By Brianna Crosby
For anybody on twitter May 18th, you may have seen one of the top trends, #BernieLostMe. The Vermont senator and democratic presidential candidate started trending following an outbreak of violence at the Nevada Democratic Convention on Saturday.
Reports say that some of his followers were involved in at least one fight, threatened pro-Clinton supporters, and harassed the state party spokeswoman, Roberta Lange. Clinton supporters used the hashtag as backlash, and it took off. Anti-Bernie tweets ranged from calling him out on going against party members, to blaming him for the violence that occurred at the Democratic Convention.
Sanders’ campaign manager did formally speak about the events, condemning the behavior and denouncing violence all together. Sanders elaborated on the incident, and noted that there were justifiable reasonings as to why his supporters were upset. He claimed that his voters were being treated unfairly, and their voices and votes were not being heard or tallied.
All of this came a few weeks after one of Clinton’s SuperPacs contributed $1 million to social media campaigning, and some are speculating that those who were retweeting, and tweeting the criticisms of Sanders were paid to do so. Many accounts seemed to be new to twitter, having very few tweets aside from the ones concerning Sanders’ and Hillary’s rivalry.
The hashtag seemed to take a turn after it became popular. Sanders’ supporters began using it to preach the reasons why he would make a great president and why he has been the best candidate. They even compared his political work to Clinton’s as far back as the 1960’s. Sanders’ clan used pictures to depict why Sanders has always been a frontrunner in the push for social equality, and fighting financial inequality. One of Sanders followers even went as far as to call out Clinton for paying users to attack Bernie.