Politicians are using Snapchat to attract young supporters ahead of the 2016 election, presenting a challenge to regulators
Snapchat is going to be huge in 2016 — and regulators have no idea how to handle it — As he gears up for a presidential run, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley held …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, Martin O'Malley and other prospective 2016 candidates are treating Snapchat as an experimental channel to reach voters too young for TV — and Fusion's reporting flags the obvious gap: regulators haven't worked out which campaign rules apply to disappearing, ephemeral content.
What looked like an improvisation then became infrastructure. Snap later partnered with TurboVote to put registration links directly into users' profiles, pushed a two-week drive that it credited with more than 400K registrations, rolled out a four-feature voter toolkit in 2020, and now says it has helped register a million users — most of them first-time or under-30 voters. The platform moved from campaign novelty to running its own civic operations.
First-order effects
- O'Malley and his fellow candidates gain direct access to an under-30 audience on Snapchat at essentially no media cost, while the FEC and state regulators face campaign activity in a format their disclosure and ad rules never anticipated.
Second-order effects
- Once candidates prove the channel works, the platform itself gains leverage over the relationship — Snap decides what political content appears, builds its own registration features, and effectively becomes a gatekeeper between campaigns and young voters rather than just a pipe.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, election law keeps chasing formats: rules written for broadcast ads lag behind ephemeral video, and by 2020 down-ballot candidates are improvising influencer-style online campaigning entirely, with platforms like Snap supplying the registration machinery themselves.
The trend: Political campaigning is migrating to platform-native formats faster than regulators can classify them, turning platforms like Snapchat from ad channels into self-appointed civic infrastructure.