Politics and Social Media
This thread comes from something I posted on the Rishi Sunak thread. In previous decades if the MP made a statement we only had print and TV journalists to analyse it. Now there are numerous influencers, some respected and some not who can get hold the facts and comment. The question is how much does social media influence our thinking on what the government says and does?
Comments
And, people have always talked about politics, but more often than not only the information shared by TV and print media (generally print media was better because they had space to reproduce entire transcripts or press release whereas a half hour new bulletin on TV required the selection of highlights). Social media has opened up the number of people who get involved - so, rather than the small minority of people at work who want to talk about politics during coffee breaks we can discuss things with hundreds of people online who we might not even know.
What social media (as opposed to the rest of the internet) does is often move people to short form communication - messages of a few dozen words, a witty picture, short video. That works (on social media and real life) for small group discussion within a short period of time (if you ever discuss politics with friends in a couple of hours in the pub I'd be very surprised if any individual contribution to the discussion contains much more content than a Tweet, or whatever posts on X are called these days), but is generally inadequate where discussions involve large numbers of people and are extended across several days. Also most social media are functionally more akin to announcements than places designed for serious discussion - places for people to simply say "this is what I did today". Great places for politicians to post up their press releases, or at least a link to them. But, if you want a serious discussion then something like Facebook or X isn't the right place, it's simply utilising the wrong tool, the equivalent of needing to join two bits of wood with a screw and reaching for a hammer. For those who only have FB, X, Instagram or other social media apps on their phones then they've only got a few variations on the same tool - when you only have a set of hammers everything gets treated like a nail. Often we need something more subtle than hitting things as hard as we can.
I can think of individuals of different political persuasions who do use it effectively both in raising their own profile and, commendably, 'educating' people on how the system works rather than how they imagine it to work.
In terms of active political campaigning social media is 'a' tool but only one of several and yes, it's a blunt instrument mostly.
Something that is often overlooked is the number of candidates and counsellors of all parties and none who eventually get ground down or quit due to the debilitating effect of constant online carping or criticism by ill-informed keyboard warriors or bullying by very unscrupulous individuals.
I wouldn't want to over-emphasise that but it is an issue and councillors and party activists face very gruelling and energy-sapping online aggro day after day after day.
I've got very mixed views about the role and effectively of social media both on the quality of political debate and the way people treat one another in general.
IMO the answer - I basically agree with Alan - is that I think you're being far too optimistic and looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Essentially, in the great scheme of things, it's simultaneously true that more people than ever are taking part in interconnected conversations about politics, AND that the overwhelming majority are still not engaging at all.
All Twitter or Facebook have done is expand the 'pub conversation' of people interested in such things by putting them in touch with one another. not just politics, this goes for people who want to talk about football, or tree conservation, or model railways, or whatever.
Social media is a gift for political parties because they can keep punting out mini party political broadcasts and press releases, and most people will never see them, most people will never call them out on it, and of the people that *do* see them, only a proportion will ever go below and read the comments. Meanwhile, commentators can and do do the critiques, as they always have, but the people who will read/see that are the same people who always would have done.
We're not creating a generation of people who think critically about what is being put out by the Tories, SNP/Greens, or Welsh Labour in power, or any of the opposition parties at any level of government.
The same people who would have criticised them are doing so, and the same people who would have uncritically lapped them up are doing so, and the overall result is just what it always was except everyone's shoutier about it.
See also the 2019 election, where the denizens of social media got awfully excited about a Labour victory that when it came down to it was only happening in their heads.
Most people don't engage with any of this until there's actually an election campaign on, and many people still don't even then.
I actually think - and I do appreciate the irony of where I'm posting this - that social media is probably at best neutral and at worst a net negative to public political discourse.
It doesn't move the needle anywhere near as much as its users like to think it does, and it makes arguing easier for the minority who were always going to argue. If we could go back to the bores down the pub who you could avoid, and a few party political broadcast and posters at election time then that might be better than the constant punch and judy of social media, which is basically Prime Minister's Questions, but escaped from its easily avoided straightjacket of half an hour on a Wednesday...*
Now, whether - and how rapidly - all that will change with AI is another question entirely...
TLDR: social media is a gift to governments because it simultaneously matters and doesn't. It *ought* to be a gift for oppositions but when it comes down to it it's even harder for them than for the government to cut through the noise.
Both sides end up thinking it matters more than it does, or that it doesn't matter as much as they're telling everyone but that they can't afford not to do it. It's about as futile as the nuclear arms race in the Cold War.
*personally I'd go back to the pre-Blair format of 15 minutes each on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in what should have been the first warning of what things were going to be like, he changed it to once per week as an opportunity to dodge scrutiny. The pre-1997 experience of stories building at PMQs because 48 hours elapsed during them couldn't be allowed to continue...
They must do - but it's how I think they work in Britain.
On the other hand. there is an African country that I do visit from time to time, not unknown to a poster or two on here, where social media is such a tool for organising opposition that I must confess I do prune my social media before getting on the flight because I don't want to get in trouble with the police. Mind you, their secret service are good enough that I expect they could find out what you might have said abroad on social media, but it's still worth not having it as your last couple of facebook posts...
In a freer media environment it's all just noise IMO.
On the other hand, a lot of those 'third spaces' in which those conversations would have taken place have vanished, been redeveloped, grown empty or much more expensive; and so great as their faults are (and they are myriad), at 'least' Facebook/Twitter still facilitate them.
Incidentally; the influence of Twitter is overblown here; it has 500m registered accounts worldwide, of which only half regularly active. There are 23m registered accounts in the UK, of which a similar fraction is regularly active. The reason it ends up 'mattering' in media terms is that blue tick status was a social signifier at some point, and all journalists are (or were) there.
There's certainly a level of abuse on twitter, equally it's fairly clear that a lot of the time journalists/politicians who complain about it tend to lump in complaints about the push back they get when they say something ridiculous.
Again, I think this is overblown, the engagement with such things vary in inverse proportion to their quantity, the vast majority of circulars of this sort get filed away/recycled.
There may be misunderstanding of register here; social media tends to mix together somewhat private/public conversations; while there was a certain level of trying to rally people, afaict 'left' social media knew that the chances were incredibly slim and the road likely to be very tough.
There's no going back without examining the role of traditional media and the way it has changed, becoming much more incestuous and centralised over the same time.
But, it happens outwith social media as well. At least social media can be filtered, there's not as much that can be done when a candidate for one party with a couple of supporters chase another candidate down the street shouting abusive comments at her young teenage children who'd been out with her forcing her to shelter in their constituency office (fortunately nearby) until the police had arrived and the abusers had scarpered. Of course, abuse online and in the real world should not be tolerated, but both happen.
As I said earlier, social media is an extension of traditional campaigning. Yes, social media makes it very easy to put out material, but the vast majority of that only goes to members and supporters and the journalists and others who choose to follow those accounts (including people in other parties keeping an eye on what the opposition are doing). Mostly parties rely on members to share their content so that it becomes more visible. It's possible to pay to try and target material but the algorithms used by the social media platforms to do that are opaque (no one really seems to know how they work) and very imprecise - even trying to get posts to go to people living in a constituency is hit and miss, trying to target a particular demographic within that geographical area is harder still.
And, then social media content gets treated pretty much the same as more traditional campaign material. People switch channels to avoid political broadcasts, newsletters go into the bin without a second glance ... and social media posts are scrolled past.
I suspect the general broadcast nature of social media content may even contribute to the abuse candidates receive. When the abuse comes almost entirely from people who aren't in the constituency/ward then that suggests that if it was easier to target material just to those who have a vote there would be less abuse, simply because the small minority who post that abuse wouldn't see the content to comment on in the first place.
It can be (as can blogs *) in multiple ways; over time a channel attracts a particular audience who interact with each other in the comments; many channels also do live streams where their audience get to interact with the channel and with each other in real time.
Quite often these live streams are tied to either patreons (possibly with private videos) and/or discord servers where again the audience gets to interact and which serve as centres of sociality.
[*] and in the old days there were blogs that attracted a loyal and enduring audience (think of crookedtimber which gave us 'Wilhoit's Law')
Yes and you also get people disagreeing with the video and discussion happens. Those who are popular on the site are called influencers.
I haven't had any recently, and I haven't revisited the video (an excellent film BTW) to see if the comments have been turned off...
I think you have to look at the history of the impact of media on politics. Not just social media. I can remember when they started radio broadcasts of the UK parliament. Many Americans were quite shocked at the chaos it presented. There was the Nixon v Kennedy debate, where Nixon did not have any make up on and looked quite sweaty whereas Kennedy looked as cool as a cucumber. It is said one reason why East Germany fell was because of tape recordings were being passed around and a new-fangled thing called texting was being used.
Trump has his Truth Social that he uses to reach out to the MAGA crowd.
One reason why I like SOF is we can expound on what we think of many issues, especially in Purgatory. But we also have a platform in which we can share fun material too. SOF often acts like a family around a large dinner table with give and take and everyone enjoying each other.
The big issue with newspapers is that if you buy a conservative newspaper you get conservative news stories, likewise with liberals.
I think the difference would be that the contents of every copy of a newspaper are predetermined and uniform for all readers, and most readers have some idea what to expect based on previous familiarity with the paper.
Whereas if I'm new to a social media site, and eg. the first ten videos I check out are of a particular commentator, then YouTube will give me, personally, other videos that match that commentator's views, even if the only reason I was clicking on her videos in the first place was 'cuz I thought she looked cute in the thumbnails. But, due to the nature of YouTube, I might come to be under the impression that I am being given a random assortment of viewpoints.
Of course, a politically literate person will recognize that there are other viewpoints besides the one being presented in his content feed, but I think it's probably a harder illusion to shake with social media rather than analog outlets.
One of the reasons I read The Independent in the 2000s (ie before the sale to Russia) was that I enjoyed the bracing utter confusion of its comment pages - Bruce Anderson opposite Yasmin Alibhai-Brown etc.
It was the closest IMO British journalism came to reliably providing a slate of diametrically opposed opinions to agree with or be outraged by from one page to the next.
I still miss it.
Four widely-reported studies last year on Facebook's data reached mixed conclusions, as far as they went. The ones published in Science appear to be pay-walled.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w
Here are links to three media outlets' take on them. Note the reporting of Frances Haugen's views in the second and third. (NPR and WP contain links to the four studies.)
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190383104/new-study-shows-just-how-facebooks-algorithm-shapes-conservative-and-liberal-bub
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/27/meta-facebook-algorithm-2020-election
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/social-media-research-meta-political-views/
The Guardian still hosts a range of utter fuckwits to go along with their reasonable commentators. Even the editor of The Spectator is a fairly regular contributor. And of course their stable is well stocked with transphobes and zionists to balance out any concern for human rights that might be voiced in other columns.
I have an online subscription to the Guardian but it’s really NOT the same IMO
Most people will realise that there are other viewpoints if only because it is against those that they define themselves. ISTM the question normally turns on how legitimate those other views are, and here I don't see much of a difference between traditional media and youtube.
There's a somewhat related question of radicalisation, but ISTM that this is generally more likely to happen to those who are socially isolated to start with purely because they are correspondingly less likely to have social interactions with people holding different views (and the worst cases may well be either school aged children or the elderly and retired).
If your social interactions happen with people in your physical proximity, then you're likely to encounter a reasonable range of views, and relatively few extremist voices.
If your social interactions happen online, they're more likely to happen with self-selected groups of similar people, and they're more likely to be overweight in extremists, because the people with extreme views tend to be the loudest.
And if you're not part of a community (whether it's physical or virtual), then you have little incentive to be a "good citizen".
I think that's why YouTube comments are so toxic - except in a few small corners, YouTube comments are almost entirely populated by people engaged in drive-by shootings. There's no community, and no interest in having a rational discussion with an identifiable set of people. It's those anonymous letters to the Editor from "disgusted of Bognor Regis", without the benefit of an actual editor.
There's a lot of good content on YouTube, of all kinds of descriptions, but finding a constructive discussion in the comments section is rare.
Yes, social media in my corner of southern Africa is a way of countering state censorship or cyber-surveillance of opposition movements. Use of the whatsapp appliance to organise protest or rallies is very effective. And everybody understands why those travelling abroad or to Zimbabwe or Egypt might suddenly delete a slew of posts or close social media accounts before travelling.
Email is used to distribute samizdat publications in defiance of State censorship and coded notice of this is given on social media. When Redi Tlhabi's biography, Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, was threatened with a banning order (Khwezi was a young woman who accused former President Zuma of rape), electronic page proofs were immediately sent out to reviewers and incriminating excerpts published on social media. The biography went on become a best-seller.
They've spent more in 3 months than Starrmer's team has spent on social media ever.
I believe I'm right in thinking that the Lib Dems spent more than the other parties on social media advertising in 2019 and to no avail.
Sunak's obviously trying to hit the ground running in campaign mode.
In some ways it makes sense as active users on FB skew towards the elderly (boomers and silents) who are both the demographic most likely to vote and most likely to vote conservative.
It's possible to ascertain who places ads via Meta's Ad Library, and in general the Conservatives and their various ginger groups tend to be the most active.
Not sure if boomers and silents necessarily vote conservative, especially when it comes to social security, medicare, and medicaid--at least in the US. Obamacare survived by one vote from an elderly man the last time it came up for a vote. An up-and-coming topic this year is long term care. Only Washington state as a program, but it covers less than half a year at least on my side of the state, probably much less on the wet side.
I was talking about the situation in the UK, as @Gamma Gamaliel had just mentioned the Conservative Party advertising on Facebook, see:
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/images/est-age.format-webp.webp
and
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/images/How20Britain20voted20201920age-01.format-webp.webp
Granted the difference in the US is nowhere as stark.
Sincere thanks for using the term "boomer" with its proper meaning. The kids today now use it to mean just about anyone older than they are, which often makes it sound like they're criticizing the elderly, when in fact, they're criticizing Gen X.
Fair enough. I tend to think of boomers as being born no later than 1950, but I know some definitions would extend all the way to the early 60s.
My point still stands, though, that when a Gen Zer says eg. "OK Boomer" to some cantankerous older jerk on social media, they are in many cases probably addressing someone much younger than the term was meant to apply to.
There is some overlap between the generations because of late births in the older gen and early births in the younger gen.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it seems to depend on what generation your parents were from.
I was born(*) to Silent Generation parents in 1968, and since Silent gives rise to Boomer, I'm a boomer.
But if I was conceived at Woodstock to Baby Boom parents and born in May of 1970, I'm Gen X, because boomers give rise to Xers.
At least that's the only way I can make sense of a generational schematum that would classify someone born after Woodstock as a boomer.
(*) I'm adopted, so literally born to boomers and raised by Silent, but for the sake of the example...
It can be murky. Sometimes you go by other factors, like the ages of parents and siblings. For example, my father (born 1924) was in the Army in WWII. I have two siblings, one born in 1950 and one born in 1954. I was born in 1961 (in the last days of the Eisenhower administration), so not quite at the tail end of the Baby Boom. But the ages of my parents and my siblings pull me firmly away from Gen X and into the boomer generation, as does the fact that the experiences of my childhood and early youth were shaped and influenced by things like the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Gen Xers generally don’t have the kind of memories of those things that I do, and therefore those things weren’t formative for them in the same way as for (late) boomers.
ETA: Cross-posted with @stetson.
Nah. That'd make me a Boomer which is moronic as I was born over twenty years after the war ended, to parents who were themselves only young children in 1945.
I thought the whole idea of these "generations" is that the people born into them reflect the wider societal influences that they had in common as they grew up. To put it another way, I think the overlapping schema* doesn't work.
*(incidentally your *Schematum back-formation from the plural Schemata doesn't work. The singular in Latin and Greek alike was Schema. Cf. Stoma/Stomata)
See this summary
I don't think we're talking about generations in the kinship sense when we give out these labels like Gen X, Mil, Boomer etc.
So a person can absolutely be a different generation to their cousins in this demographic sense.
“Generations” in the sociological sense are generally cohorts of approximately 20 year periods for which general claims can be made about the things that shaped persons born during those periods. For example, a generalized statement can be made about Baby Boomers being shaped by the experiences of being parented by parents who grew up during the Depression and came of age with WWII, and by themselves growing up and (for the older older boomers, becoming adults) in a period heavily shaped by things like post-war security and relative economic prosperity, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the beginnings of the Feminist Movement and the Sexual Revolution.
When I remarked upthread about my parents being born in the 1920s and my siblings being born in the 50s, what I was getting at was that I grew up in a cohort shaped by the kind of things I just listed. Being born in 61, I’m a clear boomer. But even if I’d been born a few years later, when the Baby Boom was ending and Gen X was starting to be born, my experience (such as having a brother eligible to be drafted for Vietnam) would have made me have more in common with boomers than typical Gen Xers.
I do think it’s safe to say, at least for an American, if you can’t remember the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War, you’re not a boomer. It doesn’t matter when your parents were born; the experiences that generally shaped and defined boomers were not your experiences if you were born in the late 60s.
Born in the cusp of the 80s, in the dying days of the Carter administration, I didn't really see much of the internet at school, or have a mobile phone until I was in my 20s. Technically I'm squarely towards the back end of X, but in reality my childhood was much more like that of my parents in the 1950s than it was that of the people born even in 1990, let alone 2000.
How old you were when the internet hit your life is a pretty stark divider into different pots these days I think. My cohort were probably the last of the mostly-not-digital-growing-up
The latter half of the post-war baby boom is sometimes called Generation Jones, and this feels like a good fit for me:
The bottom line is that all these generation designations are somewhat arbitrary generalizations.
I was reacting to the comment from stetson:
That is way off.
That would be more or less correct:
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/data-visualizations/2019/defining-our-six-generations
(Also the source of @Nick Tamen 's figures above)