Election exemplified web’s slide into sleaze and belligerence

Eight years ago, the US experienced the first election in which the internet became a major campaign tool, buoyed by the work of some rapidly growing technology start-ups introducing the new phenomena of social media services and crowdfunding.

Oh, we'd been told for a while, in various countries, that such-and-such an election would be "the first internet election". And to be fair, the 2004 US presidential election did feature a candidate in the primary – Howard Dean – who very successfully galvanised a strong youth vote and donations, via a then-unprecedented use of the net.

But really, it was the US presidential election of 2008, and Barack Obama’s campaign team primed with some seasoned Dean web veterans, that moved way ahead with a smart take on how the broad social reach and easy donation platform of the web could become an important, even potentially decisive, factor in a campaign.

In that election, Obama campaigners and the now two-term president’s growing band of supporters used their mobiles and their computers to connect, network, publicise, advocate, advertise and, of course, donate.

The donation model, based on Dean’s, was particularly innovative. Rather than going for larger donations from a smaller cohort considered known party supporters and likely donors, the Obama campaign went for everybody and anybody. People weren’t pushed to give $100, but small numbers – $2 or $5 perhaps. Then, they were nudged to give another $5. Then another. Maybe, make it a weekly or monthly transfer.

As we subsequently saw, those microdonations might have been almost laughably small in isolation. But with millions donating on easy-to-access web platforms, a serious campaign war chest began to materialise, while the campaign and the Democratic party galvanised new voters, party activists and enthusiasts. Republicans gradually followed suit.

According to a New York Times article written in the wake of the 2008 election, a senior adviser to George Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004, Mark McKinnon, said: "I think we'll be analysing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race. The year campaigns leveraged the internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom-up instead of top-down."

Debate forum

Immediately post-2008 in the US, and in elections in countries like the UK and Ireland in the years closely following, the internet still was primarily seen as a powerful tool for raising and talking about issues voters cared about, for getting out the vote and for expanding political party support and raising funds.

Oh yes, there were definitely more than a few politicians not happy at all about these new democratic platforms provided by some up-and-coming technology companies, inspired geeks and digital strategists. To their chagrin, many found they could now easily be pursued, sometimes badgered, by citizen voters through the web, and especially, that newfangled social media stuff.

But what a difference eight years makes. Looking back, in the shell-shocked aftermath of one of the most unpleasant, divisive elections in US history, McKinnon’s comments still ring true, but in some depressingly new ways.

Yes, “the paradigm got turned upside-down and truly became bottom-up” if you consider the bottom as a fetid, dismal cesspool of social media-fuelled interactions.

The complaints used to be about the occasional bad-mannered or heckling comment, or the odd partisan ad hominem barrage on Twitter or Facebook. Now, verbal threats and belligerent personal attacks, four-letter words, snide references about candidates spouses, the whole sleazy, oozing, underside of the web, came from various candidates and party officials themselves.

Preening candidates

Thanks to retweets, rapid news cycles and Twitter, Facebook and YouTube videos and sound clips, we had to watch and hear candidates – grown adults – boasting not about their career achievements or their insights and proposals on critical election topics, but preening about their supposed sexual prowess and endowments.

Try as you might, you couldn’t unhear or unsee these things. At times, the sheer ridiculousness of the discussions made it hard to believe that people in the public eye, either already in office or proposing to lead the country, could feel these were appropriate matters for casual exchange anywhere, including the famed locker room.

And to top it off, thanks to bots and fake or anonymous accounts, and the use of hashtags and searches, an army of social media trolls followed in these candidates’ wakes, stirring up ever more bile.

As depressing as it is to contemplate, maybe the internet’s varied and powerful platforms and avenues of discourse, typically forged in Silicon Valley optimism and once seemingly full of promise, simply mark where we are now, as a society: projecting the belligerence, not the wisdom, of the crowd.