VSSA does a great job of taking apart a story that anti-gun groups are trying to push to promote the narrative that they are somehow going to win the battle over the Second Amendment on social media because they are supposedly being so innovative by going to SXSW and hosting sparsely attended panels on social media.
As VSSA points out, NRA hosts its own panel with volunteers doing different types of work, including how to effectively use social media, every year to a crowd many, many, many times the size of what is featured in the story.
Of course, for those who don’t travel all the way to Austin or Indy to attend such lectures from either group, we always have the numbers:
If you are looking for grassroots support, looking strictly at the numbers, Moms Demand Action has 153,000 followers on Facebook. Mayors Against Illegal Guns has 21,000. The NRA destroys both of them with 3.2 million followers on Facebook. Twitter numbers are lower for NRA but they are still about 10 times higher that the numbers for both Moms Demand Action and Demand Action (the only reference I could find on Twitter to MAIG).
Now, the anti-gun groups have stepped up their game on social media, and there’s no doubt about that. But, that doesn’t mean they are likely to be effectively using it to “beat” us politically any time soon.
What would really be funny is if this satire site got more “likes” than the MDA facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/momsagainsteverything
How many of the Antis’ followers on social media are pro-gunnies who follow them only so they can debate them for the lulz?
Yup, that’s definitely a factor. And VSSA did make the point that numbers don’t even mean engaged followers dedicated to the cause in the next sentence that I didn’t highlight. I’m sure that’s a pretty significant factor in many of their totals.
Not only that but they’re also buying ‘likes’ through professional agencies. The NGAC sat at about 1K for years then jumped to near 45K in about a month. CSGV was sitting at about 10K then shot up to over 50K in about 2 months.
I think they misunderestimate us greatly. I’ve been arguing this stuff online for 20 years now (starting in talk.politics.guns back in the mid-1990’s). I had an online gun-rights column long before Facebook and Twitter existed. And I continue to argue for gun rights in my own preferred online media sites.
And I’m not a member of the NRA, GOA, or any other organization like that.
To them, this is “Hey, I clicked a ‘like’ button”. To many of us, it’s a long-term, ongoing effort to educate where ever and when ever possible.
/Barrel Twist at PlanetTimes.com
//You’ll need the wayback machine to find them now.
He may have won the battle but I’m afraid he’s gonna lose the war. Now they’re going to come at him with every indirect attack in their arsenal, to the point that whatever little bit of a life he can maintain, will be miserable.
That right there is the true tyranny of an overly large, overly powerful government. The ability not to send in men with guns to kill you, but to make life so onerous and terrible that you pull out your own gun and off yourself.
The fact is we the people long ago lost the war and neither the ballot box nor the courts are going to help. The deck is stacked against us from top to bottom.
Geez I’m a nitwit today. Commented on the wrong post…
Likes, views, and followers mean nothing. It’s so easy to buy a few thousand, or fifty thousands likes, and followers. It’s cheap and it’s easy to do. The thing that really matter is dues paying members. The NRA has millions of dues paying members. The moms and the mayors have 1 dues paying member.
Can they do anything like an Instalanche? And Reynold’s blog/Twitter presence isn’t even exclusively gun rights.
Tam, not many. It seems the anti-gun crowd prefers to have their own little “echo chamber” where everyone loves one another, and agrees completely. I’ve joined a few of their sites, responded perhaps once, politely, and got banned from posting further. They didn’t boot me from their page, I still got every notification of new postings, I just couldn’t respond to any of them.
Hey! I realize this is sort of off-topic however I had
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Appreciate it!