This is how social media works. When we see things we don’t like, we screech in horror and recoil in disgust. Whether it’s deliberate or not, we end up creating polarised, inward-looking habitats by snubbing dissenting voices – even if said voices belong to our own friends and families.
As a result, Twitter and Facebook become a series of barely overlapping Venn diagrams of political belief, and taken as a whole they can’t be guaranteed to be representative of anything. Given this, it seems farcical that, once again, next week’s vote has been dubbed "the social-media election".
With neck-and-neck real-world polling between the Tories and Labour, pundits look to social media for hints as to the way things might swing, and they’re left gobsmacked by the potential for analysis. The Conservatives have 430,000 Facebook likes, but Ukip is hot on their heels with 418,000. Pictures of Ed Miliband’s face superimposed on to celebrities’ bodies are getting a LOT of retweets. #WhyImVotingUkip is trending. These are all facts, but attempting to extrapolate meaning from them is pointless. A broadsheet headline from September 2014 that read "Yes campaign winning social media battle in Scotland" tells us all we need to know.
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And yet these figures keep being reported. Labour is the most talked-about party in April, according to one analytics firm. But what does that mean? Mentions doesn’t equal popularity. The Nepalese earthquake wasn’t trending on Twitter because we thought it was great. We need to take sentiment into account. So, who generated the largest number of positive conversations in April? The answer: the Conservatives. And who generated the largest number of negative conversations? Apparently it was the Conservatives. Oh.
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The political parties have all been criticised in recent weeks for failing to embrace social media effectively, but given that these media are a collection of chaotic political echo chambers, you can hardly blame them for haring around marginal constituencies instead. Last week’s attempt at a viral by the Tories – a screenshot of a fake text-message conversation between Alex Salmond and Ed Miliband – was widely shared, and thus probably counts as a success ("Yes, boss, they’ve really been engaging with our content today, I’ll have a report with you by 4pm"), but I only ever saw it presented as an object of ridicule. Then again, I would. Because I’m in a left-wing social-media bubble.
Twitter and Facebook equals people, so it’s not surprising these services are deemed to be hugely important for conveying political messages. But even people who worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns have asserted that it wasn’t social media that won him two elections; it was more traditional methods. The irony of the awesome connecting force of social media is that it can cut us off politically. We’re the converted being preached to, our existing beliefs and prejudices reinforced. You can base an electoral prediction on that if you like, but regardless of likes, favourites or retweets, the only numbers that matter are the ones that start appearing online a week today.
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