Information overload in the Facebook-ABC presidential debates?
MANCHESTER, N.H.—It sounded like a good idea at first: Let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board.
Context & Ripple Effects
ABC's Facebook collaboration began in late 2007 with a stated aim of bringing viewers closer to political coverage through the social network. The debate message board is an early test of whether that ABC-Facebook news partnership can turn audience participation into usable editorial input as Facebook's user base expands.
First-order effects
- Facebook participants can post debate reactions, but an overloaded message board makes individual contributions less likely to be visible or meaningfully incorporated into the broadcast experience.
- ABC's attempt to involve online viewers is constrained by the practical problem of separating useful audience input from a high-volume stream of comments.
Second-order effects
- ABC and Facebook have an incentive to make prominence and selection—not merely the ability to post—the operational measure of audience participation in future joint coverage.
- Viewers who expect their comments to affect political coverage may judge the partnership by how legibly the service surfaces contributions, rather than by the size of the discussion alone.
Third-order effects
- If broadcasters continue to route political participation through social platforms, platform interfaces become a new gatekeeping layer between public reaction and televised political coverage.
The trend: Political coverage is beginning to shift from one-way broadcast toward social-platform participation, with curation capacity determining whether that participation is useful.