Advances in Social Media and Political Campaigns in Elections: An Assessment of the 2016 General Elections in Ghana

Author(s):  
Harrison Kofi Belley

Initially meant for social networking and interacting with acquaintances, the new media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are now becoming crucial instruments in political communication. This is because social media has proven to be an effective format for political communication given its several features like photo sharing, status update, tags, post sharing, likes, live videos, video sharing amongst others. Furthermore, social media has democratised media access, and has afforded people who have previously been side-lined by traditional media an important platform for political mobilization. Most importantly, it has generated interest in politics among young people. The intersection between traditional media and other social media has augmented their efficiency by amplifying their reach. The study is an explorative one that adopted purposive sampling to select participants from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Progressive People’s Party (PPP). The findings revealed that although presidential candidates integrated social media into their campaign they are yet to exploit its full potential. However, social media by itself could not guarantee a candidate victory in the elections. Therefore, presidential candidates need to strike a balance between their campaigns on social media with the ground campaigns to ensure that they reach most of the electorate.

Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university’s electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.


Author(s):  
Ahmet Sarıtaş ◽  
Elif Esra Aydın

Today, using of the internet extended social media by individuals habitually enables both the business firms and politicians to reach their target mass at any time. In this context, internet has become a popular place recently where political communication and campaigns are realized by ensuring a new dimension to political campaigns. When we examine the posts and discussions in the social media, we can say that they are converted into open political sessions. As there are no censorship in such channels, individuals have a freedom to reach to any partial/impartial information and obtain transparent and fast feedback, and with this regard, political parties, leaders and candidates have a chance to be closer to electors. In this study, it is aimed to give information about the social media, present what medium has been used for election campaigns from the past until today and besides, by considering the effects of effective and efficient use of social media and new trends related to the internet by politicians, together with their applications in the world, to make suggestions about its situation and application in Turkey.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-215
Author(s):  
Ratan Kumar Roy

Politics online is a significant phenomenon today in Bangladesh given the reach of internet, resulting in the proliferation of the use of social media and online activism. The intertwined dynamic of digital drive and mediated politics can be traced in other parts of the region of South Asia as a burgeoning spectacle. In this context, the instance of Bangladesh with regard to online activism provides distinctive clues to fathom the nature of mediated politics. This paper examines a social media-driven youth protest, Shahbag Movement in 2013 to unravel the interactive dynamics between new media, traditional media and social movement. Bringing in the empirical cases, in the ultimate analysis, it delves deeper into the conceptual aspects of media practices, mediation and mediatisation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara ◽  
Gail Kenning

Following the 2004 US presidential election campaign, which was described as ‘a critical turning point’ in use of social media, and particularly the 2008 Obama campaign, there has been increasing focus on use of social media for political campaigning and what is termed e-electioneering and e-democracy. However, studies of election campaigns between 2010 and 2012 in a number of countries have identified what Steve Woolgar (2002) calls cyberbole in relation to social media for political engagement. With substantive patterns of change in political communication yet to be identified, a quantitative and qualitative study of social media use in the 2013 Australian federal election campaign was conducted using the same methodology as studies of the 2007 and 2010 campaigns to gain comparative longitudinal data. This identified trends in the volume of e-electioneering and the ways in which social media are being used for political communication and democratic engagement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-113
Author(s):  
Ayu Nenden Assyfa Putri

Social media, especially Twitter, as one of the most widely used platforms on the internet, is now being used by political organizations to convey their political communication messages. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method by analyzing the communication style conveyed by the Gerindra party Twitter account to its followers. In looking for references, researchers use a systematic review method wherein the authors must describe the search to be used, determine where and when they should search, and what terms they should use. The results of this study indicate that the style of political communication conveyed by the Gerindra Twitter account has the aim of being accepted by Twitter users, whose users are young people. Unlike the political communication messages conveyed during the 2014 & 2019 elections, the Gerindra Twitter account conveys its political communication style in a relaxed and informative way. The relevance of the information diffusion theory in this study is when the Gerindra party takes advantage of the great opportunity of Twitter as a social media to communicate its political campaigns so that new voters can accept it in the future.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Maghfira

Abstarknyo The development of communication technology has penetrated the lives of human beings. One form of communication is the development of new media technologies who gave birth to social media. Political world is also not free from the influence of new media and social media. Social media are like two sides of a coin for political actors. On the one hand, the success by using social media is getting positive support. But on the other hand failure by using social media is the risk by damaging the image. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of social media on political actors. Exposure to the use of social media in political communication becomes the first part of this paper. The second section discusses the challenges faced by political actors in the 2.0 era. The third section gives an offer opportunities for political actors in the utilization of social media. There is also the fourth and final section is a conclusion that contains what should be done by political actors to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities offered by social media. Keywords: internet, new media, social media, political communication


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Pedro Santander ◽  
Claudio Elórtegui ◽  
Camila Buzzo

The year 2017 was an intense electoral year in Chile, both parliamentary and presidential. In this context, by using computer intelligence, an interdisciplinary team conducted a collection and volumetric analysis of over 3 million Twitter messages belonging to users that mentioned, at least once, any of the presidential candidates, both in the first and second voting round. Our goal was focused on analyzing the relationship between traditional media (radio and television) and Twitter, probing user interactions during the broadcast of live political shows, with emphasis on presidential debates. For this purpose, we carried out a volumetric analysis of all mentions in social media during the broadcast of live political shows to characterize the digital attention of the audience, under different parameters. Our results show that there is high user interest in the digital debate regarding presidential debates, a positive correlation between traditional media and Twitter during the broadcast of live political shows, and that, also, the latter trigger social media; furthermore, we verify the double screen phenomenon made possible by mobile platforms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Birgir Guðmundsson

AbstractThe increased importance of social media platforms and network media logic merging with traditional media logic are a trademark of modern hybrid systems of political communication. This article looks at this development through the media-use by politicians before the 2016 and 2017 parliamentary elections in Iceland. Aggregate results from candidate surveys on the use and perceived importance of different media forms are used to examine the role of the new platform Snapchat in relation to other media, and to highlight the dynamics of the hybrid media system in Iceland. The results show that Snapchat is exploited more by younger politicians and those already using social media platforms. However, in spite of this duality between old and new media, users of traditional platforms still use new media and vice versa. This points to the existance of a delicate operational balance between different media logics, that could change as younger politicians move more centre stage.


Obra digital ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 39-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Alonso-Muñoz ◽  
Susana Miquel-Segarra ◽  
Andreu Casero-Ripollés

El uso de Twitter como herramienta estratégica para la comunicación política se ha incrementado notablemente durante los últimos años, especialmente en periodo de campaña electoral. El objetivo de esta investigación es examinar el grado de cumplimiento de los principios dialógicos atribuidos a las redes sociales. Para ello se aplica la técnica del análisis de contenido cuantitativo a los tuits publicados por los principales partidos españoles (PP, PSOE, Podemos y Ciudadanos) durante las elecciones generales de 2015. Los resultados demuestran que pese al elevado número de publicaciones realizadas por los cuatro partidos, ninguno aprovecha el potencial dialógico de Twitter.Untapped communication potential. Twitter as a mechanism for generating dialogue in an electoral campaignAbstractThe use of Twitter as strategic tool for political communication has increased considerably in recent years, particularly during electoral campaigns. The main goal of this paper is to examine the degree of compliance with the principles of dialogue attributed to social media. To achieve this, a quantitative content analysis was carried out on the tweets shared by the main Spanish political parties during the 2015 General Elections. The results show that although a high number of tweets were made by the four political parties during this period, none of them took advantage of the full potential of dialogue on Twitter.Keywords: Twitter, social media, political communication, electoral campaign, digital media


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara

Scholars and practitioners are widely agreed that media and public communication are undergoing significant change deserving of close attention and, along with widespread popular media discussion, a body of scholarly research on the changing 21st century mediascape is emerging. The term ‘new media’ is widely used in the literature to describe interactive online communication forms including blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, microblogging, and virtual worlds enabled by what is referred to as Web 2.0. A number of studies cite so-called ‘new media’ as the ‘fourth media revolution’ and make effusive predictions concerning their effects ranging from the “end of journalism” to the transformation of the public sphere through the birth of e-democracy. This paper critically reviews changes taking place and provides an overview of implications for public communication. It challenges the term ‘new media’, arguing that it is inaccurate and unhistorical, and attempts to look beyond hype and ‘cyberbole’ that often distort discussion to identify substantive changes taking place. It argues these are located in social and cultural practices rather than technology and explores four foundational shifts which have significant implications for media and all areas of public communication practice including journalism, political communication, advertising, public relations and organisational communication.


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