Social Advocacy & Politics: A Virtual Political Debate Via Twitter

oe Kyrillos kept asking his opponent Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to debate him last summer, but Menendez wouldn’t do it. So when Menendez announced he was having an #AskMenendez Twitter town hall, Kyrillos, with the help of the Heritage Foundation Action Fund, announced he was going to use #AskMenendez to have a virtual debate.  The idea was brilliant. Leading up to the #AskMenendez town hall, Kyrillos and Heritage Action mobilized conservatives to tweet critical questions to Menendez. Then, during the hour of the Twitter town hall, #Kyrillos would tweet answers to the same questions as Menendez. I’d been tracking the effort in the week leading up to the event, excited to see how it turned out. The basic idea of the event was questions were tweeted to the Senator using the #AskMenendez hashtag and Menendez would tweet a reply using the hashtag. It was a simple use of hashtags to identify, follow and aggregate questions and answers.

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