How will bloggers and social networks affect how the coming election will be reported?
It’s 2005. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook haven’t been invented, blogs are only read by geeks, and WebCameron isn’t even a twinkle in the Conservative Party’s eye. It’s the General Election and social media doesn’t exist.
Five years on and the digital landscape is very different. Some 50 million tweets and 55 million Facebook posts are created every day. The major political blogs all have traffic in the thousands. Gordon Brown’s smiley YouTube video, and others in a similar vein, amass countless hits.
Messages of 140 characters or fewer are in vogue and Sky News considers new digital platforms important enough to employ a designated Social Media Correspondent. So what impact will these new platforms have on the way the 2010 General Election is reported? Will it be “The Tweet Wot Won It”?
Bloggers’ political conversation
Undeniably, new media platforms act as news sources, informing inquiry and providing stories. Political editor for the Guardian, Patrick Wintour, openly acknowledges this influence. “Social media will break stories that will be picked up by mainstream media,” he says. A prime example was Andrew Marr asking Gordon Brown about his use of anti-depressants – this was based on a rumour started in the blogosphere.
As Westminster officials fine-tune plans to allow certain bloggers into Parliament, their part in the political conversation cannot be denied. Once dismissed as web geeks, they are now considered experts. Guido Fawkes, author of the gossipy right-leaning blog, is regularly asked for comment. “Political punditry is no longer opinion formers from newspapers, but bloggers,” he says.
For his blog, Fawkes reads over 300 RSS feeds a day. Bloggers have the time to get stories that journalists can’t. Adam Bienkov, author of Tory Troll, regularly finds scoops by meticulously reading paperwork. For instance, over the Downing Street bullying allegations, Bienkov exposed the Conservative bias of the National Bullying Helpline, undermining the BBC story.
The power of Twitter
Can Twitter, with sound bites of a mere 140 characters, compete with the blogs? Alberto Nardelli, director of Tweetminster – a site that condenses tweet feeds to give stats and graphs – thinks it’s more powerful. He calls Twitter “open, messy, conversational and essential”.
“It has more reach and distribution, and so ultimately more influence,” he says. His site measures levels of public interest, and shows which topics are hot and who is saying what around issues of the day. Hashtags, which flag up different themes, opinions or jokes, such as “#CashGordon” or “#I’veNeverVotedToryBecause” highlight what people are tweeting about most globally. The anti-Tory hashtag was one of the top 10 most popular subjects worldwide; as the Conservatives launched their new ad campaign, tens of thousands of people around the world launched anti-Tory tirades with this hashtag.
A “live” campaign
This is the real difference afforded by new media platforms. 2010 will be a “live” campaign. As Matthew Macgregor, director of Blue State Digital, the company that ran Obama’s digital campaign, said, “politicians are always on”. The immediacy of social networks means that mistakes are both more visible and more audible. We have already seen numerous examples of politicians rashly pressing ‘send’ or ‘share’, leaving their spin department reeling.
Take Labour MP David Wright’s tweet that Conservatives are “scum-sucking” and the media furore that followed. That’s the “gotcha” moment which follows each faux-pas. As political journalism expert Professor Ivor Gaber puts it, “every time a politician makes a gaffe, someone will be on hand to record it and upload it somewhere.” There is enormous scope for opportunistic people to capture politicians. This means that rather than there just being a hundred or so voices from the Westminster village, there are thousands or millions.
Ruth Barnett, social media correspondent for Sky, thinks this will be decisive: “I hope web users and voters will change the face of election reporting – by using their phone to break news or capture a must-see moment on video.” There are countless ways to virally spread this information. One such example is Eye Spy MP, the Twitter feed that “crowd sources” political gossip.
Unreliable
But who is behind Eye Spy MP, and how much of it can be believed, is unknown. This is the danger with all new media. It is considerably less reliable than mainstream platforms. Twitter and Facebook are particularly risky. Last year newspapers were fooled into reporting that David Milliband tweeted about the death of Michael Jackson, and they splashed his words over the front pages. Twitter demands rigorous checking. Rather than coming from an attributed source, there is just a name on a screen. “It is not a wire service,” says Sky News political correspondent Niall Paterson, “even though a lot of people use it that way”.
“The reality is that in the UK social media in its complete infancy,” adds Paterson. Its unreliability means that people will continue to look to conventional outlets for their election news. And although there is a lot of talk about new media, and the number of daily tweets is staggering, it is not at all hard to find large numbers of people who have no interest in or knowledge of social networking. According to a study by YouGov, most of the 5.5 million people who use the micro-blogging service are likely to come from a lower social class, live in London and be “defensive of civil liberties”.
Not a huge impact
So other than a few more scoops and a better understanding of what interests the public, will this election be any different from the last? Even digital pioneer MacGregor admits:
“It will not have the impact people are expecting.”
It’s unlikely that we will have an all-American election won by social media. Brown and Cameron haven’t quite perfected the YouTube charisma of Barack Obama and the British public are yet to fully put their trust in Twitter. It might just be the beginning for new media but it certainly marks a momentous change in election reporting for the future.
By Sarah Baldwin