Hashtagging the Debate

For the first part of the debate, I just scrolled through my own feed on Twitter. It was mostly filled with tweets from the people I follow, so opinions were mixed. I follow a pretty good mix of Hillary supporters and Trump supporters. Most of the tweets I saw, however, were either negative toward Trump, or negative toward the debate in general. I didn't see many negative tweets about Hillary, other than the occasional tweet calling for fact-checking or criticizing her for her overly-rehearsed spiel. Many of the tweets I saw were criticizing Trump for interrupting Hillary, but I also saw a lot of tweets bashing the mediator, Lester Holt. I did not agree with him bringing up the "Birther" subject in the debate. I think we all expected it to come up at some point, but the mediator bringing it up himself was ridiculous. Those types of questions had no place in the debate. I think that Hillary carried herself with more poise and with more professionalism, but I don't think either candidate accomplished very much. Neither of them detailed their policies effectively, and I don't think either of them gained any voters. They probably didn't lose any of their constituents, but they didn't do much to attract undecided voters. These ideas were reflected in most of the tweets I came across, although I could tell that die hard Clinton supporters and die hard Trump supporters each thought that their candidate "won".

About halfway through the debate, I decided to start following the "debates" hashtag. I was actually surprised that the tweets were pretty evenly distributed. For the most part, I saw tweets bashing both candidates and Holt. I think this might be because I don't generally tweet my political opinions. In this election especially, saying you don't support one candidate makes people assume that you support the other, and this makes people turn hostile. I try to stay neutral on social media, and I search both Trump and Clinton equally because whenever I search one of them, I usually go check what the other one has been tweeting. I think that this helped contribute to the even distribution of tweets I saw on my newsfeed. I also see an even amount of promoted tweets from each candidate.