PS21 Report: Social Media and Politics

Social media can generate the momentum to change minds, policy

and even governments.
It is, however, no longer the "Wild West" it was five years ago.
Successful (sometimes) for single issue campaigns, less clarity on
its use for swaying elections.
Can lead users and media to an "echo chamber" that reinforces
views rather than informs.
Campaigns
can
produce
a
wide
range
of
unintended
consequences.
Can prove a useful tool to boost voter turnout.
Little clarity on how space will evolve. Some platforms -- including
Twitter -- might simply vanish.

On Monday, 18 May 2015, the Project for Study of the 21 st Century (PS21) held a
discussion on Social Media and Politics.
A full transcript can be found here.
The panelists were as follows:
Peter Apps (Chair): PS21 Executive Director.
Tim Hardy: technical writer, commentator and activist: beyondclicktivism.
Sandy Schumann: Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social
Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Jonn Elledge: Journalist at the New Statesman and Editor of City Metric.
Please feel free to quote from this report, referencing PS21. If you wish
to get in touch with any of the panelists, please email
PS21Central@gmail.com.
Over the last decade, social media platforms have redrawn both politics
and business on the Internet. How exactly they have done so -- and how
sustainable that might be -- still remain extremely poorly understood,
however. Question marks remain over the sustainability of some of the

most popular social media channels, particularly Twitter. In some cases,

the political effect of social media campaigns can be transitory at best.
What is clear is that it has represented a major challenge to more
conventional "top-down" media, information and political structures. It
has also proved relatively difficult to control.
Sandy: Institutions, formal leadership, and hierarchical structures have become
less important. People just act on personal interpretations and rationales, find
each other, and can co-ordinate... actions.
Theres evidence from Spain (the Indignados) and from the Arab world (Tahrir
Square)... [We] know that Facebook played a role -- in addition to word of mouth
-- in getting people out on the street. #kony2012 [raised] millions and millions of
dollars and... awareness for Africans and [a] conflict in Africa that probably noone had ever heard of.
Tim: ... It makes me think of that description of the revolutionary mob: that you
try and ride the tiger. You cant really control it because it is, on some levels, a
genuinely spontaneous outpouring of individuals and, as such, there is no way
that you can guarantee that you can steer the outcome of anything...
If you decide its not going the way you want theres no way of saying: Lets
drop this campaign and try something different. You can try a second campaign
but you never go viral twice.
The space is now much more crowded by governments and corporations
that it was only a handful of years ago. That may have a somewhat
stifling effect on debate, innovation and political activity, particularly
on the fringes.
Tim: Social media, particularly five years ago when it was still relatively new, felt
very much like everything was up for grabs. There was very little commercial
engagement with platforms like Twitter. Businesses didnt really know how to
manage it. Media companies didnt really know how to engage. Obviously,
theyve moved in and filled that vacuum.
Media coverage of the UK election shows some of the risks in being too
focused on social media. For all users, it risks becoming an "echo
chamber" in which they simply receive the views of those with whom
they already have a great deal in common.
As users become increasingly aware they are in the public eye, they
may also become less honest about the views and image they present.
Social media can encourage groupthink.
Jonn: There is a great tendency within the media... for [a] kind of echo chamber
effect... Until the exit poll came out, basically the entire country had convinced
itself that a hung parliament was inevitable... And we were all massively wrong.
And I think one reason for that is that wed been repeatedly reinforcing that
impression, not just through newspapers but minute-by-minute on Twitter and
Facebook... Its very easy for something to harden into a received wisdom.

Sandy: On Facebook people are usually quite aware of who their audience is. So
if your friends believe that most of their friends are leftwing they will perform an
identity that their friends appreciate and may not be expressing their political
views.
Tim: At the moment social media has this extraordinary role... in many peoples
lives, in that it is a performance space... We are creating a public persona which
is something historically very few people ever had to do, whereas now an
ordinary person... [has] one eye on... future employment prospects... They are
curating their relationships with one another, they are self-censoring and they
are saying things they dont necessarily believe...
Social media is at its most effective in one-off, quick-burning
campaigns. For all the talk of "slacktivsm", those who joined such
campaigns are often highly motivated and willing to do more to make a
difference.
Sandy: Id like not to use [the term "slacktivism"] anymore... because it refers to
a notion of being unmotivated to act, and my own research showed that people
who do engage in those quick and easy actions like signing a petition or liking a
Facebook page are actually motivated to make a difference.
In 2010-11, UK protest group UKuncut successfully grabbed attention
with multiple flash mob occupations of stores run by companies they
accused of evading British tax. While the protests themselves
eventually died out -- in part due to more aggressive policing and a
series of arrests -- they had successfully influenced the overall political
climate
Tim: From nothing, people would self-organize, and find one another, and could
then go and close down Boots, or TopShop, by demonstrating in a very nonaggressive, playful kind of way that always played well with the media... In the
run-up to the election, in particular, we saw both Labour and the Conservatives
accepting that there was money to be found from the [tax-evasion] schemes and
that the public was against them.
It is difficult to repress information, whether through censorship or
legal means such as libel threats or court-based "superinjunctions"
designed to criminalise certain information on privacy grounds.
Jonn: One of the best uses of Twitter... was three to four years ago when the
Guardian ran a story that basically said: There is something we are not allowed
to tell you. It is in the parliamentary records but there are reporting
restrictions.... Twitter managed to take this piece of information and find out
the exact details of who had taken an injunction out and why in the space of
about 45 minutes.
The evidence of social media's effect on elections themselves is
equivocal at best. Not everybody wants a colossal onslaught of political
comment and information.
Tim: ... If the last elections show anything, its that the ability of social media to
win an election is very much up for question. Twitter is for whatever reason left-

leaning and Labour-supporting, while Facebook is far more conservative, and the
Conservative party invested very heavily in ad campaigns on Facebook, which
obviously had some influence as well, but we dont know what that influence
was.
Sandy: ... We know from the US at least that people in general dont appreciate
political commentary on Facebook, and they dont want to be convinced or
persuaded on Facebook.
Still, it can have an effect -- not least in encouraging larger numbers to
vote and highlighting any perceived or actual attempts to rig the
process.
Sandy: We... know that particular cost-benefit analyses are involved in voting or
any other form of political behaviour... so definitely having access to information
is much easier and quicker and has changed those calculations. [An experiment
on Facebook showed] that in 2010, during the congressional elections in the US,
there were about 40,000 additional votes being raised just by adding an I
Voted icon on Facebook.
Jonn: ... In the US presidential election in 2012 there were reports in social
media about much longer queues outside polling stations in predominantly
African-American areas than there were in white areas. I have no idea whether
anything sinister was going on, but just the suspicion that something might have
been meant that the people sort of pushed back really hard and were wiling to
stand in that queue for a very long time just to make sure that their vote was not
taken from them...
Some campaigns have had second-order effects which no university
student in the Midwest tweeting #bringbackourgirls or #kony2012 could
imagine.
Emmanuel Akinwotu (audience): In Nigeria [the #bringbackourgirls
campaign] played out as a political agent... An insecure government was really
spooked by it... To the wider world it was a huge thing... Protests took place in
London and Washington and all over the world...
There were a number of things [the former Nigerian government] failed on but
[the security situation] played the biggest role in discrediting its legitimacy and I
think a lot of that was down to the way the #bringbackourgirls campaign
galvanised public opinion.
Peter: #kony2012 had almost the opposite effect: it increased international
support for the anti-LRA campaign, which meant that it secured Musevenis
position and strengthened his hand in domestic politics.
There is such a thing as too much information.
Sandy: Having a lot of information about how your government is doing and
comparing that to governments around the world can actually discourage people
from getting engaged in politics and voting because they feel like they cant
change much...

Tim: One thing that a lot of people complain about is this kind of information
fatigue... Which is why... Facebook has algorithms that have an inherent bias...
they want you to be entertained and amused to keep you there, so anything
nasty, like a riot, they just wont talk about...
Users only get part of the story.
Jonn: If you are... responsive to stories that are more liberal or left-wing, then
Facebook will give you those stories and it will give you the comments, and it will
promote material that matches your beliefs.
... Its easy to look at something like Twitter and think its democracy, but its
not... There will be campaigns that kind of got lucky, where... [a person with
clout] spotted it at an early stage and put rocket boosters on it... There will be
dozens of equally worthy... causes that just never manage to get that far, that we
therefore dont have the faintest idea [about].
Tim: ... Its very hard to keep up with all of it... Its stories that are quick and
easy... [that] will spread... Anything that requires a greater degree of
engagement, that will challenge your ideas and is more complicated, is less likely
to get a hearing...
Whilst also leaving individuals exposed.
Sandy: It is possible to reverse engineer people's behaviour on Facebook.
Jonn: I think a significant birth... is Snapchat... Where theres no record of
anything. So a lot of teenagers... [who] dont really want anyone to be able to
look at the kind of things they are sending each other... prefer that to something
like Facebook or Twitter, where there is a paper trail.
Tim: Maybe we could see a massive kind of Balkanization, whereby people move
into very strong filter bubbles, where they only want to hang out with people that
they know... I can imagine a social media platform thats completely encrypted:
that BuzzFeed cant look at to see whats trending but neither can GCHQ or
NSA...
There is no single established definition of what "social media" actually
means. Different elements work in very different ways. Twitter is
heavily used by journalists but its user base is highly unrepresentative
and its business model unproven. Facebook has by far the deepest
penetration, used by left and right wing and young and old alike albeit
in very different ways.
Tim: The two big beasts [are] Twitter and Facebook... but obviously theres a
whole world of different platforms out there... The way that the media has
adapted to the environment means even things like comments on websites have
aspects of social media these days...
Weve been here before. Weve had dominant platforms and they vanish: such is
the nature of the Internet...

Jonn: Facebook... [is] profitable... I think we have to consider the possibility that
[Twitter] is just not going to be there in five years time because it couldnt make
any money.
What remains to be seen is whether the social media trend will last -- or
in what form. In such a fluid environment, further rapid change is
inevitable.
Tim: Anything that is self-organising like this... can run out of momentum very
quickly...
Sandy: I know computer scientists who are basically working on... putting
together [the formula for the perfect tweet] and I dont think they are too far
off...
Jonn: I wonder... If you ever work out what the perfect tweet is, does the perfect
tweet change?
Report by Crisa Cox. Transcript by Carrie Cuno, Rhea Menon and Vanessa
Pooudomsak.