We're electioneering
I hope I can rely on your angry post on that social media platform you favour
The UK has finally joined the election race which a colossal number of other countries are in this year: 64 countries, more than 2 billion voters, all getting to have their say. Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, announced the timing—of all days, July 4, American independence day—in a speech where he was all but drowned by rain and drowned out by hecklers playing the music which accompanied the previous Labour government’s triumphant march to power in 1997, D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better”.
Though this being the age of social media, the question is: can they? Or might they get significantly worse? I think we can expect a few things.
• Bots bots bots bots bots bots bots. In fact we’ve already had this. Sunak’s damp squib of an election launch required some sort of boosterism, and it seems at least one group had a prepared script to push on eX-Twitter:
When you look more closely at these accounts, you find that they push very generic “bloke” style content: football banter, occasional drooling pictures of girls, and then the scripted response, which is made a a reply at all sorts of stuff. One account offered its scripted Rishi response to one of the other bot accounts which had said “Downfall started after a certain someone left”, referring to football, because of course the bot accounts follow each other. And they use absurd phrases like “In all my years as a British citizen”. Nobody says that.
I don’t know if this is something that the Conservatives have paid for, or if it’s some outside group having fun at the expense of everyone. (From the way those accounts blip their responses, it’s as if they’re getting paid per post.) I also don’t know if Labour has similar bot accounts set up to echo Wonderful News about the six Labour pledges, though you’d think the party would probably want to save its money, since social media seems fairly skewed pro-Labour (or, more accurately, anti-Conservative).
• Dark Facebook adverts. We’re in the age now of the microtargeted political advert; have been, actually, since 2015 in the UK, when the Conservatives realised that a lot of Liberal Democrat seats in the south-west of England might be vulnerable if you reminded their voters how Nick Clegg had broken his election promise not to raise university tuition fees. The Tories narrowly targeted those seats with Facebook adverts to discourage those voters, and won handsomely, surprising David Cameron, who won an outright majority rather than getting another hung parliament and forced coalition. Unfortunately this majority meant Cameron felt obliged to stick to his pledge to offer a referendum on EU membership, which led to Brexit, which.. means we can blame Facebook for Brexit?
Anyway, it is possible to track the political adverts being put on Facebook, via the Facebook Ads Library, though you need to think laterally: pressure groups will seek ways to obscure quite who they’re targeting. But you can spend an interesting couple of hours there once the campaigns are properly under way: make sure to filter for Active ads, and for dates after 22 May 2024. (Unfortunately there’s no way to start a new search with such filters in place already that I can find easily. There is an API but you have to register for a developer account and set up an app, which might be more trouble than you want to go to.)
Watch out for the dark ads: they may drive more than you think. Reform is already pushing ads around “Net zero”, on a tiny spend. Hitting between 50,000 and 100,000 people for less than a train fare from London to Manchester isn’t a bad deal, really.
• Mad events being dismantled and shared by and among journalists on social media. We are very much in the world of social media elections, even though they’re unlikely to change many votes. It’s a puzzle why people think they will; ask yourself if there’s anything you might see on social media—as apart from “mainstream” media—that would make you change your vote. If anything, it would be the outcome of an investigation of some sort being echoed on social media. Although it does have the power to reach further than mainstream media more quickly. As ever, during the election it’s going to be eX-Twitter which will be relied on by journalists for the rapid dissemination and sharing of information—as happened on the first day when Sunak made an appearance at a biscuit distribution warehouse and took two questions from Conservative plants among the workers, and none from the press. This was noticed by Adam Bienkov of Byline Times, and then picked up by all the other press too, and then broadcast media including the BBC. (Pippa Crerar is The Guardian’s political editor, who got multiple scoops when at the Daily Mirror about the chaos inside Boris Johnson’s government.)
• Barefaced lies and fibs being dismantled on social media. See above, to some extent. One thing that is new since the 2019 election on eX-Twitter, at least, is the presence of Community Notes, which are a groupsourced fact-checking for tweets/posts. One has to apply to become a Community Note writer, which then also confers the power, or perhaps responsibility, to evaluate already-written Community Notes. Once a CN reaches an (unknown, unshown) number of positive recommendations, it becomes publicly visible. In its way, it’s a bit like the old Verified status, except totally invisible, and you’ve no idea who else belongs. (I have CN writer status. I don’t think any of mine have ever appeared.) Personally I think it’s better than Facebook’s external fact-checking, which is slow—although it can take a day or more for a CN to appear on a tweet/post.
Nothing is safe from CNs, including ads and political ads (except perhaps Elon Musk tweets/posts). Which meant that on day 2 of the election campaign we had..
..yes, a CN on a Rishi Sunak post. The “helpfulnotes” account is a fun one to follow. That it took only nine hours for the CN to rise to visibility is indicative of a lot of activity. We should expect more of this sort of thing (even though Tom Hamilton doesn’t approve.)
• Leaks from WhatsApp groups. They will show despair, or triumph, or some sort of gigantic cockup which will become news for at least a cycle. WhatsApp is now so embedded in British politics that it won’t be removed without physically confiscating everyone’s phone. I’d think that the peak of this will be at about 10.05pm on election night, just after the polls have closed and the BBC has delivered its verdict on just how terrible things are going to be, and Labour and Conservatives compete for delight and gloom.
• Journalists being misled by stuff and putting out misleading stuff. There was a terrible example of this in 2019, when the Tories claimed that a Labour activist had hit then health minister Matt Hancock outside a hospital. The BBC was among many which put this out; it is meant to have two independent sources for any story, but it’s clear that in this case the two sources were sharing the same, untrue, story. When the “activist” (in fact, a man wheeling his bicycle) released a video of what had actually happened, there was a lot of shamefaced climbing down. It did, however, have the advantage of distracting from a story about a child with suspected pneumonia having to lie on a hospital floor. So, job done in that sense.
• Candidates being revealed as having terrible social media histories. This already happened to Reform during the local council elections. Oh man.
Reform dumped eight of its council candidates after they were shown to have said things that were just unacceptable in polite (or even slightly rude) society. And Reform says it’s going to have candidates in all 650 seats, with the election just having been announced? And the Tories have more than 150 seats without a candidate, which have to be filled by Friday June 7. There is no way in the world that the Tories and Reform will fill those vacancies without including a few horrendous people who will turn out, unsurprisingly, to have said and/or done terrible things. Social media has become the tail that people cannot shake off.
Yes, it’s going to be a wild six weeks. But you know what? Everyone’s going to get very enjoyably drunk at the end of it.
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I suspect quite a few of us are going to get fairly drunk well before the end, and just because of it