President Obama has held town halls on both Facebook and YouTube, and to round things out a bit, the White House has announced that the President will be holding his first town hall on Twitter next week.
The President’s town hall, which will take place July 6 at 2 pm ET, will focus on the economy and job creation. People will be able to participate by Tweeting questions with the hashtag #AskObama, and can follow @Townhall for updates. Via a Twitter-hosted site, you can also watch President Obama respond live via webcast. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey will moderate the meeting.
The fact that @jack is moderating the meeting isn’t too surprising considering Mark Zuckerberg moderated Obama’s Facebook town hall meeting earlier this year. Twitter PR head Sean Garrett said in a Tweet that Dorsey will be providing the questions to the President, and ‘there will be a fairly involved process on how they are selected’ from the stream.
As the 2012 campaign heats up, Twitter has become a centralized platform for communications between candidates and the general public. A few weeks ago, we saw that the President’s 2012 campaign took over managing Obama’s Twitter (@barackobama) and Facebook accounts (which were previously managed by the DNC). And Obama himself will begin posting updates on both Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter has more mass appeal than four years ago, and there’s no doubt that the platform has become a centralized place for political communication and news. Twitter will be a central part of the election (and so will Facebook), and Obama is taking this seriously and helping to draw more users to Twitter.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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