The Role Of Social Media (Facebook) In Edo State Governorship Election Of 2015

Facebook, which is an American online social media and social networking site, was establiashed on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. On the planet today, all types of media and their devices are considered vital elements that advance majority rules system and great administration. Through the media, the voice of the general population, and also their considerations on political issues are reverberated. There is additionally a clear cooperative energy between the new media instruments accessible today and the political existence of individuals, and it commonly sets the phase for a powerful, intelligent and destructive adaptation of political correspondence.

For the ordinary man in sub-Saharan Africa, this detail makes the new media a favoured decision as a stage of articulation and hotspot for news. Similarly for some political on-screen characters it turns into a road to contact the general population at an altogether less cost as far as cash and calculated. It likewise makes it simple to convey as a toolbox for political purposeful publicity and also bridle social understanding. Along these lines, the utilization of the new media in the present political space is fairly imperative to every single political partner. The Electorate, Political Parties, the Electoral Management Bodies (EMB), Civil Societies, the Media and the Worldwide Community all discover use for it. General classes of new media apparatuses being referred to incorporate the Social Media, Texting Services and Big Data Analytical apparatuses to say a couple. They comprise of our regular apparatuses for portable correspondence adequately changed and repurposed for political correspondence. As a rule, they do not require much overhead as far as cost, nor is their utilization compelled by geographic space and time.

Election can be defined as a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.

Election is a very critical tool in politics because it is through elections that people choose who they want to rule over them and this is mainly seen in a democratic system in order to select their representatives. So far, the candidates have used different ways in order for them to tell the citizens to vote them into power, some do it by placing posters, making adverts on TV and also on radios, publishing their advert on newspapers and magazine. Billboards ads and brand sponsorships etc but the most known way for campaigning is through social media.

It is said that over a billion people in the world are on one social media or another and are fully active and therefore because the candidates know full well that a lot of people get their information online they post their campaigns online for people to see and be fully aware of their plan to rule and what they plan on acquiring over the years that they are going to run for.It is imperative to bring up here that online life is anything but another idea. There have been a decent number of online networking stages before Face book Twitter, YouTube and others. A portion of these stages incorporate Classmates, Sixdegrees, and Ryze. Then, the 21st century has seen the advancement of new types of online life systems controlled by the web, for example, Face book, YouTube and Twitter benefit among others." The development of these new types of social media upset numerous parts of human correspondence. Along these lines, social media have turned into a common piece of the regular day to day existences of individuals everywhere throughout the world ". Allen (2012) and Scholz (2008) have contended that “web based life applications are not new and that their starting points can be followed two years sooner than 2005. They additionally included that Blogs were at that point around toward the finish of the 1990's, the wiki innovation was suggested by Ward Cunningham in 1994 and first discharged in 1995; long range informal communication locales as of now existed in 1995 furthermore, Google was established in 1999 ". This suggests that internet based life isn't as new as individuals have been made to get it.A basic examination of the rising pattern in the utilization of online life for the most part in Nigeria demonstrates that online networking, for example, Face book, Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApps, Twitter, Blog, MySpace, YouTube and Instagram are not any more mostly social with the basic role of making and empowering investment in social organizing locales for individuals to mingle and look at what companions are doing, however, have rather, turned out to be ground-breaking apparatuses for political correspondence and commitment, and a valuable methods for policing decision brings about Nigeria and by augmentation, veritable instruments for dynamic political cooperation. In this example, web based life wound up not just "destinations of information‟‟ giving numerous Nigerians with political voice yet in addition "locales of activity".

Also the 21st century online life have not recently been a minor wonder on the internet; it has moreover turn out to be a piece of our day by day schedule. Social media have impacted this age with the end goal that a few people can't manage without going on the web in an entire day thus for such people, one can state they are enormously instructed, educated furthermore, impacted by internet based life intentionally or unknowingly. As called attention to by Hinton and Hjorth (2013:2), “Online life impacts the manner in which we think experience and practice 'online media'. It is never again a minor type of youngster mingling - it has turn into an basic some portion of our regular daily existence which has impacted how we reflect and lock in with companions, family, associates and even do governmental issues. “Government officials have swerved from the utilization of the old media for example, the print (daily papers) and the electronic media (TV and radio), to the utilization of the new media amid electioneering to complete their political objectives. Today, government officials have grasped the utilization of Social Media, which is one of the quickest ICT instruments in the 21st century to achieve their goals during the election.

Face book has helped some countries with their election process as well as it goes a further way in elections because it is seen that people participate more in social media and that’s where a lot of people get their information from.

In places like Edo state and some villages which are in Edo need to also be able to get information easily as people who are in Lagos state or Abuja. People are not fully aware about the things that are going on in their state or how the people who are ruling them think or what they say or what their next move will be for the betterment of the state.

Most people cannot even read and write and they know nothing about technology or even how to use a phone or anything about using a computer, the just go about with their day to day activities without knowing what is going on around them.

For instance during the last Edo governorship elections some people were carrying around a fake result from the elections and were announcing it on twitter and spreading it to everybody what the result was and because the issue was something that did not really require the need to be published on the newspaper or to go to the TV channels for INEC went on twitter and said that “ it has come to the attention of the Independent National Electoral Commission that some persons have started publishing the result of the governorship elections, such result should be disregarded as only INEC or its designated officials to do so. “ this was what INEC posted on twitter during that time on social media in order to pass across that information and people that already heard about the fake results from one person or another who do not have social media accounts or a good network won’t have been able to get that information and know that it was not true. This is why we need to ensure that a lot of people should be educated about the role social media plays in politics down to our everyday lives.