What can we learn from Mike Bloomberg’s campaign? There have been a number of pieces written dissecting Bloomberg’s failed run for president, and most of those pieces have focused on his enormous spending, his inept organization, or the link between both. While there’s much to learn from those analyses, I want to focus on a different part of Bloomberg’s campaign. We can learn a great deal from how Mike Bloomberg utilized social media.

Bizarre Videos, Insane Viewership

On 28 January 2020, the Bloomberg campaign’s twitter account posted a bizarre video of the candidate eating Big Gay Ice Cream. The post immediately went viral. The twitter commentariat retweeted and replied to the post mocking it and the Bloomberg campaign. The replies to the tweet were filled with posts calling the video “cringy” and “pandering.”

As of a month later, the video had racked up 2.1 million views. There were only 9 thousand comments and 3 thousand retweets. Even if every retweet was a quote tweet dragging him, backlash earned Bloomberg more than a 10x conversion rate. Mike Bloomberg played social media at their own game and won. Remember the bizarre Bloomberg as a meatball post? The same exact game. Ditto for the purposefully bad memes that Bloomberg’s campaign paid to have posted on Instagram.

Bloomberg’s British Counterpart

Critics of Bloomberg like to compare him to Donald Trump. Both are billionaire New Yorkers. Both like to be in the spotlight. Both have a tendency to be boorish. However, there is another figure in the Anglosphere who is a much better match for Mike Bloomberg: Boris Johnson. Trump by all accounts does strange things because he’s a genuinely bizarre and unpredictable person. Johnson, by contrast, does strange things strategically. In his 2019 takedown of Boris Johnson, John Oliver laid out how calculating Johnson really is and how he’ been playing a long con on the British media.

The weird outfits and crazy hair are purposefully done to disarm Johnson’s opponents and critics. They leave him immune to many attacks on his wealth and privilege. The same idea applies to Johnson’s bizarre claim that he paints model busses in his spare time. It was probably done to waste a news cycle and to gum up search results for a few days. Every move is coldly calculated to push an image while sending journalists chasing down rabbit holes to write about inconsequential stories. Sounds a lot like Bloomberg doesn’t it?

The Boris Effect

Kaitlyn Tiffany, writing for The Atlantic, claimed that Bloomberg didn’t understand internet culture. This is wrong: His team understood internet culture so deeply that they played it to their benefit. The Streisand effect occurs when someone tries to censor information, and in doing so accidentally publicizes the information. Similarly, Bloomberg is using what I will call the Boris effect, in honor of the British Prime Minister.

The Boris effect is the intended consequence of making a piece of content – a tweet, an op-ed, story in a shock jock outlet, etc – go viral because people want to criticize it or mock it on social media. The attention spawns a series of stories in online outlets like Vox and newspapers such as the Washington Post explaining why this thing went viral and what the criticism is. The end result of this cycle is a surge of traffic from people who want to read the piece of content that has caused so much ire. It often leads to a deflection from more serious criticism.

The Media, and Everyone else, got Played

Every bad meme that requires a story is a waste of increasingly limited person-hours in the major newsrooms across the country. Every story brings in clicks the original content would never have received. Every time Bloomberg’s post was ridiculed by the twitter Left, it was free publicity. When the mockery devolved into personal attacks online, Bloomberg used it as ammunition for attack ads. The media couldn’t help itself but gorge on Bloomberg created faux controversies. Bloomberg released a doctored debate video, tweeted fake Sanders quotes about Cuba, appeared to openly bribe Instagram influencers, and had numerous mockable moments like the Big Gay Ice Cream video. Every click was a victory for his campaign.

The Bloomberg campaign taught us that unlimited money can buy you a decent rise in the polls, but it can’t buy loyalty or lasting results. But we should also remember what it taught us about social media. The media and the online chattering class need to keep the Boris effect in mind through future political contests. Your outrage and your mockery can be effectively wielded as a tool, and Bloomberg’s campaign showed the unintended side-effects of amplifying viral political content.

Thank you to Jeremiah Johnson for his help in writing and conceptualizing this piece