Twitter teams up with Buzzfeed to stream a live election night broadcast, hopes to capitalize on high level of youth engagement in the presidential race
Editor-in-chief Ben Smith hopes to reach political junkies and bring transparency to the “mystical” process of declaring election winners.
Context & Ripple Effects
The BuzzFeed deal is the third leg of Twitter's 2016 live-video sprint: after streaming both party conventions with CBS and splitting ad revenue on Bloomberg's debate coverage, the platform is now claiming the biggest night of all — election night itself. The pitch is complementary: Twitter brings the audience and real-time conversation, BuzzFeed's newsroom brings the calls, with editor-in-chief Ben Smith framing the broadcast as a way to demystify how winners get declared.
What makes this worth watching is who the target viewer is. Both partners are betting that young voters already living on Twitter will watch returns there instead of on TV — a bet the related coverage shows playing out four years later, when TikTok's election night became a first communal experience for many younger users.
First-order effects
- BuzzFeed gets national-scale distribution for its election desk without building its own streaming audience, while Twitter secures exclusive live content for the single highest-engagement night of the cycle.
- Ben Smith's transparency angle puts BuzzFeed's editorial judgment — how and when winners are called — directly inside a social feed, exposing those decisions to real-time public scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms are forced to match the format: Facebook's later partnership with Reuters for live vote tabulation and projections shows competitors concluding that election-night results are table stakes for being a civic information hub.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms stop renting election coverage from publishers altogether — Twitter's own dedicated US Elections tab in 2020 suggests the endgame is an owned, curated hub where the platform, not a media partner, controls the experience and the ad inventory around it.
The trend: Election night is migrating from broadcast TV to social platforms, which start by licensing publisher coverage and gradually absorb the whole experience into their own products.