Election season is upon us and the incumbent candidate, President Barack Obama, has taken to answer questions on the social news site Reddit. One of the more popular features on Reddit are ask me anything (AMA) posts where celebrities and interesting folks answer questions in the comments section of a submission. The President stated that he would partake in answering questions for about a half hour while on the campaign trail in Charlottesville.
To participate, the President set up an account titled “PresidentObama,” verified himself on Twitter and answered 9 different questions. A full list of all questions and answers can be seen on this thread. His most popular response was in regards to the space program:
The least popular answer from the President was in response to tax cuts for SMBs:
Overall, the post received a warm reception within the community with 118,059 “upvotes” on the post compared to the 109,310 “downvotes” for a sore of 8,749 as of 9PM EST. Traditionally, an AMA participant will truly answer anything rather then only a small subset of questions — something that may have accounted for the large number of downvotes. To the President’s credit, the site did have some uptime issues due to the heavy load and may have hindered some question answering.
Just how did this AMA happen? Well, apparently a good deal of staffers are actually Redditors as well. This isn’t the first time that President Obama has used social media to answer questions either. Last summer President Obama has had Twitter Town Hall and this January, he even hosted a Google+ Hangout, So far the President has been much more active than his opponent on social media. Obama is averaging 29 Tweets a day (compared to 1 Tweet from Mitt Romney) along with 8 blog posts (compared to 4 from Romney).
For more information see the official Reddit submission.
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