Recently, President Obama published a series of tweets urging Congress to compromise in the debt ceiling debates. In a single day, Obama lost about 36,000 followers. However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to his total list of followers, which number about 9.3 million on Twitter.

How He Lost Them

Compromise used to not be a toxic term. Most people agree that that’s how numerous people reach agreements. Nobody deserves to get 100% of what they want while somebody else gets 0%. If each side gives a little ground, both sides can get most of what they want.
However, Obama made the mistake of tweeting to individual GOP members of Congress. By calling them out by name, Obama knew he was going to antagonize those who opposed him, and if there’s one thing people hate, it’s being asked to sacrifice everything.
The 36,000 followers who stopped reading Obama’s tweets were never the liberal base. Instead, they were mostly conservative moderates who disagreed with his calls for slightly increased taxes and for calling the GOP out on a relatively hard-line stance over debt negotiations.

White Noise

The biggest problem with the tweets wasn’t the political nature of them – after all, the President is a member of a political party. Instead, some users felt “spammed” by the sheer volume of them. Going from GOP member to member, from state to state, required literally dozens of tweets within the span of a few hours. They were very similar in substance, so many members of Twitter stopped following President Obama.