As this became less strategically beneficial, campaigns moved away from traditional, overt forms of control.
Campaigns, because they are accustomed to using publicly-available tools, are at the mercy of the affordances provided by these tools. While the 2010 version of Facebook allowed for more severe limiting of politicians pages on the backend—controlling who can post and where they can do so—they lost some of these capabilities after the UX change.
Even beyond technological shifts, campaigns’ available means of control were also colored by the organizational changes that began to hit campaigns in 2010, with the rise of digital media strategy as in-house campaign staffers. Occurring in races as technically advanced as Obama’s 2012 race, the cultural differences between communications and digital teams often had ripple effects. During decisions about how much control should be wielded do arise, organizational divides usually occur along professional fault lines; those with traditional communications or press backgrounds on one side, and those who have come up as digital specialists on the other.
As a result of this push to become more deeply dedicated to openness, campaigns began to engage in indirect control which involves allowing for the actions associated with deliberation—spaces to voice opinions, disagree, and engage in reciprocal communication—while also exerting great power in setting an agenda that is of strategic benefit to the campaign regardless of topics’ importance to the public. Far from a strategy that the higher-ups in most campaigns wanted to deploy, the move toward more open interaction with citizens was part of of a cultural shift in campaigns that was an unforeseen consequence of organizational changes.