The “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” Facebook group is now up to 323,899 members, up about 25% from the 259,647 members it had on 13 February when Seth Gitell followed up on David’s NECN discussion of the phenomenon with an article in the NY Sun. (David’s discussion, in turn, was sparked by a January piece in Raw Story).
The largest group I could find for Clinton on Facebook today was “Americans For Clinton in ’08!” which has 2,089 members. (Gitell wrote that he found one for Clinton in February with 3,251 members). The more important point, however, is that the “ANTI Hillary Clinton for president’08” group has 58,982 members.
It looks to me like the netroots, at least the young netroots, have decided who they like and who they hate among the Democrats. It will be interesting to see how that plays out on the ground come autumn.
I don’t think of Facebook as necessarily being representative of the netroots, because so many college students are on it, they are not all politically active. A lot of people who are not really politically involved would classify themselves as Hillary-haters. Though I do think that young people are generally more into Obama than Clinton, but they were more into Dean than Kerry and that didn’t get Dean anywhere.
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I think a poll of BMG members, or people who post on DailyKos or something would be more representative of the “Netroots” of politics, where Facebook is more just young people in general.
But, anyway, don’t you think that anyone who actively wants to join such a group is at least somewhat “rooty,” if such a term has meaning? plus, the scale of the imbalance is sending a message don’t you think?
From the point of view of a Facebook addict (me) I can tell you that the vast majority of people don’t find groups…usually group building is done through invites, and it’s essentially a click and you’re in. It’s not an active search. So while the dynamics of these groups is interesting, I wouldn’t really chalk it into many votes when that time comes.
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PS, bob, I added you. hahaha.
is there a Blue Mass Group Facebook Group?
depends what you mean by Rooty, but membership in a facebook group does not necessarily mean that you are actively doing anything for the candidate other than just being in the group. A better measure would be how many active volunteers each campaign has.
very popular
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When I hear people talk about Hillary it’s usually about her talking black or making up bull shit stories about babysitting illegal’s while their parents were out working in the fields. Plus – her husband has no class.
Those of us in the Web 2.0 community should be very leery of Obabma’s takeover of on of his supporters Myspace pages. Those of you supporting Barak should be as well, as a backlash from the young activists so necessary to run campaigns may be seen.
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I don’t think this is what Mr. Carnegie had in mind, when talking about making friends and influencing people.
Gee whizz nice man, thanks for coming by telling us about what a bad bad person Obama sure is! I mean, I know a lot of people don’t like him cuz his skin isn’t all white, but it took you mister to show us how bad he is! If it wasn’t for nice smart liberal friends like you, we’d sure be in trouble!
[/snark]
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There are plenty of reasons to dislike Obama, but ths he-said she-said business about Obama and MySpace (covered with the typical breathless interest in electronic insider baseball stories we’ve come to expect at mydd here (Part I) and here (Part II) — there are many more parts) is no big deal. The worst possible interpretation is that Obama’s campaign did not pay someone for investing a lot of time building something on what is essentially their property (their name). If somebody builds me a garage on my property without asking, I am under no obligation to pay him/her for the service. Granted, this has been handled in a rather clumsy way so far by Obama’s people, but I don’t think it means they have it in for young activists the way our guest from RedMassGroup would have us believe.
As the chapter president for my campus grassroots Obama for President group facebook groups can be divided into two categories the mega and the practical. The mega groups like One Million Strong are not officially sanctioned by the campaign and many people join who simply like Obama, in fact a lot of people joined merely to post things they disliked about Obama on the wall, or cause a cute classmate invited them, etc. The practical ones are the individual chapters that have their own groups all linked together online, ours is through the U Chicago network, and I use that to post events and messages and that is an actual grassroots tool.
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So for the layman I would say One Million for Barack is not the best tool though it makes for a nice headline, the real organizing grassroots power is in the individual netroots, U Chicago has a lot of members since he was our State Senator just a few years ago and lives in the same neighborhood we do in addition to being a liberal candidate which attracts our mostly left of center campus. The more interesting fact is how many groups in early primary states, in more conservative campuses, etc.
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We’re just four hours from Iowa and I’m hoping to ship my classmates to win that state for our guy.