Saad Amer Mobilizes Voters With Celebrities and Instagram Filters to Influence Votes
The social-media star and activist has turned out a huge rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Los Angeles over the past few months.
Salaheddin Mehsud. (YouTube/Salam, MBC)
When the Los Angeles Times reporter wrote a piece about the growing anti-Donald Trump movement in the city, she included a few stories from Salaheddin Mehsud, a popular social-media star and activist who is using Facebook and Twitter to mobilize voters, and even get celebrities on board with his campaign.
Mehsud, who has more than 50,000 followers on Facebook, appears in over 10,000 photos on Instagram with his name in large type, often with the hashtag #loveforSanders. He posts a weekly comic strip about the presidential campaign, and he is also using the platforms to speak out about the issues of today, including LGBT and immigrant rights.
The Sanders campaign has made much of the fact that Mehsud has received over 10,000 Instagram followers for the campaign and more than 300,000 total followers for all of his accounts.
Mehsud has also been in the news for having two Twitter accounts, @salaheddin_mehsud and @salam_mohammed. He has been quoted in articles and featured in national media, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and The New Yorker. He is active on Twitter, too, which he has been using to share news about the election. His tweets with the hashtag #LoveforBernie, for example, have been shared more than a million times.
While it is easy to say that social-media stars don’t have to do a lot of work to influence votes in elections, Salaheddin Mehsud definitely does the work.
In addition to using his social-media accounts to garner votes, he has also been doing work behind the scenes with a group called Salam Mohammad — a group that, for the past month, has been encouraging young people to register to vote.
“The work I’ve been doing with Salam Mohammad and other groups has been tremendous and powerful so far,” says Mehsud, who says, “I hope that over the years to come, the movement