On Wednesday, TheTeaParty.net held the first ever presidential debate on Twitter, posing questions to candidates in 140-character bursts as hopefuls answered in kind. On the sidelines, 22,400 viewers watched and commented.
The project is the brainchild of Andrew Hemingway, the creator of Digital-Acumen.com, which teaches politicians how to use Twitter effectively, and the chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire. He originally came up with the idea while riding in a car with presidential hopeful and former Speaker Newt Gingrich. He took the idea and started working with developer Adam Green, who, with his son Zach, helped create the debate.
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Gingrich, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza Herman Cain, Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Sen. Rick Santorum, former Gov. Gary Johnson, and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter all participated in the debate, which was moderated by S.E. Cupp, a right-leaning columnist, with live analysis by Rusty Humphries, a conservative talk radio show host.
What could have been a huge confusion of thought-bursts was organized on a single website that was more ordered and controlled than a similar debate would have been on a single Twitter feed.
Essentially, the website organized any tweets about the debate in a new interface. An algorithm re-tweeted messages from authorized accounts, such as candidates and moderators, when they mentioned @140townhall, the name of the event, and placed them in one central column.
The website also searched every single post on Twitter and pulled in about 14,000 tweets that mentioned the candidates or the town hall, and those were published off to the side where they were clearly visible, but not mixed up in the debate itself. It also filtered out any vulgar language.
But the system did have its flaws. Every candidate was answering the general questions at the same time, causing inevitable interruptions between each candidate by another candidate. It only got more confusing when Cupp started directing individual questions to candidates, which meant candidates were not talking about the same things anymore.
Though some candidates made it easier for viewers by keeping complete thoughts to a tweet (such as Bachmann and Cain), others, like McCotter, would let sentences continue into another tweet.
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Twitter’s 140-character limit does create an interesting, new paradigm for a debate. The audience could compare all of the answers side-by-side, but the candidates’ use of Twitter did limit their ability to give in-depth, contextual arguments. Instead, they were forced to give either talking points or bullet point answers. There was very little middle ground.
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But that may not be a bad thing. By restricting candidates’ responses to short bursts of texts, there was no room for flowery language or restating the question, typical ploys used by political hopefuls to avoid answering the question (except in videos that candidates submitted for opening statements). In this arena, a candidate wasn’t able to hide when he or she didn’t answer the question at hand.
“It really strips away a lot of their ability to be evasive or dodge questions without it being plainly obvious,” Dustin Stockton from TheTeaParty.net said. “Whereas in the traditional debate format they could use rhetorical flourish or filibuster their time to avoid answering the question.”
The use of platform rather than face-to-face conversation does pose a troubling question: Are candidates themselves delivering the answers, or is their staff deliberating and deciding the most politically popular answer that will guarantee their candidate’s election? Hemingway assured TIME that all of the candidates were “fully engaged” in what their campaigns were tweeting for the debate. Organizers couldn’t be more specific, but Zach Green did say that McCotter typed his own responses while others, such as Johnson, were read the question and then dictated responses to an aide.
It can’t be guaranteed that all of these candidates are without any staff in the room helping them with their answers. Without the typical debate setup that we are all used to, it makes it difficult to know if we’re hearing the words of our future Commander-in-Chief or those of their campaign.
It’s clear that candidates are forced to contend with a political arena that thrives on sound bites. In that regard, Hemingway seems to think Twitter’s perfect, saying, “Have you ever heard a politician, you know, say anything that was worth listening to that lasted over 140 characters?”
Zachary Cohen is a contributor for TIME. Find him on Twitter at @Zachary_Cohen. You can also continue the discussion on TIME‘s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.