Is #PresPollSL Our First Social Media Election?

Worlds are colliding all around us, all the time. It happens in culture, society and politics constantly evolving ideas, ideologies and loyalties. The mainstream media – newspapers, radio and television – have historically provided the contested space for this. In recent years, the web has become another realm for debate. As Sri Lanka completes two decades of commercial Internet connectivity in 2015, it is no longer elite or marginal: at least 20% of our population regularly goes online.

Literally billions of conversations unfold 24/7 on social media (SM). A survey in 2012 found three quarters of our digitally connected youth spend an average of 46 minutes a day on Facebook, the most popular SM platform in Sri Lanka (where most interactions take place within closed groups). Myriad interactions also happen on fully open social media spaces like Twitter (which involves text, images and videos), Instagram (images and comments), and YouTube (videos and comments).

What does all this chatter and sharing mean for our society as a whole? Do they provide just a welcome distraction from burning issues of the day, or is social and political discourse influenced by what is generated and shared on social media?

Nobody really knows. Lanka’s university-based media researchers, for the most part, have been blindsided
by their own prejudices to realise and analyse what is going on in cyberspace. Market researchers are more aware, even if their focus is determined mostly by specific needs of clients. Meanwhile, a vocal minority loves to implicate SM as a threat to our culture, public morals and even national security.

The net result: there is little evidence-based, dispassionate discussion on this altered reality. From advertisers and mainstream media to social activists and political parties, everyone seems to be guessing.

Campaigning Online?
Might the Presidential Election in January 2015 be a turning point in social media use in Sri Lanka? As I write this in mid December, the campaigns are getting into speed and it’s too early to tell. But this aspect is definitely worth watching closely. Ours is a politically engaged society where voter turnout at key elections is high, and the public seems obsessed with all matters political. Mainstream media have long catered to this interest – either for boosting their sales or serving political agendas (both lawful).

During the first half of the twentieth century, political discourse took place almost entirely at small group level or at political rallies. It was in the 1950s that newspapers entered the process noticeably, and press barons considered themselves king-makers (some were right, some of the time)…

Television’s arrival in 1982 provided another platform. Although it became a mass medium within a decade, and partial liberalisation in the 1990s ended governmental stranglehold of the airwaves, Lankan politics took a long time to warm up to it. Political talk shows became prominent during the last decade or so. Even now, most career politicians speak on TV as if addressing outdoor rallies. The few skilled in the art of TV debating are younger politicians, members of Lanka’s first TV Generation.

The web presents its own challenges to political players. Some will eventually master the art of turning their web followers into actual votes (as Barack Obama did in 2008). So far, no Lankan politician has grasped the full potential of the web or social media.

Oh sure, every other politician has a website and some also have a presence on Facebook. However, these are being used mostly in the ‘broadcasting mode’ of disseminating information and images, rather than for actually engaging the public.

Social Media and Youth Vote
In November 2013, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung’s Asia Media Programme, based in Singapore, published an interesting book titled ‘Social Media and Elections in Asia-Pacific: The Growing Power of the Youth Vote’. It brought together media researchers in 11 countries who probed how social media is reshaping electoral politics.

In their foreword, co-editors Alastair Carthew and Simon Winkelmann wrote: “There has been no ‘Arab Spring’ in Asia, but beneath the surface of political rhetoric the region is experiencing the gradual, if somewhat erratic, embracement of the power of social media in the electoral process. The rejuvenation, or awakening, of the youth vote in a number of countries examined in this book followed a path more benign than the Arab Spring, but nonetheless…a sea change is happening that is inexorably altering the face of electoral politics in the Asia Pacific region forever.”

Chanuka Wattegama and I contributed the Sri Lanka chapter in the book. We probed whether the youth vote and social media made a difference in the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) elections of October 2011. Our conclusion: “There is no unequivocal evidence to prove that the use of social media, on their own, significantly changed CMC election results. As with all election campaigns, the influences were many, varied and nuanced…”

At the same time, we noted how the social media enabled urban, tech savvy individuals from different social and cultural backgrounds to engage in the political discourse. That was significant when considering many young people today to be politically indifferent.

We added: “To that extent, this election may one day be seen as a turning point in electronic citizenship engagement in Sri Lanka’s governance and politics. For the moment, however, ‘offline’ factors dominate politics and economics in Colombo and elsewhere in Sri Lanka…” (Full paper is online at: http://wp.me/p3zUD-2sC)

Since then, the Indian general election of April-May and the Indonesian presidential election of July 2014 have provided more insight into what works (or not) in using social media for election campaigning.

The Indian experience highlighted the critical need to combine mass outreach with right messaging and engagement. Dr Ranjit Nair, CEO of Germin8, a company that works on big data analysis, was quoted by NDTV as saying, “If you see it broadly, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had a fantastic outreach to people, but they failed in their messaging strategy. The BJP on the other hand did not have much of an outreach earlier on (it changed in the latter months) but their message was one that the people wanted to hear, whilst the Congress woke up to the impact of social media messaging just too late.” He says that India’s first-time voters – numbering around 150 million, many among them digitally connected — wanted to hear a positive message. The new kids on the block, the AAP, spoke passionately about corruption and other problems plaguing the country, but “never offered any hope in the form of bringing about a change”.

While the 2014 Indian elections saw a glimpse of social media being used, Nair says it would be the 2019 elections where its power will be fully visible. “Five years down the line, political parties will have fully understood the importance of reaching out to the people in urban and rural India.”

Engagement Matters!
One thing is clear: it’s much more than a numbers game. Social media watchers now agree that engagement level is the key measurement of SM success for a candidate. That means that the number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans is not nearly as important as their social media interactions with supporters, how many people share the candidate’s message with their own network, and how much attention beyond social media (in important mainstream media) those actions receive.

Even good engagement is not a guarantee of electoral success. As India’s AAP found out, successfully garnering large numbers of social media followers does not necessarily translate to votes any more than curious crowds at political rallies do.

There is, however, an important difference: online, we the people are not simply by-standers or passive party loyalists. If we choose to exercise it, we have the power to question and even challenge our politicians.

And when we do so on public SM platforms like Twitter, our fleeting messages become part of society’s shared digital record. By using common hashtags — such as #PresPollSL – we can ensure they are sorted and archived better. Politicians and campaign managers may choose not to respond to SM
queries, but their silence itself would be telling. In the #PresPollSL campaign, JHU’s General Secretary Champika Ranawaka was the first politician to have Twitter Q&A sessions at regular intervals using the hashtag #Ask-Champika. After the first session on 28 November 2014, where several of my pointed questions went unanswered, I tweeted: “Good 1st try, but you were often aloof, verbose & evasive. Overall, in my view, u get C+”

When I remarked that the main contenders for the presidency were not engaging us much on social media, Prof Rohan Samarajiva (@samarajiva) replied: “Consider competing demands 4 candidate’s time in 1 month campaign. How many votes from tweeps?”

Maybe some campaign managers share that view, even though it would be unwise for politicians to ignore digitally savvy sections of society. Engagement takes time and effort but it is much better to have such smart-mobs (to use American writer Howard Rheingold’s term) on your side than working against you… Social media’s downside is that so much that circulates there can be speculation, fabrications or hate speech. Notwithstanding these drawbacks and rising cacophony, modern political campaigns cannot afford to ignore SM.

The challenge, as Sir Arthur Clarke put it years ago, is to “Exploit the inevitable!”