Since there are many different social communities dedicated to Obama and his candidacy, I'll be looking at messages from two separate communities. The first, "I endorse Barack Obama -- and I'm telling my friends!", is an activist group that advocates direct support of and involvement in the Obama campaign. That being the case, you would expect the messages found here have a distinctly energized tone, for both good and ill.
The group is extremely new, having been formed within the last week, but already the messages cropping up seem to bear our my expectations. For instance, the first message that appeared when I loaded up the message board was an invective-laced accusation regarding Obama's apparent status as a Muslim terrorist. Though this well-intentioned fear-monger was quickly shouted down, it seems like this kind of thing is going to be par for the course going forward.
The community that is forming around this group handles the trolls and weirdos as best as they can, and uses the board mainly as a bulletin space for calls to action, announcements of milestones, and heads-ups for Obama-related events. So far, actually debate/discussion seems to fall more under the auspices of the older, more well-established Obama group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)".
When I arrived at this board, I was expecting the worst, simply because... well, that tends to be what politics brings out in people. I was surprised to find that the board, with a few exceptions, was fairly respectable when it came to the level of discourse. Part of this comes, I suspect, from eagle-eyed moderation; as I perused, I noticed topic deletions sprinkled throughout the threads. The supporters who are here also seem to take trolls with a grain of salt: numerous threads are devoted to venting about everyone's favorite type of internet rabble-rousers. In one, a particularly proactive community member (and apparent fan of It's A Wonderful Life) suggests donating to Obama every time a troll posts.
In terms of topics for discussion, the board is currently in the throws of Super Tuesday fever. This post, which I chose because of its proximity to my destination for tomorrow, captures the general feeling of many around the board. Elsewhere, there are numerous topics devoted to frustrations regarding Obama's opponents; in particular, Hillary Clinton seems to be drawing the most amount of fire, well ahead of any Republican candidate. The distaste ranges from outrage (a post regarding alleged Clinton puush-polling in California) to tactical (a breakdown of Mark Penn's latest talking points) to downright Drudge-ian (an apparently shocking video that "the Clintons don;t want you to see!!!").
As a site dedicated to Obama support, there is very little room for a middle ground approach when it comes to Obama's chief rival. However, the board does show some sense of awareness when it comes to life in the world of online politics. This post, which may be my favorite of the ones I've read so far, contains a conversation about the role of trolls and agitators in these kinds of communities. Far from being self-exonerating, many of the messages contain admissions of trolling by board members on Clinton sites, and seems to reflect the belief that "everyone's doing it". Though the group's view of such behavior seems to be negative overall, most of them still aren't willing to grant Clinton, or her supporters, a break.
More surprising is the group's preoccupation with Ron Paul. Instead of focusing on Any of the Republican frontrunners, most messages about the GOP are in regards to the TExas congressman's longshot bid for the White House. From complaints about his supporters, to ways in which to win them over, the Facebook crowd is either swept up in the Paul "revolution" with the rest of the internet, or aware of the power that Paul's bloc wields as a potential swing group in the upcoming election. Whatever the reason, though, you have to admit that, for someone with no with no shot at the nomination, this guy's everywhere.
One thing that's lacking from the board (as far as I can tell, at least) is a strong presence of undecided voters. People don't seem to be coming here in order to figure out if Obama is their candidate of choice or not; the people who have chosen to be active in these groups all seem fairly set when it comes to who gets their vote. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does remove the possibility of non-partisan information/persuasion sessions.
Another possible problem with the Facebook forums is the lack of lingering threads. Most discussions that I found on the site were created within 76 hours of my first searches. Going deeper, I found that, in most cases, all messages found on the first few pages were new rather than ongoing. There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, a lack of old, or even sticky, threads leads to redundant posting, as newcomers attempt to assert (for the 37th time) that Obama is not a Muslim/white supremacist/anti-Christ/etc. Second, the value of new content overshadows the need for the kind of foundational posting that takes a message board from a bulletin space to a community. In this climate, the possibility for the lengthy debates found on other boards is lost.
Overall, the message boards of the Facebook groups are far less painful than I was expecting. While the occasional troll slips past the keeper, the community generally fulfills its goal as a place where Obama supporters can come to have their beliefs reinforced. Undecided voters who wish to participate would do well to do what I just did: lurk.
CARE2
It goes without saying that Care2 is a very different animal than Facebook. As a community of progressive activists, you would expect their message boards to be quite different from those found on a general use social network site. For the most part, however, the same concerns and content found in the Facebook groups is present in the Care2 forums, albeit in a smaller setting. The people who participate in the Care2 groups are, generally, against Hillary Clinton, for Barack Obama, and ready to do something to help the process along. Thus, the instances of troll abuse are low to nonexistent. If anything, there may be even more outrage present on the Care2 boards than the Facebook one. In one post, the topic starter takes an endorsement of Obama in the direction of a screed against lobbying and special interests. In another, an earnest citizen calls for the campaigns to remove race and gender from their arsenal of potential attack points. On the whole, the Care2 boards seem to be more focused on political discussions, with campaign minutiae taking a back seat to political discussion. That said, the topics discussed do not deviate significantly from those found on the Facebook boards.
However, in spite of their similarities, the Care2 boards do offer several differences from their Facebook counterparts, to both their credit and detriment. For instance, Care2 allows users to embed images within their posts, which allows for interesting visual aids in addition to inspired argument. However, this advantage is nullified by Care2's difficult-to-navigate dating system, which uses the "x days ago/x months ago" display style for archived posts rather than the easier, more explicit dating method found on Facebook.
In the end, the Care2 boards may be more civil than the Facebook ones, but their small size and scope renders them less useful for daily visitors than their Facebook counterparts. Though Care2 wins the battle on many fronts in the worlds of online organizing, the campaign forum fight can be more successfully fought on the larger, more well-organized Facebook boards..
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