Obama Was Too Good at Social Media

President Obama has been called the “first social-media president.” It’s both a true and a misleading characterization. On the one hand, the Obama White House was indeed the first presidency to make use of services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. But on the other hand, these services either didn’t exist or weren’t used by a broad public before Barack Obama took office in 2009. The White House brags that Obama was the first to tweet from @POTUS on Twitter, to go live on Facebook, to use a filter on Snapchat. But in truth, any president in office during the last eight years probably would have become the first social-media president.

That doesn’t mean that any president would have been good at it, however. John F. Kennedy is widely considered the first television president, but he wasn’t the first one to appear on TV. Franklin televised debate with Richard Nixon in 1960, and continuing with the televised news conferences and interviews that characterized his presidency.