2017/11/23 by Katharine Dommett, Luke Temple · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Social Media and Politics #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Media Studies and Communication
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/pa/gsx056
Studies of digital campaigning have revealed substantial change in the nature of political campaigns. Tracing the rise of email, party websites, social media, online videos and gamification, scholars have shown how, since the 1990s, parties have become heavily dependent on digital technology (Gibson, 2015). In this chapter we focus on two elements of the 2017 digital campaign: Facebook advertising and what we term ‘satellite campaigns’. Whilst resisting claims of revolution and transformational change (Kreiss, 2010, Williamson, Miller and Fallon, 2010) we nevertheless argue that these digital practices have important implications for parties’ organisational structures, practices and behaviour, as well as for public expectations of campaigning. Through this analysis we contend that the 2017 general election provides further evidence that ‘digital media are reconfiguring party-related engagement’ (Vaccari and Valeriani, 2016, p. 295), and agree with Gibson (2015, p. 191) that by ‘chaf[ing] against embedded organisational routines and norms’ these developments challenge established understandings of parties’ campaign strategies. In examining digital, we adopt an expansive definition of the term. Alongside an interest in social media and party websites, we also examine the organisational digital infrastructure on which parties rely. Including digital databases, canvassing systems, online phone banks, and email lists, digital infrastructure is pivotal to parties’ diverse campaign activities by enabling participation through the reduction of resource costs. In the analysis that follows, we employ this expansive conception of digital to consider developments within the Labour and Conservative parties, using these examples to illustrate wider emerging trends. By April 2017, few were predicting an early general election, but in the days that elapsed between Theresa May’s surprise announcement on 18 May and the vote on 8 June, parties across the spectrum exhibited formidable online and offline campaigns. In the digital realm, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram all played a part in the campaigns (Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta, 2017) with numerous graphics, videos and messages shared online. While all parties were active on these platforms, emerging analysis has demonstrated the degree to which Labour, and particularly Jeremy Corbyn, dominated support on these platforms (Cram et al., 2017; Dean, 2017; Shephard, 2017). Organisationally, digital proved key to volunteer mobilisation, voter identification activities, and message targeting. Particularly prominent within the wider picture of social and digital media use were two elements of the digital campaign: parties’ use of Facebook advertising and the role of what we term ‘satellite campaigns’ facilitated by non-party intermediary organisations such as Campaign Together and CrowdPac. Considering these two developments in detail, we argue that such changes represent important new evolutions in political campaigning, and raise interesting questions for parties, the public and our expectations of political campaigning. Parties’ use of Facebook advertising was heralded as a key component of the 2017 campaign (Bakir and McStay, 2017; Walsh, 2017; see also Bond, 2017; Ward, 2017; Waterson, 2017). Using this tool, parties across the spectrum targeted content at specific groups of voters. Drawing on demographic data such as age, postcode, religion, and gender, combined with indicators of users’ interests, parties were able to identify those with, say, a passion for cycling, international travel, or beer, and use these interests to filter messages about the environment, foreign affairs or taxation. Parties were therefore able to identify electorally significant voter groups, such as women over 65 in marginal constituencies, and tailor messages to their interests and ideas in attempts to win appeal. The uptake of this tool was especially notable in the two main parties. Labour, in particular, embraced Facebook advertising (Waterson, 2017), investing heavily at a national level in adverts designed to promote electoral registration, but also creating a new organisational tool, Promote, which allowed local parties to target their own Facebook adverts. Similarly, the Conservatives invested in adverts promoting Theresa May and questioning the leadership credentials of Jeremy Corbyn. Reportedly, these campaigns saw Labour and the Conservatives spend over £1 million each on the platform, although formal electoral commission figures have yet to be released (Bond, 2017). Due to their targeted nature, capturing the range of adverts is exceedingly challenging. Initiatives such as Who Targets Me allow users to track the adverts targeted at them (via web-browser extension) to offer some insight into the number, form, and focus, of party adverts; however, these data are yet to be analysed in full. Given the evidence that seeing a political message on a friend’s page can affect voting behaviour (Bond et al., 2012), Facebook provides parties with a range of new capacities that can enhance their campaigns. As a social media platform, Facebook allows parties to connect with voters where they are, building on existing networks through sharing, comments, and reactions. In this way, an advert targeted to one voter may be liked and shared, signalling to friends and acquaintances that voter’s views and affiliation. This kind of sharing enables messages to be organically disseminated (Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta, 2017) and, as previous studies have shown, voters are increasingly comfortable sharing election related information online (Aldrich et al., 2016, p. 174). Whilst the prominence of Facebook in 2017 may suggest the emergence of a new campaign tool, it is important to recognise that the use of targeted social media advertising in the UK is part of a developing trend. This technique was prevalent during the EU referendum the previous year (Cookson and Gordon, 2016) and at the 2015 general election the Conservatives embraced Facebook advertising, declaring a spend of £1.2 million to the Electoral Commission on this platform alone (Electoral Commission, 2016, p. 29). Reflecting on the success of the 2015 digital campaign, interviews with Conservative Party strategists have demonstrated that Facebook in particular was viewed as ‘the best place to advertise’ (Interview with Conservative Party official, February 2017),1 an idea that has infused the strategies of other parties in 2017. Moreover, despite the increased prominence of Facebook as a campaigning space, the targeting it enables is by no means new. Parties have long focused on identifying and targeting their vote with the aim of refining communication strategies and identifying where the vote needs to be mobilised on election day (Whiteley and Seyd, 2003). However, historically, parties have been restricted by data protection laws to using the electoral roll (a list of everyone registered to vote), the marked register (a list of each elector's voting history), commercially available data (from private companies) and their own canvassing databases to target voters. Facebook is distinctive in offering a new source of voter information to parties that reflects voters’ interests and social preferences, whilst also providing the platform for communication. From this perspective, we argue that rather than signalling radical change, the use of Facebook in 2017 represented a ‘normalized revolution’ (Wright, 2012), as it has adapted and extended party activities, whilst not radically changing what it is that parties do. In reaching this conclusion, we nevertheless argue that parties’ use of Facebook has important implications for public perceptions, control, and resource, that warrant further discussion. First, in regard to public perceptions, Facebook allows parties to target content at highly localised audiences with greater precision than was previously possible (Aldrich et al., 2016; O’Brien, 2015; Council of Europe, 2017, p. 11). This ensures that voters hear about topics they are likely to be interested in/receptive to, which, given that social media is an increasingly important source of news and information for many voters (Miller, 2016), has the potential to yield significant effects (Marengo, 2013). Whilst companies such as Amazon and Google have been utilising targeting techniques to filter desirable content to users for years, parties’ use of this data is less familiar,2 and the consequences of such targeting are unknown. Some scholars have already theorised that ‘unsolicited messages are likely to be regarded as more intrusive than a “cold call” to a landline or flyer posted through the mailbox’ (Aldrich et al., 2016, p. 166). Whilst the use of Facebook data is often not as sophisticated as may be presumed, the degree to which parties should be able to access and, indeed, purchase additional information about voters raises potential concerns. Asides from issues of resource inequality (discussed further below), the idea that private information is being used by actors in the public realm to further their own electoral success raises issues of transparency and appropriate democratic behaviour. The norms here are not absolute, but research indicates that politicians are held to higher standards than other people (Allen and Birch, 2015, p. 71), suggesting that commercially-accepted practices may not be tolerated to the same degree in the political realm. In this context, questions emerge around how parties can and should use data to connect with voters, questions that the Electoral Commission need to consider when re-examining existing regulations. Second, we argue that whilst the unique attributes of Facebook offer parties advantages in terms of connectivity and reach, this platform also raises issues of control. While Facebook can be used to target official party adverts, it is also a forum in which unofficial campaign interventions can be made in an untargeted manner. While the Conservatives developed videos comparing their position on taxation to Labour, and Labour made videos citing 10 reasons to vote Labour, many other videos from ‘unofficial’ sources could also be found. From Cassetteboy’s remixes of political speeches, to memes mocking parties’ manifesto positions (see for example The Metro, 28 July 2017), Facebook provides a platform for a range of different political interventions. This raises a series of questions about the degree to which parties can exercise control and maintain campaign coherence, but also about how targeted campaigns intersect with other content. To take one example, during the 2017 election, Momentum generated high-profile Tory attack advertisements, one of which, set in 2030, depicts a young girl asking her Conservative-voting father if he hates her, to which he replies, ‘Obviously!’ Shared entirely on digital platforms including Facebook, Momentum activists claim the video was watched over 5.4 million times in two days (Peggs, 2017).3 This content had huge reach, but the stylistic approach is unlikely to have ever been sanctioned as part of an official Labour campaign, and it may be that many voters being targeted by official Labour advertisements were put off by the tone. The relationship between official and unofficial material, and the interactions between targeted and untargeted social media material are therefore far from clear, but they suggest a tension between parties’ desire to execute targeted campaigns and their capacity to do so on an open platform such as Facebook. Third, Facebook raises issues of resource. On one level, the implications are organisational. Facebook demonstrates that digital has the potential to greatly reduce resource costs in terms of the efficiency of disseminating political campaign material, but also shows that there is a trade-off with the organisational capacity required to utilise digital tools effectively. As Labour’s experience in 2017 shows, parties’ use of digital requires investment not only in the cost of adverts, but also in the skills base of activists and organisational software. The tool Promote, developed by Labour’s Digital Transformation Team, allows local parties to identify their own target voters and deploy appropriate adverts, yet parties’ ability to design text and graphics likely to win attention and be shared is by no means guaranteed. As one digital consultancy company indicated, social media ‘has to give people something they cannot get elsewhere, and it needs to be designed for the environment it is appearing in. Otherwise, you’ve just made another trivial but terrible contribution to Sharemageddon’ (DigitalsLBi, 2015, p. 4). Ensuring that party activists have the capacity to generate attractive media poses a significant challenge to parties and may lead to a divide between ‘digitally native’ activists (Nielsen, 2013) and those lacking digital skills. As this divide is closely linked to generational profile, the Conservatives could be at a natural disadvantage when it comes to both their activist pool and their wider support base (Bale, 2017). This suggests that while parties face common challenges, these will be manifested in different ways depending on party context and culture. At another level, Facebook also reveals issues of resource inequality. Whilst parties’ financial capacities have often been unequal—restricting their capacity to produce leaflets or commission campaign billboards—on Facebook, parties’ differing ability to buy advertising space raises important concerns about fairness, equality and transparency (see Norris, 2012). Whilst Labour and the Conservative Party used Facebook adverts extensively, other parties such as the Greens did not have the financial capacity to devote extensive resource. Moreover, it appears that, in certain marginal constituencies, only those parties willing to pay inflated prices for advertising space were able to promote their messages to voters (Cadwalladr, 2017). The importance of money for success in this realm, and the lack of transparency around how and why content appears in people’s Facebook feeds, raises issues about the fairness of elections. These issues have begun to be by campaign as have not been adapted to the of digital campaigns. The Council of therefore that and new the ability of existing to maintain a level in electoral communication between new and and and campaigns’ p. and yet the Electoral Commission in the UK has only adapted for online campaigns. while that organisations an on their online (Electoral Commission, 2017, p. formal have not been adapted in the UK to take of issues such as campaign and political Parties’ use of Facebook therefore raises a series of questions about the use of parties’ control of election campaigns and the role of money and resource in elections. 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