Week 6 : Politics and Social Media

Social Media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are evidently a driving force in the current election. There are both liberal and labour pages set up of Facebook for people not only to ‘like’ to show support, but to also explain why they support the party and share suggestions. Both these sites are updated regularly updating Australia of the parties and its leader’s activity, particularly throughout the build for the election. These sites are very influential on voting decisions I believe, particularly for the younger generation as they are constantly checking their own Facebook page. Obviously these pages aren’t the parties main source of marketing, however this pages are influential on the younger Australians vote.

Twitter is often understood as a derivative or miniature version of the regular blog – i.e. a microblog, consisting of ‘short comments usually delivered to a network of associates’ (Jansen et al., 2009: 2170). Both major Australian political parties use twitter constantly as a way to communicate with people around the country. Kevin Rudd has almost 2 million followers, allowing him to instantly communicate with roughly 11% of the country.

Considering ‘technology is often viewed as a key driver of change in the electoral arena’ (Gibson et al., 2008: 15), twitter and social media are a huge driving force in politics.

Larsson and co, argue that Twitter research is still at a very early stage and that the difference between a blog post and a tweet is still quite substantial.

References:

Jansen BJ, Zhang MM, Sobel K and Chowdury A (2009) Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(11):

2169–2188.

Gibson RK, Lusoli W and Ward S (2008) Nationalizing and normalizing the local? A compara- tive analysis of online candidate campaigning in Australia and Britain. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 4(4): 15–30.

Olorf Larsson, A. and Moe, H., 2011 ‘Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign’ New Media and Society, vol. 14, no.5 pp.729-747.