Clinton tunes out the trolls during Facebook forum
The difference between online public forums and in-person public forums made itself jaw-droppingly clear Monday when Hillary Rodham Clinton threw herself out to the wide world on Facebook for a question-and-answer session.
The former first lady and secretary of state, usually surrounded by handlers at live events, found herself peppered in the Internet universe with questions about her breast size, sex habits, and whether she’d rather fight a horse or a duck.
Amid the bilge were plenty of serious, sometimes erudite queries on Israel, the Citizens United ruling and abortion rights — many of which the possible 2016 presidential candidate answered carefully and without making news.
On Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. prison for suspected Islamic militants? “I supported closing it,” Clinton wrote. On abortion? “We need to continue the fight to give women the right to choose.”
She said she’d consider working to overturn the Citizens United ruling, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave corporations wider rights to contribute to campaigns. And she agreed with President Obama that Russian President Vladimir Putin bears some responsibility for last week’s downing of a Malaysian jet in Ukraine.
Pet-friendly
On the lighter side, Clinton said she lets her three dogs jump up on the sofa.
And there was plenty of outright fawning from commenters: “Can’t wait to vote for you to be President Clinton!”
But the insults and foolishness stood out in the 353 comments and questions rolling into the half-hour forum on Clinton’s book-tour Facebook page, conducted live from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.
“How big are the hooters?” one commenter posted. “Would you rather fight 1 horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses?” asked another.
Clinton ignored the gibes.
“There’s no screen,” Ken Goldstein, political professor at the University of San Francisco, noted dryly.
Commenters who appreciated the serious parts found the forum limiting, but not without merit.
“I think it has potential,” Laurynda Ann Williams, an Idaho artist, told The Chronicle. But she said she “hated the trolls in the comment sections.”
The forum was conducted during Clinton’s tour promoting her book “Hard Choices” — a tour generally seen as a way to keep Clinton’s profile prominent in preparation for a 2016 presidential run.
“This book tour is a mini-launch for a presidential campaign, and practice for a presidential campaign,” Goldstein said. “This is spring training for her.”
Twitter visit
Later in the day, Clinton stopped by Twitter’s San Francisco headquarter for a session that contrasted with the troll-laden Facebook chat.
As Clinton sat before an audience of Twitter employees, a company manager brokered queries from a range of people, including actress Amy Poehler and Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani women’s rights activist who survived a Taliban assassination attempt. The live setting eliminated snark, but the biggest laugh line came from Clinton herself — about enduring snark as a woman in politics.
“If a woman wants to be in the public arena, she needs to grow skin as thick as the hide of a rhinoceros,” she said. “And I have certainly, as you can tell, had to learn how to do that — and there’s a lot of good moisturizers I can tell you about if you’re interested.”