Politics 2.0 – America’s first digital president

By Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta,
Thought leaders at INSEAD.

Barack Obama’s electoral triumph was the first American presidential election won on the Web.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt was America’s first radio president and John F. Kennedy was the country’s first television president, Barack Obama is its first Internet president.

This watershed was largely overlooked during the presidential campaign. While most pundits were focused on the question of race, speculating whether Americans would elect a black man to the White House, Obama was busy defeating his rival thanks to his powerful techno-demographic appeal. His popularity with young voters was especially high.

Obama enjoyed a groundswell of support
among the Facebook generation.

Obama captures 70 percent of young
On Election Day, he captured nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under 25. In a word, Obama enjoyed a groundswell of support among the Facebook generation. The vote has even been dubbed the “Facebook election.” Obama, who was constantly thumbing his BlackBerry during the campaign, had a shrewd understanding of the electoral power of direct Web-based political mobilization. His campaign leveraged not only Facebook and YouTube, but also MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, BlackPlanet, LinkedIn, and other Web 2.0 platforms.

At 47, Obama was older than the average Facebook member, but he proved to be a natural Web politician. On his personal Facebook profile, he named his favorite musicians as Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, and listed his pastimes as basketball, writing and “loafing w/kids” (note the hip shorthand).

The 72-year-old John McCain, by contrast, never managed to connect with voters online.

McCain: Missing in action on the Internet
McCain’s campaign struggled to give its candidate a Web presence, but compared to Obama’s online blitzkrieg, the former war hero was missing in action on the Internet. The cold numbers tell the story. Obama counted some three million “friends” on Facebook and two million more on 15 other social networking sites. He also boasted 13 million names on an email list and three million receiving SMS messages coming directly from Obama’s famous Blackberry.

The MyBarackObama.com Web site was clocking more than eight million monthly visits, including 35,000 volunteer groups that raised $30 million on the site. On YouTube, the Obama channel attracted more than 97 million video views by some 18 million channel visits. Compare that to YouTube presence: only 330 videos were uploaded to the JohnMcCain.com channel, which attracted just over 28,000 subscribers.

The McCain channel attracted barely more than million visits and some 25 million video views. Obama beat McCain four to one on YouTube. Obama attracted double the Web site traffic and had five times more Facebook friends. On the microblogging platform Twitter, Obama could count on more than 112,000 supporters “tweeting” to get him elected. McCain, for his part, had only 4,600 followers on Twitter. In the world of politics where victories and defeats can be measured with great precision, these stats graphically illustrate how Obama crushed McCain on the Web.

The YouTube coup de grace was the blockbuster “Yes We Can” video clip. The viral circulation of that video, watched by millions of Americans only days after it was first posted, gave Obama solid electoral credibility in Middle America. Suddenly he was like a pop star on MTV. The video wasn’t even made by the Obama campaign team: it was produced spontaneously by the hip hop star Will.i.am, from the group Black Eyed Peas.

That video offered a classic example of bottom-up civic engagement and its viral network effects. Obama’s masterful leveraging of Web 2.0 platforms marked a major e-ruption in electoral politics – in America and elsewhere. Political campaigning is now shifting from old-style political machines, which are vertical top-down organizations, toward the horizontal dynamics of online social networks.

Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Twitter, by their basic social architecture, are a perfect medium for grassroots political movements. There are no barriers to entry on sites like Facebook and YouTube. Everybody can participate, building social capital online.

Resurgence of social capital
For those who a decade ago were lamenting the decline of ‘social capital’ in America, Web 2.0 platforms have emerged as powerful tools of social interaction, civic engagement, and political mobilization. Unlike traditional means of civic action dependant on complex organizations like political parties, there are no barriers to entry in the Web 2.0 sphere, which as the Obama campaign demonstrated is low cost and high impact.

Web 2.0 networks like Facebook not only allow citizens to organize themselves by bypassing traditional organizational structures, they also allow political and business leaders to engage and communicate directly with their constituencies without going through traditional intermediaries like the media.

Obama’s masterful leveraging of Web 2.0 platforms
marked a major e-ruption in electoral politics –
in America and elsewhere.

President Obama, for example, used his Change.gov site to speak directly to Americans and today a White House blog serves the same purpose.

He is also the first president who, during a White House press conference, has called regarding a question from a Web-only journalist. These are signs of powerful changes. Web 2.0 social networks diffuse power away from institutions and toward people, providing effective platforms for a genuine expression of bottom-up expression of citizen sovereignty.

Web-based citizen empowerment can potentially strengthen liberal democracies and, more importantly, bring democracy to countries currently living under tyranny and despotism in its many forms.

Call it Politics 2.0.

Reactionary hostility in authoritarian regimes
One measure of the Web’s role in providing a political voice to citizens is, paradoxically, the reactionary hostility it provokes in authoritarian regimes that oppose democracy. No wonder dictatorships resent, and frequently suppress, free expression on Web 2.0 networks like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Syria’s autocratic state has jailed bloggers and blocks Web sites deemed as a security threat. On Syria’s black list are both Facebook and YouTube. Even in Egypt, an Arab country that enjoys open diplomatic relations with the West, the government takes a hard line towards online criticism of the state.
The Chinese regime has also imprisoned cyber-dissidents and, in March 2008, shut down 25 Web sites including YouTube. Indonesia meanwhile has banned both YouTube and MySpace. Other states that have banned Web sites or imprisoned cyber-dissidents include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Belarus, Burma, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

An OpenNet Initiative survey published in 2007 reported that 25 of 41 countries surveyed were engaging in some form of Internet censorship. Clearly, there is something about free and open sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube that non-democratic regimes find threatening.

Insurgence of ‘anti-democracy’
Some contend that Web 2.0 platforms are anti-democratic. They warn that, even in Western countries including the United States, there is an ever-present danger that states will succumb to Big Brother temptations and pry into social networking sites to spy on their citizens.

There are even conspiracy theories that claim Facebook was started by the CIA through alleged links between the site’s original venture capital backers and the American spy agency. While the CIA admits openly it uses Facebook for recruitment purposes, there doesn’t appear to be any operational linkage between the two organizations.
The CIA’s seemingly innocuous use of Facebook nonetheless has raised concerns among civil libertarians. Facebook’s privacy policy, for example, states it does not share personal information with third-party companies -– but adds that, in order to comply with the law, it may give personal information to ‘government agencies.’

If Web 2.0 platforms promote social capital and civic engagement, the same self-organizational opportunities are available to criminals and terrorists. The findings of a “Dark Web” research project at the University of Arizona, tracked Jihadist extremist groups using Web 2.0 media, provide a particularly disturbing example of how Web 2.0 platforms can become vehicles for terrorism. The study, published in 2008, came across an alarming number of Jihadist blogs, including one that post news updates about so-called “occupied Islamic countries.”
Jihadist bloggers were also active on YouTube, uploading videos featuring explosives, attacks, bombings and hostage-taking. On Second Life, meanwhile, a ‘Terrorist of SL’ attracted 228 members and another group called ‘Liberation Front’ counted 65 followers. Some claim that terrorists are using Web platforms like Google Earth to locate potential targets, especially in countries like Israel. This may explain why Google has, in fact, pixilated sensitive zones in Israel and elsewhere in the world that could come under a terrorist attack.

NATO prepared for cyber warfare
While the Kremlin denied any involvement in the cyberattacks after they first occurred in 2007, the incident prompted the NATO military alliance to step up its readiness for cyber warfare. In early 2009, a pro-Kremlin youth group admitted it was responsible for cyberattacks against Estonia.

President Obama, a leader who understands the power of Web 2.0 platforms, is taking these threats seriously. During the presidential election campaign, he promised to elevate cybersecurity as a national priority and appoint a cyber-czar reporting directly to him in the White House as part of an ambitious, $30 billion Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative.

After taking office, President Obama earmarked $335 million for securing U.S. Internet infrastructure. He also gave broad powers over cybersecurity to the National Security Agency (NSA) – one of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies – under the direction of General Keith Alexander.
While the NSA’s work is top secret, it’s believed that its cybersecurity efforts include blocking thousands of foreign electronic attacks on U.S. systems that occur every day. Russia and China, in particular, are believed to have developed advanced cyberwarfare capacity.
Barack Obama won the U.S. presidency thanks to Politics 2.0, and it now appears like his American foreign policy will be driven by Geopolitics 2.0.