clusters from across the country, the movement is generally understood as favouring relatively leaderless, non-hierarchical and decentralized structures and processes of organization and communication. For example, as the National Journal has reported, a popular management book that is widely read by organizers within the Tea Party movement is The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom (2006) which describes and contrasts the advantages and drawbacks of two ideal type models of organizations – the centralized, tightly controlled and hierarchical spider model and the dispersed, loosely networked and egalitarian starfish model. Many Tea Party members would consider their movement to be more like a starfish while more traditional political party structures are thought to to be more spider-like.  The starfish model however would not have been so successful were it not for the crucial role played by new media platforms, and especially Web 2.0 social media – Tea Party organizations have prominently encouraged social media training for its supporters. [...]

[...] is an interesting blog on the effects of the long tail phenomenon as it relates to the recent Tea Party Movement and the [...]