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Rand Paul's Epic Anti-Drone #Filiblizzard Actually Fizzled on Twitter

Why? First off, he called it a "Filiblizzard."

Rand Paul took to the Senate floor to wage an epic filibuster last night. For thirteen near-consecutive hours, the libertarian senator from Kentucky vehemntly protested President Obama’s nomination of Jon Brennan for CIA director, and his penchant for allowing targeted drone strikes on American citizens. But if you were skimming Twitter at the time, you might not even have noticed. In fact, despite hook-hungry blogs touting the role the social network played in the stunt, Paul's filibuster made for just a meager blip there.

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Paul’s political theater no doubt succeeded on some major counts—in a single day, Paul managed to literally double the amount of time Congress has spent discussing drones in its entire history. He earned the support of the anti-war left; Code Pink cheered him on, and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden briefly joined the debate. And he finally drew the press’s attention to an issue that has largely been ignored.

But the filibuster-watchers at the Atlantic noticed that he didn't fare as well on Twitter. The only hashtag that ever trended during the duration of the speech was #Senate—keywords involving “filibuster” or “Rand Paul” or the senator’s own preferred hash #filiblizzard, never did. In fact, over the entire course of the full-day filibuster, Topsy.com’s analytics show that over the 24-hour period after the filibuster began, there were less than 4,000 tweets made with the hashtag in total, around the world—and the vast majority of those were retweets, and originated from Paul himself.

This morning, news of Paul’s filibuster wasn’t even on the front page of Reddit, whose users are deeply sympathetic to this particular cause. The related top-voted entry was on page 2 by 10 am, and that was an item about Jon Stewart’s support for Paul's stand. To be fair, while the filibuster was in progress, the news was on the front page. But today, on Reddit, it’s almost like it never happened.

Image-based memes and other social media trade-ables were in relatively short supply, too: there was nothing to be found on Know Your Meme, though this Facebook image was proving to be popular. All in all, even with the breathless beltway media cheerleading—see Slate’s David Wiegel fawn over the filibuster, claiming that “Within hours, reporters who rarely covered drone policy were live-tweeting Paul quotes"—there’s little evidence that Paul’s crusade was as successful on social media as it was amongst politicos. The hashtag #Randpage that Wiegel cites in his piece was only used 267 times in total. That’s not quite viral.

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So how did Paul win the DC news cycle but still come up short in the Twittersphere?

First: “#Filiblizzard.” Really? Any social media manager could have told Paul that his hashtag was destined to flop, even if content-starved CNN did eventually write an online story about it. Just because it’s snowing in Washington doesn’t mean the rest of the world will care—or get it. It would’ve been much savvier to have melded filibuster with his subject, drones, seeing as how it’s a topic that Americans are quite anxious about. Imagine the damage #DroneBuster could’ve done.

But who knows? Maybe that wouldn’t have been enough, either. After all, Paul’s handicapped from the start. Most of the nation simply doesn’t care what senators do, even it's something dramatic like talking endlessly for hours, and there's a famous Jimmy Stewart movie about it. An event usually has to be imbued with cult of the presidency to draw mass public attention to Washington these days, especially when general opinion of Congress is at such a historic low and most people are sick of hearing about its nonsense.

Finally, Paul’s virality also probably suffered because, yep, he’s a Republican. Most social media users still skew Democrat, and even though Paul was championing issues that are dear to the left—due process and reining in drone warfare—fewer institutions and influential tweeters were likely to cheer Paul on, given his staunch Tea Party bona fides. The Democratic establishment was, of course, in staunch opposition, so sympathetic outlets or organizations stayed silent. Independent journalists and non-Democrat affiliated groups expressed support:

Fascinating day: Tea Party Senator filibusters torture-supporting CIA nominee over civil liberties, while Dem establishment mocks & fumes

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 7, 2013

But major Dem-leaning meme-pushers like Upworthy stayed mum. There's no snappy, shareable 2 minute vid on due process anywhere to be found on its pages today. Of course, conservative websites went all-Paul all the time: Daily Caller, Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, and, of course, Drudge, went nuts. But little of their enthusiasm seems to have trickled into mainstream feeds.

It’s an interesting divide to contemplate—a filibuster from a fiery senator over highly controversial subject matter should by all rights have been a Twitter sensation. But a few thousand tweets? There were probably more tweets about Michelle Obama’s bangs in the first three minutes they graced the camera than there were about the day-long anti-drone filibuster. Whether it’s our deep disinterest in Congress, general ambivalence about drones, poor social media marketing from Paul, or resistance from a Democrat-skewing Twittersphere, Paul’s #Filiblizzard fizzled.