Boomers Trump, Biden make an effort to catch ’em young on Snapchat
The photo-sending software that boasts 229 million users, mostly young, Snapchat -better known for filters that turn that person right into a puppy or a vampire-is a new battlefield for opponents President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, both of whom are within their 70s.
The stakes are high: Gen Z (ages 18-23) and millennials (ages 24-39) together make up a lot more than 35 percent of the American voting population.
For them, traditional varieties of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are increasingly growing passe.
In the race to win them over, Trump’s reelection team has a solid lead, because they have not suffered from lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“The President’s campaign has always prioritised digital tools and data infrastructure, so that it was an extremely natural shift to completely digital campaigning,” Ken Farnaso, the Trump campaign deputy press secretary, told AFP.
The 100-person strong team can be backing a candidate who's infamous for his own prolific social media use.
“It’s clear that we’re wiping the ground with Biden’s campaign,” Farnaso said.
As a result, the amount of subscribers to Trump’s Snapchat account tripled in eight months, easily reaching 1.5 million.
Biden’s team declined to share its number of Snapchat subscribers.
Aviator filter
“I’m sure we can do better on the web,” Biden himself admitted during an interview said on Snapchat fourteen days ago, from his home in Delaware.
He previously been sheltering there until Monday, when he made his first public appearance in months for a Memorial Day ceremony, sporting a black face mask.
“The truth is, we’re trying,” he said.
His team has refused to provide information on its arsenal but insists that it's been working doubly hard on digital campaigning since the start of pandemic.
Top staffers for his former rivals Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris have also been recruited to strengthen the ranks.
On his Snapchat profile, the former number 2 to President Barack Obama keeps it cool: he's shown without a tie but along with his signature aviator sunglasses. Followers can put on the same pair because of a custom campaign filter.
Subscribers to Trump’s account, meanwhile, are invited to relive one of the president’s rallies in Wisconsin, circumstances imperative to winning the election on November 3.
Trump’s team also posts videos openly mocking his opponents gaffes on Snapchat that are then shared on a massive scale.
If Snapchat-whose initial premise was sending self-deleting photos-is popular amonst the candidates, it is also since the platform has expressed a desire to independently and actively take part in American political life.
“Snapchat believes that there surely is no more powerful sort of self-expression than helping its users take part in democracy and exercise their right to vote,” a spokesperson told AFP.
The app, in line with the spokesperson, reaches 75 percent of Gen Z-ers and millennials on a daily basis-a figure it intends to benefit from.
The platform had already inspired 450,000 young persons to join up to vote for the mid-term elections in 2018, and it plans on developing new in-app features as the election approaches.
Recently, Snapchat commenced offering users voter registration links through the week following their 18th birthday. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Snapchat turn 18 monthly.
Conversely, its competitor TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has opted to stick with the app’s traditionally light-hearted aesthetic. But that doesn’t stop political content from flourishing on the platform.
A video of a guy in a hotdog costume listing all the reasons why he thought Biden-whose campaign has been rocked by a sexual assault accusation-was a “pervert” has racked up a lot more than 530,000 likes on TikTok.
