The 2016 election season is a great time for cartoonists. #trumptoon is already a famous hashtag on social media, but Clinton isn’t being spared by cartoonists either. Not surprisingly, a major theme for them is the email server controversy.
Cartoon #Trump #Clinton pic.twitter.com/ydfbpsWbZf
— Nadja Atwal (@TheNadjaAtwal) August 8, 2016
Political Cartoons Play Up Physical Features
In addition, Trump and Clinton both have prominent physical features that are great fodder for cartoonists. In a CBS interview, Los Angeles Times cartoonist David Horsey says that a cartoonist starts with someone’s face. Hillary “has a round face, a moon face; kind of small mouth, big eyes… There’s sort of, I don’t know I’m going to get in trouble for this, there’s a sort of a ‘Midwestern mom’ look to her.”
Hillary has two big things going for her: her X chromosomes and her unhinged opponent. https://t.co/fnWdMopFUq pic.twitter.com/4rZjB4qzRF
— David Horsey (@davidhorsey) June 7, 2016
Art historian Henry Adams thinks that social media has a big impact on the popularity and proliferation of political cartoons, as there are so many more relatable moments, moments when a candidate is not as composed as they should be and the content can be widely distributed and consumed …. “We are communicating more with word and image.” Adams said.
Joe Heller’s cartoon (below) illustrates this. It went viral quickly obtaining in one day over 45,000 likes on the Huffington Post, 8,300+ likes on Mashable, and his original Facebook post was shared over 4,000 times. Clearly, cartoons are engaging social media content.
#RiggedSystem
Another topic that is popular on social media these days is the Olympics. Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich depicted Trump participating in the Olympics. His cartoon was tweeted and retweeted by thousands including Raju Narisetti, SVP Strategy at NewsCorp.
Another brilliant cartoon by @mluckovichajc. Gotta be one of my favorite favs so far in 2016. #RiggedSystem pic.twitter.com/4P7TrBMNo0
— Michael Leo Owens (@milo_phd) August 9, 2016
The social curation of cartoons
Readers love to go to social media to engage with cartoons. For example, while most tweets by the Guardian get about 25 retweets, cartoons on the Guardian easily get 50 retweets and often they get several hundreds of retweets. You can use the Crowdynews platform to curate cartoons and feature them on your website. Instead of going to social media to find cartoons, your readers can read them on your own website. In a nutshell by using Crowdynews, you can become the go-to place for any social content, including political cartoons.
Our platform is very versatile, allowing you to display cartoons in real-time or sorted by popularity. Whitelisting the content is an option. This enables you to cover very specific themes. For instance, you could cover the email server scandal by whitelisting the content with related keywords such as email and server.
Want to learn more about how you can easily use social media content for your articles? Book a demo with us by clicking the button below.
Are you from outside the United States? No problem. Our social curation platform can easily be used to curate content in other languages like Dutch.