LemonLyman.com

White House Social Media Disasters

The perils of social media are known to us all at this point, regardless of our station or role in the world, thanks to almost a decade and a half of Facebook, Twitter and their siblings. We have all found ourselves misunderstood and misunderstanding; most of us have gotten jacked up over some post or tweet or meme that pushed our buttons; and more than a few of us have said something we shouldn’t.

This kind of trouble is impossible to avoid today, but in 2002, when the third-season episode “The U.S. Poet Laureate” aired, Facebook and Twitter weren’t yet a thing (the Internet itself had only been open to commercial traffic for a decade). Their precursors – forum websites and bulletin boards – were the digital places where people gathered to e-chat, commiserate, vent, and snark off. It’s fair to say that not everyone watching the episode the first time it aired even knew what a forum site was. Josh himself seemed to be encountering the phenomenon for the first time, given his lack of clarity about its potential for calamity...

Josh passes Donna’s desk and finds her surrounded by Margaret, Ginger and other assistants. They have stumbled across a forum website, and can’t get enough of it. 

“It’s your fan site,” Donna explains.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a website devoted to all things Josh.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.” He leans in. 

“‘LemonLyman.com’?”

“You have fans, Josh. Not many of them, from the looks of it, but what they lack in numbers, they more than make up for in fervor.”

LemonLyman.com, it seems, hosts discussions of Josh’s media appearances, lists sightings of him around Washington, and features a special section where the enamored discuss their Josh Fantasy Date.

Josh scatters the assistants, but later asks Donna to sit and help him post on the site, which he clearly has been perusing.

“It’s a bad idea,” Donna cautions him.

“Why?”

“You don’t know these people.” 

“Neither do you.”

“Oh, yes, I do!”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nobody knows.”

Thinking that the LemonLyman.com dwellers are praiseworthy for taking an interest in government, Josh insists on getting involved, instructing Donna to type a post correcting what he believes is a misunderstanding of something he had said on Nightline. Despite Donna’s “Please don’t do this...people on these sites tend to be a little hysterical,” his response is posted. 

“What Josh doesn’t know is that some of these people haven’t taken their medication,” she says to the fourth wall. “Let’s see what happens now!”

Social media is here to stay

When Josh discovered social media, in a year before it was even called that, the phenomenon was peripheral at best - today, of course, it is not only ubiquitous but immersive; many if not most of us participate daily, and almost no one doesn’t participate at all – but the rise of social media as part of everyday life, let alone its deployment as a political tool, would be the better part of a decade in coming.

Political websites and campaign emails have been around for more than two decades. As soon as these tools became available, it was inevitable that politicians entrenched and aspiring would leverage them as communication channels, connections to the electorate. And so they have been, as long as they’ve been around. Per Diana Owen, in Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade, 

“The public gained greater political agency through technological affordances that allowed them to react to political events and issues, communicate directly to candidates and political leaders, contribute original news, images, videos, and political content, and engage in political activities, such as working on behalf of candidates, raising funds, and organizing protests. At the same time, journalists acquired pioneering mechanisms for reporting stories and reaching audiences. Politicians amassed new ways of conveying messages to the public, other elites, and the press, influencing constituents’ opinions, recruiting volunteers and donors, and mobilizing voters.”

But the true date of birth of social media as a real political tool occurred during the 2008 Obama campaign, well after Josh Lyman’s rude awakening. That campaign took the novel approach of using hi-tech methodology and tools to muster what was essentially a grass-roots campaign. Via Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, the Obama team was able to radically ratchet up both the volume and speed of messaging to the electorate. When all was said and done, they had out-messaged Republican opponent John McCain 3-to-1. 

Beyond messaging, there’s the analytics: by bringing voters into frequent online engagement, it became possible to know 1) how often each one was showing up, 2) what content was engaging them, and 3) where they’d landed from and where they’d gone next. This information was invaluable in fine-tuning messaging for micro-segmented voter audiences. Needless to say, this was Political Moneyball; once these techniques had entered the water supply, no campaign dared eschew them.

With one obvious exception.

The dictatorial ruler’s thumb

Josh is in his office, browsing LemonLyman.com (as we might guess, he just can’t help himself).

“Donna? Something weird is happening here.”

Donna sticks her head in his office.

“They don’t seem to be taking my response in the spirit in which it was intended.”

This is no surprise to Donna. Josh is learning for the first time how most Internet forums work.

“Seems to be a very unusual social structure,” he has noticed. “There’s a leader who seems to pride herself on her organizational skills and a certain amount of discipline.”

“Right,” Donna nods. “That’s what’s called a ‘control freak’.”

“She seems to do an awful lot of scolding,” Josh continues. “’You’ve posted in the wrong place’...  ‘Stay on topic, people’... ‘Don’t use capital letters’... but that’s not the problem.”

He reads directly from a post the moderator wrote: 

“‘Someone needs to deal with Josh’s planet-sized ego, by teaching him Government 101. Who made him overlord of the Democratic Party?’; and someone else writes, ‘Is Josh delusional, or is he actively trying to destroy the separation of powers?’”

“Well, are you?”

“No!”

“Then turn off the computer, shut these people up, and let’s get back to work.”

“I think I need to clarify my original post...”

...and the whole thing escalates. Josh’s response is snarky, condescending, and far less polite than his original comment. He goes so far as to defy the moderator.

“See, I think these are good people, by and large,” he says to Donna after she types his post, “but they’ve come under the thumb of a dictatorial ruler. So, as with a small Central American country, my role is to incite the people to topple her...”

Josh has tripped and fallen into the social media minefield that has maimed so many of us over the years.

When Donald Trump entered the arena in 2015, he already had many years of Twitter experience under his thumbs. He had been tweeting to a hungry audience day in and day out on all manner of topics, from Anthony Weiner’s sex life to President Obama’s birth certificate, with a consistency perhaps unmatched by any other activity in which he ever indulged.

He knew, first-hand, that people now spend more time on social media than they do watching television or reading the paper or listening to the radio; he knew, because (with the sole exception of Fox News), he is himself such a person. Social media is the place to be if you want to be seen – which he always does, more than anything; and when he got serious about running for president (to the degree that it has ever been truly serious to him), he knew that social media is where the voters are.

But there was no strategy, no plan, no systematic deployment of targeted messaging; no microsegmentation of his base, no analytics, no fine-tuning. There was only Trump and tweet and whatever happens next. 

Trump’s effectiveness in ascending to office and using social media to connect directly with his base, bypassing the usual channels, filters, and checks/balances, must be honestly rated as effective – every bit as effective as the Obama campaign use of social media (though to radically different ends). In the latter case, the point of social media was to improve communication between the campaign and the electorate – to message more effectively and to hear what the electorate was thinking and feeling with greater sensitivity. On the Trump channel, the only real communication is whatever Trump is feeling in the moment, and his reactions (when feuding) to whoever is pushing back at him. There are no two-way streets in Trumpville.

What does all of this say about the real political landscape? There are two takeaways that we can map to Josh Lyman.

1. Authority, in a social media context, is a murky proposition at best. Perhaps the single biggest social feature of social media is lack of consequence: one can participate at whatever level one wishes – lurking, commenting occasionally, participating regularly and actively, indulging in snark and antagonism, intentionally triggering fear and anger in others, going full-on troll – and suffer nothing more than a time-out if caught. Why is this so? Because no one has any real power; even site moderators and administrators, like LemonLyman.com’s “dictatorial ruler,” can do nothing more than scold or, at worst, block Josh; she can have no meaningful impact on him in the real world. What must be noted, however, is that the reverse is also true; Josh tries to parade his power and knowledge for the group, as though it represents actual power in the ethereal realm of a website - and he gets nowhere. No one in social media – not even a president!!! - has any real power in that domain.

2. Social media is too shallow for effective confrontation. Josh’s attempt to throw his weight around on social media presages Donald Trump’s annexation of it a decade later. Trump is Josh on steroids, with all sorts of horrific malignancy and unshackled dysphoria layered over the arrogance. Trump is the global pacesetter for online social dominance, trying to subdue his opponents and coddle his sycophants with his perpetual tweetstorm tirades and prevarications. But, again, even the planet’s most prominent social dominator has no real power in social media; one need only tune in for five minutes to observe Trump taking it in the shins from all sides, every time he tweets, by critics and mockers and antagonists of every variety – none with any apparent station . The Internet remains the Great Equalizer, in this regard, and Trump’s failure to understand this is myopia of the most telling sort: nothing he says or does has any impact beyond the moment. He does his followers no good and his critics no harm with his outbursts; the medium itself is impotent, and so, by extension, is he: it’s a schoolyard with no mudballs, a junior-high cafeteria with no mashed potatoes. 

Put simply, confrontation in social media is pointless as a general rule – and certainly pointless for any elected leader. It’s not built for that. Social dominance is the baring of teeth, the flashing of claw; social media possesses neither. 

A Chief Bromden in every White House

Even in 2002, social media’s leakage to other media had begun. A Josh feud on an Internet website would inevitably find its way to other channels.

“Oh, Josh?” C.J. calls out in a West Wing corridor. He stops.

“The Federal Page of the Washington Post just called Carol to confirm that you’re the Josh Lyman who stated on an Internet website that the White House could order a GAO review on anything it wants.”

“...without threatening Separation of Powers, is what I was saying.”

“You posted on a website?”

“I was communicating with the people.”

Ah, communicating with the people. This is the justification that wafted through social media during the Trump administration, as the 45th posted with nauseating frequency, bypassing all official channels, filters, fact-checks and protocols – all to communicate with the people.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, Trump’s use of social media isn’t a supplement to other channels of communication with the people, as it was with President Obama – it is his only channel of communication. Oh, he sent a lieutenant to the White House Press Room on occasion to prevaricate on his behalf, but that occurred less in his administration than any previous one by an order of magnitude. Second, communicate is a dicey word in this context; Trump does not inform the people, he deliberately misinforms them. At this writing, he has lied to the public more than 20,000 times – and most of those lies traveled via Twitter. Finally, the Twitter user base isn’t the people; it’s his fan club, not even close to a representation of the electorate. Previous presidents have spoken to that electorate by television (on all three-plus networks, not just one), knowing they were getting the voters who loved them, hated them, and the ones who couldn’t make up their minds; Trump tweets precisely because those who bother to follow him on Twitter are the only ones listening, with rare exception.

But back to Josh.

He tries to explain to C.J. that the website is Crazytown, which of course doesn’t surprise C.J. at all. 

“Let me explain something to you,” she tells him. “This is sort of my field. The people on these sites? They’re the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The muumuu-wearing Parliament smoker? That’s Nurse Ratched. When Nurse Ratched is unhappy, the patients are unhappy. You? You’re McMurphy. You swoop in there with your card games and your fishing trips-”

“I didn’t swoop in! I came in exactly the same way everybody else did.”

“Well, now I’m telling you to open the wardroom window and climb out before they give you a pre-frontal lobotomy, and I have to smother you with a pillow!”

“You’re Chief Brom-”

“I’m Chief Bromden, yes, at this particular moment! I’m assigning an intern from the press office to that website. They’re going to check it every night before they go home. If they discover you’ve been there, I’m going to shove a motherboard so far up your ass-”

“...technically, I outrank you-”

“-so far up your ass!”

Social media is an excellent, even ideal channel for engaging the electorate, and an essential one: it is an invaluable source of information that a wise leader requires in these uncertain, immediate days. Used intelligently, it can be that and more – a path to insight, a source of important information about the candidate for the voter, an avenue to inspiration and (in our dreams) a place of calm. If it’s used intelligently. 

If it isn’t - well, there’s one lesson Trump’s Twitter account makes all too clear, it’s that every White House needs a C.J. There should be someone in every administration empowered to monitor the president’s social media activity, at all times.

It should even be a Cabinet position...