Political Social Media in the Global South
We examine the evidence of growing social media use among political elites in low- and middle-income countries, including in places where the proportion of actual voters on social media is small. We propose three ways to view this phenomenon of– first, as
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University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA {joyojeet,andregon}@umich.edu Abstract. We examine the evidence of growing social media use among political elites in low- and middle-income countries, including in places where the propor‐ tion of actual voters on social media is small. We propose three ways to view this phenomenon of– first, as signaling, second, as a means for politicians to access elite populations, and third as a way to circumvent mainstream media and exercise direct control over political communication. Keywords: Twitter · Social media · Political communication · Global south
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Introduction
In the last decade, engagement with major social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook has become a central element of political communication, particularly around major elections. Social media have challenged media logics in several parts of the world, most recently in the United States, where politicians have been able to reach citizens directly and even channel their mainstream media engagements through social media. Although scholarly attention to political social media has drawn its empirical basis in developments in the Western world, the trend of social media use is now global. The World Bank lists 135 countries as low- and middle-income, and the Twiplomacy study found social media use among politicians in 119 of those countries, including in 25 of the 31 low-income countries [1]. At the same time, despite claims that social media drive election results [2] there is little evidence that social media influence election outcomes, and indeed evidence suggests that online popularity can be deeply misleading in predicting results [3]. Events around the Egyptian pro-democracy movement and elec‐ tion-related protests in Iran were early drivers on subjects of social media and citizen action in the Global South [4, 5]. Commentary on social media has since taken a cautionary tone, noting its purpose as a means for media capture by entrenched institu‐ tions and powers [6–8]. We propose a lens to approach the motivations of political actors for whom social media use is not a means of winning elections but is nonetheless an important media strategy.
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Approach
We identified 73 nations listed as low- and middle-income where the head of government had a verified account on Twitter or Facebook. In each of these, we searched, where © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 587–593, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_52
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J. Pal and A. Gonawela
relevant, for at least one known electoral opposition figure. Overall, we gathered the details of 113 politicians – including their date of joining social media and scale of following. Our goal here is not to analyze the tweets in detail but rather to document the broad use of social media, so we primarily gathered basic data on rate of messaging, duration on social media, and online following. We also kept a databas
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