It happens more often than you care to count.
A political campaign announces a new hire, usually a rising star. The media reports on it, first positively, if superficially — then, after a few days’ digging, unearths racist/sexist/homophobic/fat-shaming tweets from five years ago.
Or a politician tweets (or retweets) something inappropriate — pictures of certain body parts, segregationist propaganda — but before he or she thinks better of it and goes to delete it, the tweet has been shared thousands of times and crisis mode ensues.
Social media, especially Twitter, has become an unavoidable element in politics. Candidates and elected officials rely on it for pushing out their messages with a unique degree of immediacy and viral potentiality. It’s an easy way to enhance branding, disseminate information on events as they occur and have dialogues with voters.
So it’s not going anywhere.
“You have to embrace it,” said Steve Schale, a Tallahassee-based Democratic political consultant. “In a lot of cases, in the sort of overly packaged world we live in, there’s often such an authentic side to it that I think is really important in the dialogue.”
But it doesn’t switch off.
That means there’s really no wall between the carefully scripted candidate rallying at 4 p.m. and the post-happy hour candidate (or green campaign aide, or staffer) getting a little loose in the tongue — or loose in the thumb, as it were — after a couple of half-price glasses of pinot grigio.
“You have to be exceptionally cautious,” Schale said. “Who you are and the way you comport yourself on Twitter also becomes who you are. If you’re a jackass on Twitter, people are going to think you’re a jackass.”
That potentially damaging aspect of social media caught the eye of Michele Joel, a tech startup founder and University of Tampa alum who recently developed a program that uses algorithms to help people self-censor.
Joel, now an Arizona resident, was in town recently touting My Social Standard, the product she developed to help people mind their Twitter personas.
“I think people say things on social media before they think about it a lot,” she said. “And it’s to their detriment that this is happening. A lot of times, people have a lot to say, and they don’t know the proper way to say it and how it’s going to affect their reputation. Sometimes it just takes a moment to think about if it’s appropriate.”
My Social Standard, and its anti-bullying counterpart targeting parents of tweens and teenagers, My Social Sitter, are services that scan subscribers’ outgoing Twitter posts using an algorithm to detect sensitive or controversial words and phrases. If it finds something questionable, the message bounces back to the poster (or in the youth version, the poster’s parent) and asks if the message is really something that should get sent out. Adult users can either override the program or delete the tweet, and parents can prevent their kids’ potentially damaging negative tweets from going out before it’s too late.
Joel said part of her inspiration came from being bullied as a kid, and her heightened empathy for kids who get bullied these days, when it doesn’t end once they get home from school but can continue on social media.
“When I saw this in the news, and this was happening so frequently, I was disgusted with a medium that I thought was so positive,” she said. “There’s no escape.” So she came up with My Social Sitter.
As for the adult version, she said recent social media misadventures gave her the idea — the Anthony Weiner scandal, and the woman who lost her job after tweeting about not wanting to “catch AIDS” in Africa just before boarding a plane to the continent on a business trip.
The lack of awareness of the potential consequences of social media missteps was alarming to Joel.
“I wanted social media to be a very positive communication tool, and it really struck a chord with me personally that it wasn’t, that people were damaging their reputations from it,” she said. “So I thought, there needs to be some way that people could take a pause.”
The product launched Sept. 1 and currently is available for Twitter only. Other social media — Facebook, Reddit, even text messaging — will be added in the near future. Joel also hopes to create an algorithm that scans photos for questionable content — which would have been helpful in Weiner’s case.
Perhaps the inverse of Joel’s product, for politics, anyway, is the currently out-of-commission Politwoops, which published deleted tweets of lawmakers and candidates alike.
It started in 2012, when Twitter allowed the DC-based Sunlight Foundation to “curate” deleted tweets of politicians.
The site politwoops.sunlightfoundation.com is still live, but Twitter halted its operation in June of this year.
Most of the deleted tweets — posted by everyone from obscure congressional candidates to the president — are relatively innocuous; perhaps a staffer accidentally posted a photo upside-down or a candidate commented on a campaign announcement before it was scheduled to go public.
But then there are bigger gaffes, like U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham misspelling the president’s name, or members of Congress tweeting their support of the release of Sgt. Bowe Berghdal from Taliban captivity, only to scrub their feeds of such messages after the party line shifted on the deal that saved him.
With tweeting in real time being key for campaigns and pols, there’s always a risk of the wrong message getting out.
“I think we’re very much in an age of ‘speed kills,’” Schale said. “And there’s an element of that which is dangerous. You want to be in a place where you can impact the narrative quickly.”
So it becomes kind of a catch-22. It you’re not getting the perfect message out with perfect timing, your campaign can get torpedoed in a matter of minutes.
“In this Twitter age, if you’re radio silent to a crisis for 15 minutes, all of the sudden it’s a bigger crisis,” Schale said. “It creates a scenario where you have to engage in the space. It’s tricky, though, because a lot of times you don’t know all the facts.”
The Sunlight Foundation’s efforts, which the nonprofit hopes to relaunch in the near future, are more about holding politicians accountable, and exposing who they really are — not the scripted, platitude-rehearsing people we see on TV.
“What our elected officials say is a matter of public record, and Twitter is an increasingly important part of how our elected officials communicate with the public,” Sunlight Foundation president Christopher Gates wrote June 4 in a “eulogy” for the site. “This kind of dialogue between we the people and those who represent us is an important part of any democratic system. And even in the case of deleted tweets, it’s also a public part — these tweets are live and viewable by anyone on Twitter.com and other platforms for at least some amount of time.”
While such services can be the bane of some politicians’ existence, others have embraced it.
When the foundation’s Nicko Margolies asked U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot about a tweet he deleted, he replied, “I thought it was a more succinct way of expressing what I wanted to convey. Thanks for asking and for promoting transparency!”
Former Montana Rpublican Rep. Danny Rehberg also had good things to say.
“The great thing about social media — Facebook, Twitter — is that it not only increases government transparency but also access and accountability,” he said. “It’s also a medium that encourages innovation and creativity. I mean, where else can you get a message out by erasing it? How cool is that?”
OOPS: A selection of politicians’ deleted tweets, collected by the DC-based Sunlight Foundation.