By Stephanie Kelly
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Whereas tens of hundreds of thousands of People tuned in to look at the controversy between Republican Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on their tv screens on Tuesday, a secondary battle performed out on social media via clips and video edits of memorable debate moments.
Social media customers had been off from the opening second of the controversy, with Democrats seizing the second Harris walked throughout the stage to shake Trump’s hand and introduce herself.
“Kamala said you’re gonna shake my hand dammit!” social media consumer Adam James Smith posted on X, to 40,000 likes.
A part of Vice President Harris’ debate plan was to goad Trump into saying issues that would turn out to be viral social media clips, advisers mentioned earlier, and the controversy advised that technique paid off.
Supporters circulated photos of Harris’ generally bemused, generally skeptical facial expressions as Trump cycled via a sequence of acquainted falsehoods and repeated a false conspiracy that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been consuming pet canine and cats.
“THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS,” shortly trended on social media platform X, buoyed by 1000’s of posts – together with many confused on the quote’s relevance in a presidential debate, after Trump mentioned “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”
Trump supporters, in the meantime, jumped on his response as he mentioned Harris’ financial plan, saying it was simplistic and copied her boss President Joe Biden’s agenda. “Run, Spot, run,” he mentioned, referring to a preferred childrens’ e-book sequence used to show children to learn in many years previous. Social media is taking part in an much more vital position on this 12 months’s election cycle than it has prior to now, political strategists say. Each the Democratic and Republican events have drafted content material creators, or influencers, to push info on their get together’s insurance policies and their candidates.
General, Trump outperforms Harris and her marketing campaign on X and TikTok primarily based on followers. The Harris marketing campaign’s official Kamala HQ account has 1.3 million followers on X, in comparison with Trump’s 2.4 million. Nonetheless, her marketing campaign has obtained over 100 million “likes” on its movies on TikTok versus Trump’s 44 million.
