Seeking the Presidency, Bernie Sanders Becomes Facebook Royalty Through Quirky Sharing [View all]

[yuiyoshida]

WASHINGTON — The quotations he posts, rarely pithy, are often sayings he thinks up in the shower. The photographs he puts up sometimes show him frowning, while others show him gazing oddly into the horizon. And he does not seem to care about the importance of videos.

But somehow, Bernie Sanders, the 73-year-old senator from Vermont, has emerged as a king of social media early in the 2016 presidential campaign, amid a field of tech-savvy contenders.

His Facebook posts attract tens of thousands of likes and shares, and threads about him often break through to the home page of Reddit, where the cluster of topics rarely focuses on presidential election politics.

“I’m a grumpy old guy,” Mr. Sanders joked when explaining his approach to posting online. “I know that people talk about their cats and ‘I’m walking to the grocery store and getting a can of chicken soup’ and ‘this is so exciting.’ By and large, we have not done that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/us/politics/bernie-sanders-wants-to-be-president-but-hes-already-facebook-royalty.html?smid=nytpolitics&_r=0