The Controversial Potential of Social Media Before Elections

With the rise of social media in recent years, it has slowly become a tool to utilise in democratic elections throughout the world. In this essay I will arguing that politicians participating in these elections are not utilising it to its full potential. I will be arguing this as large parts of democratic elections are participation of the people and transparency and social media has the potential and ability to provide a platform for these to expand. In this essay I will be referring to elections that have occurred in the United States of America and Australia and discussing how the use of social media has fallen short in recent democratic elections.

The 2008 U.S. election was considered the first social media election and it saw America’s first African America president to be elected Barack Obama. While the 2008 election was the first social media election, only Obama ran an online campaign, due to this the essay will discuss the latest 2016 U.S. election as both Democratic and Republican candidates ran online campaigns. In the 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton ran as the Republican and Democratic campaign respectively and both utilised very different campaigns. Social media has become essential to modern political campaigns as it allows politicians in theory to talk directly to their constituents and have an open dialogue with them.

Twitter is the main platform that is utilised as it generally only allows for short dialogue with a 140 character word limits on ‘tweets’. This has the potential to have both positive and negative effects on different elements of election campaigns. The limited character allowance means that any general or policy announcements that are made have to be short and concise and are generally but in simple terms. This has positive and negative effects as with the announcements being short and in simple terms, this has the potential to allow those who are generally not included or participate in political discussion, a way into the dialogue and a better understanding of what is going on in the election. The negative of this is that because of the short concise statements a lot of the meaning behind the announced policy is lost and create a false narrative which a party or politician could win on, only for voters to realise after the fact that what they expected was not actually promised.

The 2016 U.S. election had a large presence on social media due to the controversy surrounding both candidates and the heavy presence on fake news. Barack Obama could not run for a fourth term due to restricts placed on how long a President could hold office. This led to the rise of multiple politicians running to become the democratic nominee. Hillary Clinton was nominated despite controversy during her campaign and a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) investigation in the use of a private email for confidential matters during her time as Secretary of State. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee was almost surrounding by large amounts of controversy with him having no political experience and multiple sexual assault allegations. Both of the candidate’s controversy were mention and repeatedly brought up on social media throughout their campaigns and was also subject of fake news articles from both sides of the debate. A benefit of social media was that it allowed a greater sense of transparency to be reached, which is a detrimental to a well working democracy. With less people consuming traditional media and 62% of U.S. adults only consuming news off social media, there was the potential that those who don’t consume the news would have never heard or discussed the wrong doings or potential wrong doings of each candidate, though this saw a raise in fake news articles.

The largest issue that can be found in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election is that while candidates used it to convey messages to their constituents, they never allowed for there to be open discussions about their election promises and focuses. Rather candidates and campaign teams used it as a marketing tool as it generally cost nothing to run adds on their own social media accounts and websites. In a way this makes the intended and primary use of social media, to connect others, redundant. For ability of social media to be completely maximised, campaigns need to work towards creating a dialogue between candidates and voters for it to truly have to impactful effect on their campaigns.

During the 2010 Australia Federal Election, the hashtag of ‘#ausvotes’ was used to discuss to what was happening around and during the election campaign. Different to American election campaigns that can last for nearly two years, Australia political parties only have 6 weeks to win voters over with election promises. With the addition of social media in recent years it has taken some of the pressure off running a full election campaign in such a short amount of time. The main issue with the use of ‘#ausvotes’ is that while it opened up a larger dialogue, it was mainly focused not on political discussion but rather on the performance of both politicians and mainstream media. This caused for the focus to be on journalists and how they interacted and conveyed information to voters rather than the interactions between voters and politicians.

The 2010 Australia Federal election was Australia’s first ‘social media election’ as social media campaigns where embraced by both major parties whereas in the 2007 election former Prime Minister John Howard rejected the use of a social media campaign and can be attributed and as well as a changing political scene to his loss in the election. While both Labor and Liberal had social media campaigns, the main drivers of the political discussion on Twitter was journalists. This is due to mainstream media being highly concentrated with there only being a few media corporations around Australia, which can lead to political bias among different media outlets as it is so concentrated.

Much like the American candidates mentioned earlier in the essay, Australian politicians use the platform mainly to broadcasting their party ideals and policy rather than to interact with voters. This is problematic as it diminishes the debate and discussion aspect of Twitter and becomes another ‘Facebook’ like platform and is utilised the same as mainstream media, without exurbanite advertising costs.

A way that media in Australia is changing this is programs on mainstream media such as Australian Broadcasting Network’s (ABC) program ‘Q&A’ in which politicians and journalists are invited on to a debate style setting and are moderated and asked questions from the audience and Twitter with the hashtag ‘#Q&A’. While this is primarily a mainstream media approach, it is inviting the idea of open dialogue with platforms such as Twitter in an environment they would otherwise be excluding from. This program and Twitter itself has the potential to allow regional voters and those in areas that generally ignored such as Western Australia (until the 2019 election, in which a federal debate was held in Perth, the first ever in Western Australia).

While social media, specifically ‘Twitter’ has the potential to enhance political and election debates in western democracies as discussed in the context of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and the 2010 Australia Federal election, it is being underutilised by all politicians regardless of political background. As social media campaigns become more streamlined and professional with dedicated teams and personnel, there is the need to expand what it can achieve for both side of politics in the context of the elections. Twitter and other platforms have the potential to carry political debates and candidates to winning elections if more politicians were opening to use it as a platform to discuss and converse with their voters. There is the ability for social media to humanise politicians in which some voters have become disenfranchised with due to political turmoil, especially in Australia with there being multiple leadership spills in previous years.

Both U.S. Presidential elections and Australian Federal elections in recent years not only demonstrate the short comings of the use of social media platforms such as Twitter by politicians and how the lack of interest in using it as a tool to interact with the people who are voting for them to enter office.