Snapchat, the four-year-old picture messaging app, is having its moment in the 2016 election cycle. While the app has a solid track record among young people — the app boasts upwards of 200 million users — its entrance into the political arena is a recent development. Snapchat has hired political veterans like Rob Saliterman, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush, and Peter Hamby, a former CNN political reporter, to coordinate its transition into the political sphere. These experts are facilitating new features for the 21st century electoral landscape, such as “Live Stories”, advertisements, and filters. Through these methods, Snapchat is becoming an indispensable tool for reaching millennials in elections and has the potential to dramatically increase political awareness, although the fruitfulness of this strategy is still unknown.
Snapchat’s popularity — and importance as a political tool — arises from its versatility. The app offers a platform for users to send picture or video messages to friends that last up to 10 seconds, after which the “snap” disappears forever. These messages can be altered with filters that include the location, time, and temperature. Users can also choose to add a message that is up to 31 characters long.
Almost all the presidential candidates have their own accounts on Snapchat. Users can follow their favorite politicians, as they do with their personal friends, and watch their stories. Once a user has added a politician as a friend on Snapchat, the politician gets free access to those users. Access to this information can be a savvy and cost-effective way to advertise to young people, as long as politicians can get youthful voters to view their images.
Candidates, especially Secretary Clinton, are becoming more innovative and trying to appeal to young people on the app. In a trendy “takeover,” US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) sent Snapchats from Hillary Clinton’s account for an entire day. These Snapchats were available to all who had previously friend-requested Hillary’s account. Booker documented his travels throughout Iowa on the app, including fast-paced anecdotes and selfies with citizens at rallies.
Political campaigns have taken this a step further by using the filter feature to spread the word about their candidates by paying for filters that are politically themed. These Snapchat-designed images feature information on the candidates, historical facts about the presidential race, or current primary results. Candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio took this route and sponsored a filter that featured their campaign slogans and logos. Conservative Solutions PAC even attacked Donald Trump with a filter. “Trump is a con artist,” the filter states, “Friends don’t let friends vote Trump”. Millennials can use these 2016 presidential election filters to talk to their friends about the election: “Does Donald Trump’s winning percentage in the Michigan primary make my arm look fat?” With these features, users can immerse themselves in all aspects of the campaign narrative, something that is harder on other social media sites.
Snapchat aficionados’ posts can also be shared with everyone that has an account. Users can choose to add their Snapchats to a “story” centering on a specific place or event, which all users can access. A moderator from the company ultimately decides which Snapchats will become public as part of the story. This feature has increasingly been used to mark states’ primaries and caucuses. For example, citizens at campaign events in early primary states often used Snapchat to capture their experiences and post them on the app-wide story. Peter Hamby makes routine appearances via these live stories to explain certain facts about the race or events. By adding substance to these live stories, Snapchat generates information and effectively functions as a news source.
Additionally, Snapchat provides some of its own content. The Discover Feature hosts a variety of advertisements — which come from media entities as diverse as Cosmopolitan and The Wall Street Journal — to offer an exciting way for companies to reach young people with short, visually-appealing videos, music, and stories. John Kasich used a paid advertisement on Snapchat to get his message across. For 10 seconds, he tried to appeal to users on their Discover page along with other flashy media content, perhaps marking a new venue for campaign advertisements.
Despite all these popular capabilities, however, Snapchat is severely limited in other areas. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram, Snapchat is not a particularly good conduit of substantial information. A user cannot exceed 31 characters when adding text to a Snapchat, and there is no way to link to an outside news article or video, either. If, for example, a user saw the famous “Just Chillin’ in Cedar Rapids” Snapchat video recorded by Secretary Clinton and wished to learn more about her, there is currently no way for a user to be linked from that video to her campaign website. Consequently, Snapchat has no definitive way to analyze users’ reactions to these advertisements. While users on other social media can attach links to more comprehensive articles or sources, Snapchat is limited to 10 seconds and 31 characters. This hinders the ability of campaigns to use Snapchat as a messaging tool to inform potential supporters about their platforms and biographies.
Nevertheless, campaigns have flocked to the social media app this cycle in what is arguably an inevitable strategy to reach young voters. 26 percent of 14- to 25-year-olds report that they get their news strictly from social media, an all-time high for any age group. As millennials embrace news through social rather than other traditional sources, merging politics and unconventional media platforms will broaden the scope of political recruitment. At least, this is what politicians and pundits are counting on.
However, the relationship between social media messaging and voter turnout is not always congruent. For example, Facebook’s membership grew from 100 million in 2008 to 1.01 billion in 2012. Over the same time period, the percentage of Millennials that voted in the general election dropped from 51 percent to 45 percent. This vast increase in Facebook activity alone did not necessary increase millennial voter turnout, despite energetic political discussion on the site during this period. Perhaps excessive exposure to political jostling — courtesy of round-the-clock social media saturation — made Millennials more apathetic about voting. If their social networks were filled with commentary and arguments, young people might have been alienated by the discourse.
Of course, Snapchat is not just any communicative platform. Rob Saliterman notes that “intimacy” with which Snapchat reaches its users might be an advantage over other forms of social media. The app is phone-based, and its photographic and video content creates the feeling of seeing someone face-to-face. The user feels physically closer to the content and is in direct contact with it, providing a different user experience than that of other, less immersive mediums of communication.
Snapchat is certainly on the rise in this election cycle, but it is still too early to understand its full impact. Unlike other emergent social media brands, Snapchat remains limited and therefore inherently informal in its format by lacking a computer presence, the capabilities to attach links, longer videos, and most notably, save and redistribute any material shared on the website. As always, politicians will have to walk the fine line between effectively utilizing a new communicative medium and overtly pandering to those who use that medium.