So far in these blogs we have considered social media in the context of a channel of communication. In traditional thinking the politicians and their parties would use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms to send their messages out to an audience. This would passively receive the message as any other medium, broadcast or print. In this digital election, though, all of that changed: social media became the aggregators of information, and the data itself part of the social glue that formed and bound communities of knowledge.
What this meant in practical terms was that items from the political news became the things by which we came to understand our own views and to articulate them to others in our social network. In this arrangement, audiences themselves became broadcasters, and increasingly the traditional broadcasters turned to social media to learn what was being said. The BBC in particular had recourse to Twitter in each of the high profile Leaders' Debates, identifying the key 'trending topics' as a way of gauging the extent to which the ideas on the TV had migrated to the screens of PC, laptop and mobile phone.
What hundreds of thousands of us seemed to be doing during the UK General Election was unconsciously replicating what teenagers have been doing since the advent of instant messaging services such as MSN and Yahoo! Messenger: we were consuming broadcast media while at the same time engaging in web-enabled social media. So through Facebook, YouTube, Myspace and Twitter we publicly laughed, cheered, yawned cried, booed and scowled ourselves into an understanding of what we were witnessing. The election was social learning in action. But while teenagers had been watching old episodes of Friends or repeats of Scrubs, their older siblings and parents were hooked into live news, party election broadcasts and political debates.
In this 2010 election the print media, for the first time, became largely marginalised in the process of opinion forming due to the advent of social media. While in 2005 we might have had to wait until the next morning to read how we should be evaluating the previous evening's news, in 2010 we had our social network on hand with their verdict. There were around 26 million UK voters active on Facebook, commenting, sharing links, supporting causes and generally airing their views. It might be thought that this process was a progressive one, but in fact it was mixed: a movement on Facebook called 'National Not Voting Conservative Day' was supported by around 178,000 people, but rejected by over 210,000 with a further 250,000 uncommitted. Social media provided voters with a range of tools with which to express their views and beliefs, but it is simply not true to say that these exclusively favoured Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the minor parties. Indeed the official Conservative Party group on Facebook had 100,000 supporters on election day, more than the Liberal Democrats and almost twice the number that Labour had gathered.
Once again it would be tempting to say that broadcast journalism had filled the gap left by print medium, and it is commonplace to hear it said that the Leaders' Debates were the 'game changer' in 2010. Once again, though, social media played a huge part in this, with many more voters consuming the debates vicariously through social networks and deciding on the basis of pictures, comments and movie clips who had won the argument. In our study we found the parliamentary candidates engrossed by the debates with some adding their views on Twitter every few minutes. Attempts by the old media to call the debates for one candidate or the other were invariably met with derision online, particularly if the verdict failed to correspond to the new 'world view' articulated by one's social network.
Broadcast media in 2010 continued to provide the headlines and narrative content on which social networks thrived. Key topics of conversation included incidents when candidates were found to be seriously off-message, for example in describing immigrants or homosexuals. But the process went further, and continued to disrupt existing journalist-audience relationships: in some cases audiences themselves judged what should and should not be reported, and insisted that the broadcast media complied. A telling example of this was the demand that they report on the views of Philippa Stroud, a Conservative candidate in Sutton, who allegedly held some unusual views on homosexuality: for almost two days as the campaign came to a climax the term #PhilippaStroud was the leading 'trending topic' on Twitter in the UK (ie the most talked about theme on the platform at the time). This fact in itself forced its way into the broadcast media and the story did find its way onto the BBC (Stroud, described as a Conservative high-flyer failed to capture the seat from the Liberal Democrats).
This incident serves to highlight another important aspect of the campaign and the role of broadcast media in it. News stories, rumour and gossip were surfacing continually during the campaign and in the aftermath, far more than journalists were able to get into their short TV or radio bulletins. Most of the better-known political correspondents and journalists supplemented their public offerings with extensive behind-the-scenes commentary on blogs, live online news feeds and Twitter posts. Channel 4 Neews's Jon Snow and the BBC's Nick Robinson had around 12,000 people following them on Twitter, while Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC had managed to gather 20,000. This gave audiences, candidates, party workers and others privileged access to information that never made it to the airwaves, or knowledge to share in advance to it being broadcast. This has been particularly the case during the post-election days when speculation surrounded the coalition talks taking place between Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour. Here it was not just that the print media was sidelined by events, but broadcast itself was being undermined by social media.
The final part of this new picture emerges from the other novel aspect of social media, the ability of audiences to talk back. We have alluded to the way in which aspects of the campaign ignored by the media were forced to their attention, as well as the way that audiences co-created new media phenomena such as the catchphrase “I agree with Nick”. In the immediate aftermath of the election, when there was a hiatus of several days as coalition deals were talked about, social media were mobilised by ordinary voters, party workers and politicians of all shades to encourage the negotiators to adopt particular courses of action. Once again the evidence of this could be seen in the trending topics on Twitter, where #dontdoitnick was aired constantly over several days.
The chorus continued after the deals were done, with audiences using the same channels that politicians had used to talk to them, to talk back. We noted several parliamentary candidates from our study being far more vocal on Twitter after the election than when the campaign was running. In one case a Liberal Democrat had a running argument about principles and betrayal with a former Green candidate, the row stretching over nearly two days. In this period social media were once again deployed with Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party all targeting disaffected Liberal Democrats via social media. No doubt other parties were similarly targeting disaffected Conservatives. Ironically, the loud dissenting voices in the Liberal and Conservative ranks were probably of great value to the party negotiators, each one able to show evidence to the other party the extent to which their tentative agreements were straining the loyalty of their party members.
Overall the larger picture of the new media environment in the 2010 election is confused. There was a blurring of boundaries between the web, broadcast and print media, with each platform involved in producing output for the other. Similarly, it was not always clear in social media who was the audience and who was the communicator. The dynamics of social communication meant that audiences became aggregators – usually uncritical echo chambers for messages and narratives that chimed with their world view. In an important sense we all became journalists or broadcasters, with social media empowering us to get our views across to a wider audience. As audiences we expected to be consulted, and broadcasters often obliged, faithfully reporting the reaction of what they called 'The Blogosphere'.
It has already been mentioned that the Leaders' Debates were said to be the 'game-changer' in 2010: this may be true in more ways than one. What we observed happening was that audiences were consuming the debates and their aftermath in a teenager fashion, establishing their viewpoints before, during and after by reference to their peer groups and other opinion leaders online. This process continued right up to and past polling day. As the results started to come in on the night of June 6th, large numbers of us stayed connected synchronously via FaceBook chat, IM and Twitter, digesting the implications of the unfolding drama into the early hours, by reference to others. In an important way what the Leaders' Debates did was to provide material, not to persuade us one way or another, but to take away and discuss in our small online huddles.
In a similar way, our earlier blogs about the extent to which Twitter delivered the vote can be said to have missed the point. What Twitter and other social media provided us with was a collection of ideas to kick around: but while the candidates may have thought that these messages were persuasive, in practice audiences took the ideas, talked about them and ultimately accepted or rejected them. In practice we believe that social media were generally effective in helping uncommitted voters to find a party or candidate to support. What was often lacking was a persuasive call to action: the virtual world delivered a virtual supporter that in many cases never made it to the polling station.
Finally, it is worth being clear that we are not suggesting that Twitter and other social media are now somehow a substitute for serious journalism. Twitter may have become part of the news, but there was little argument, reasoning and debate in evidence during and after the General Election (there is a limit to what can be argued in 140 characters anyway). Instead it often became an aggregator or echo chamber for the same partisan chants, forcing itself onto our attention through sheer volume or persistence. Ordinary voters, having been handed a microphone, were reluctant to return it after they had had their say. The short messages we received helped to reinforce our views, while the process of re-broadcasting them had an evangelising effect on many.
It is ironic that when the internet gives us almost instant access to information resources with which to check our facts, the immediacy of social media often means that we suspend our critical faculties and join in the chanting with the rest of our virtual tribe. An example of this was a posting from The Centre for Women & Democracy when the new regime was starting to allocate seats in government 12 May. The message gave comparative figures of the extent to which women were represented in cabinet in the EU “Spain 53% Germany 37% France 33% Neth 33% Italy 27% Greece 26% Belg 23% Ptgl 13% UK so far 0%”. This statement may have been true when it was posted early in the morning, but in the space of a few hours it had been rebroadcast uncritically at least 600 times, probably many times that number where Twitter users removed the @CWD attribution. Indeed it was still circulating widely, unamended, as an admittedly small number of women were appointed to the British cabinet, and and even the following day. Chanting is no substitute for journalism, and providing audiences with access to the real information does not alter the facts that many of us prefer to rely on our friends and relations.
13 May 2010
The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the 2009 European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.
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