Did Facebook and Twitter influence the General Election?
May 7th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe
As I took up my blunt pencil attached to a piece of string in the polling booth yesterday, and made a cross against my chosen candidate, it struck me how much Twitter and Facebook have enhanced my interest and understanding around this General Election, but similarly how far the UK still has to go before we can experience a truly, socially-connected election.
This was the first General Election where Twitter and Facebook played a part. They gave the electorate a new ‘voice’ aside from their vote, enabling them to freely discuss election issues in an uncensored environment within a much wider network of individuals.
Facebook set-up a live voter counter on its website (via a tie-up with the Electoral Commission) - according to the final tally, 107,892 Facebook users voted. A poll was also conducted through this group, aka the Facebook election, which saw Nick Clegg and the LibDems emerge victorious. Facebook groups and political pages have been hugely active - today a particularly active one seems to be ‘I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who want Proportional Representation - UK‘.
But how much of this social network activity and buzz was two-way conversation and engagement?
A comment on the BBC blog is telling:
“I asked questions via Twitter of the main parties, but no reply was ever returned. In fact, the only politician who replied was John Prescott. The political parties were treating Twitter just like another letterbox through which to poke leaflets - but failing to grasps the idea that such systems require two-way communication to be effective. I just felt ignored by them online.”
Today across Twitter in particular, and to a lesser degree Facebook, there seems to be a general feeling that today’s election results do not match with their political learnings and discussions over the past few weeks. BBC blogger, Rory Cellan-Jones, makes the same conclusion in his blog post: So was it an Internet Election?. He opens the post saying: “The verdict was already in, even before polling day. This was not an internet election, and all those who had suggested it might be had got it completely wrong. It was a television election, and all of those tweeters and bloggers were sad political obsessives talking to each other.”
Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly provided a gateway to political engagement, and importantly among the younger generation. A YouGov survey found that a quarter of 18-24-year-olds had commented on politics via social networks. But at the end of the day, this activity seems to have had little impact on the final election outcome.
Tags: facebook, general election, politics, Social networking, twitter, voting
May 10th, 2010 at 7:54 am
I think Rory is right to some extent, but this isn’t always about which media format ‘won’. What media commentators often forget is that a lot of people don’;t say anything much and then vote in secrecy, and may well be turned off by the massive media circus which now happens. Yet they may be very engaged with what happens through a variety of ways, on and offline