Micro Spin and the Obama Administration
G. R. Boynton

Anyone with more than a passing interest in American politics knows about 'spin.' Randal Rothenberg argued that spin could be traced at least back to the 1950s but did not get used in politics until 1972 (Rothenberg, 1996). William Safire associated its beginnings in politics with Richard Nixon's second run for the presidency. And NPR wrote about spin in the 1984 election and suggested that "spin doctor" may have been used first by Jack Rosenthal in a New York Times editorial (NPR, 2002). If you search for 'spin politics' Google produces 25,600,000 results -- only a few of which I have consulted. As a way of characterizating, if you use the language of narrative then spin is getting your version of the story out.

If you look for "micro spin" Google produces only 52,800 documents and the first several hundred are about either a reel, as in rod and reel, or a few references to centrifugal filters. Even when you add politics to the search political references did not appear. "Micro spin" is not yet part of the vocabulary of American politics.

The medium for spin has been the mass media. Politicians, spin doctors, etc. attempt to get reporters to understand the story from a point of view and to communicate that version to their mass media audience. What should we say when the medium of communication is microblogging? 'Micro spin' is just waiting for spin doctors to tackle Twitter. One should anticipate the emergence of micro spinning with the election of 2010.

In the new world of Twitter 'micro spin' would be understood as tweets that people want to pass on. Very early people using Twitter found that they wanted to pass on messages they came across and they invented retweeting. The standard format was RT @[some name] [quoted message]. An example of retweeting a message from the White House is "RT @whitehouse: Obama giving opening remarks at seniors #hcr tele-town hall now: http://wh.gov/live." In late 2009 Twitter, the company, found that retweeting was so popular they decided to build it into their standard message format (twitter blog, August 13, 2009). It is now possible to retweet with the click of the mouse instead of requiring copying and pasting.

Retweeting is considerably more popular in political messaging than it is in the Twitter stream as a whole. A team of Microsoft researchers drew a sample of the Twitter stream in the spring of 2009, and they found retweeting in 3% of the messages (Boyd, 2010). I reported on 125 streams of political tweeting (Boynton, 2010). The extent of retweeting varied considerably from one stream to another and the distribution was highly skewed. I presented the results by quintile.

The percentages of messages containing a retweet in the streams in the bottom quintile ranged from 4% to 27%. Political messages start above the general average, and they range up to 72% of messages in a stream that include retweeting. People who tweet politics like to retweet.

Politics is persuasion; it is getting your message out. It is writing tweets that people want to pass on. The most straightforward way for this to work with Twitter is: you have followers who automatically receive every tweet you write; those followers then may retweet the message to their followers, and the reach of your message is magnified manyfold if your followers read tweets they want to retweet.

President Obama and the White House both have a good start on this process. President Obama had 4,386,901 followers at one point on June 27, 2010. The White House followers numbered 1,777,971 at approximately the same time. The Barack Obama twitter account had produced 778 tweets at that point and the White House twitter account 1336 tweets. If each of their tweets had been retweeted by each of their followers the numbers would be astronomical: 3.4 billion for Obama and 2.4 billion for the White House. We can be confident that neither happened. But at this time it is not possible to reconstruct the history of political tweeting because Twitter does not give access to the history of their stream of messages. Either the messages have been captured or they are effectively gone. I will look at the success of the Obama administration in two cases where I collected the streams of tweets.

Bringing about health care reform was one of the major commitments of the administation and was one of the major accomplishments of its first 14 months. The principal stream of messages about health care reform was identified by the hashtag #hcr. There were other streams, but this became the place 'to go' if you wanted to communicate about health care reform. And #hcr was used by both proponents and opponents of the reform. I collected Twitter messages including #hcr beginning November 14, 2009 and continue to collect them. At this point, June 27, 2010, there are 653,000+ messages that contain #hcr. The distribution in time is shown in the figure.

Figure 1 Twitter Messages Health Care Reform [#hcr] Nov. 14, 2009 to June 27, 2010

March 2010 dwarfs every other period. There were 99,000 messages on a single day, and that makes every other variation seem tiny.

Two hundred and eighty four thousand of the tweets contain a retweet. That is 43.4% of the messages, which puts it in the second from the top quintile. Almost half of the messages contained a retweet, and that is a lot of retweeting. There are only 2,045 retweets for @barackobama and only 3,137 for @whitehouse. As fractions of 3.4 million and 1.8 million followers there are too many zeroes to be worth counting. The Obama administration does not seem to have developed the knack of writing tweets that anyone wants to retweet.

Recently the Obama administration had what was treated as a major public relations problem. General McCryskal was quoted in a news story speaking very unfavorably about his superiors. A general in charge of the war in Afghanistan is not supposed to express himself quite so openly about what he thinks of the people above him. Between June 22, 2010 and June 27 there were 30,219 tweets found by searching for the two names Obama McChryskal. By the standard of the 125 streams I reported on that is not a particularly large stream. That number is right on the edge between the next to lowest and the middle quintile. It is, however, a situtation in which one might think it would be viewed as important to get the president's view out. These are the twitter messages: one from @BarackObama and four from the @WhiteHouse.

BarackObama

Speaking to the press after meeting with General McChrystal. Watch live at 1:30 pm ET. http://wh.gov/live Wednesday, June 23, 2010 12:27:33 PM via web

White House

Full transcript & video: President Obama on Afghanistan, General McChrystal & General Petraeus http://bit.ly/bdQyA7 2:20 PM Jun 23rd via web

The President: "General Petraeus… setting an extraordinary example of service & patriotism by assuming this difficult post." 12:51 PM Jun 23rd via web

The President: "Today, I accepted General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation" 12:44 PM Jun 23rd via web

Starting now: The President speaks on Afghanistan and leadership of the mission http://wh.gov/live 12:43 PM Jun 23rd via web

Of the 30,129 tweets 9639, or 32%, contained a retweet. There were no retweets of the message from @BarackObama, and there were only 66 retweets from @WhiteHouse. Of the 66 all but two were retweets of the message "Full transcript & video . . ." Consider the numbers again. There are 1.78 million followers of @WhiteHouse. Only 66 retweeted one of the tweets from @WhiteHouse. 1.78 million did see the messages, but there was effectively no multiplier effect since so few read anything they wanted to pass on to others. That means many thousands of other twitter communicators were doing the micro spin.

The Obama 'phenomenon' is intriguing. They ran a highly successful campaign of charisma using the tools of the new media quite effectively. Since taking office they have not been nearly as successful. They seem unable to attract an audience for the weekly address of the president (Boynton, February, 2010). And they are principally the object of criticism and scorn on twitter. Their message is not getting out via twitter even though they have very large numbers of followers.

The Obama 'phenomenon' is not the principal point here, however. The point is to look at another potential for communication that microblogging is opening in the public domain. The Obama administration is a way of introducing what is coming. Micro spin is going on now, but it is not who we think of as politicians who are doing it -- at least not yet. At the moment all of those retweets, 284,000+ and 9639, are micro spin of the politically committed who use Twitter. Micro spin is no longer the monopoly of spin doctors and the news media who do the 'transmission.' Suddenly the public domain has become much larger and the players have multiplied many times. And the public domain becomes something new.

References

Danah Boyd, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan, "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter," hicss, pp.1-10, 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2010

G. R. Boynton, February, 2010, The Dynamics of Attention, ITP/ICOMM News, vol. 5, issue 2

G. R. Boynton, March, 2010, Politics Moves to Twitter: How Big is Big and Other Such Distributions, presented at the 2010 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

NPR, November 4, 2002, Spin

Randall Rothenberg, December 1, 1996, Esquire

twitter blog, August 13, 2009, Project Retweet: Phase One.