Campaigns are no longer what they were 20 years ago. Political communication formulas have mutated and have moved to other spaces. Manuel R. Torres, Professor of Political Science at the Pablo de Olavide University and member of the advisory council of the Elcano Royal Institute, sums it up: “Conventional systems, such as meetings, propaganda and communications through the media, have lost influence against new platforms”. Several investigations confirm it. One of them assures that even the televised debate, whose celebration proposal has focused the first days of the pre-campaign, “does not seem to change the behavior of the voter.” The networks have become the main means of dissemination, where emotional or negative messages triumph. Although they maintain their hegemony, the incorporation of moderation systems to combat misinformation, not always successfully, has caused hoaxes to be transferred to encrypted communication applications, such as WhatsApp or Telegram, where they are rampant without limits.
“The rally, in its original conception, was an open space for any interested party to know the proposals of a candidate in a direct way. That has already been overcome a long time ago and, really, they are party events to which only those already convinced go and whose purpose is to generate some type of material for the news and to feed the social networks. It has more and more character of set design”, says Torres.
And not just the rally. Not even the great electoral moment of the televised debate has survived the new forms of political communication, according to research published by the University of Oxford last March in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Its authors conclude that election campaigns and televised debates have little effect on voters compared to other sources, including political activists, networks and friends, whose messages have more impact.
“Despite all the interest they generate, the large audience they attract, and the many media comments they elicit, televised debates do not appear to change voting behavior.
Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons, Montreal and Harvard Universities
After an analysis of 62 electoral campaigns in 10 countries, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons, from the universities of Montreal and Harvard, have observed that “political preferences remain remarkably stable throughout the campaign.” Regarding televised debates, the authors observe that, “for all the interest they generate, the large audience they attract, and the many media comments they provoke, they do not appear to change voting behavior.”
Torres shares the conclusions: “The voter has already determined his vote well in advance, before these debates are held, and the percentage of voters who feel affected by the results of these meetings is increasingly reduced. There is also a certain consensus that those candidates who start from a losing position or need to increase their share of knowledge tend to be more interested in debating. Candidates with a more advantageous position are usually more reluctant to participate in debates because they have little to scratch there and, on the other hand, if some type of incident occurs, such as a blank or a bad answer, it can cause you considerable trouble. ”.
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The loss of influence of the face-to-face campaign, propaganda and the conventional media has led the debate towards the networks, among which Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube stand out. According to a recent study led by three psychologists from Columbia University and published in PNAS“social networks are at the forefront of modern political campaigns”, especially with ideological polarization, which favors the rise of the most extreme factions.
“Politicians need all the votes they can muster to reach and hold majorities, especially since narrow margins can decide elections. In this ultra-competitive environment, social media platforms have become a valuable avenue for politicians to reach their constituents and for voters to disseminate politicians’ messages”, the authors defend.
The same researchers identify a problem with this model. Certain language patterns lead social media users to amplify, that is, to publicly endorse (“favorite”) and share (“retweet”) the most destructive political content. These patterns are not alien to polarization, but rather feed it, since the most successful messages are those against opposing groups, the negative ones, or those that appeal to unfavorable emotions. “Politicians can increase their chances in hotly contested elections by reaching out to like-minded supporters and motivating them to act,” they conclude.
Torres agrees that the content with the greatest propagation capacity is negative, appeals to feelings of revenge and resentment, and ridicules the adversary. “This affects the communication of political parties and actors and we see it even in settings more conducive to formality, such as the Congress of Deputies or in televised debates,” he adds.
In this breeding ground, the viralization of disinformation was gestated, against which some platforms have tried to put a stop with mediation measures. However, a job released last October by Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy group, from the Tandon School of Engineering (United States), considers that “TikTok approved 90% of the ads with misleading and false electoral misinformation and Facebook allowed a significant number of equally inaccurate and false advertising.”
YouTube, according to the investigation, did remove this information. However, the policy of this platform begins to change, as announced on his blog: “We instituted a provision of our electoral misinformation policy focused on the integrity of the past United States presidential election, in December 2020. Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and an election cycle later, it is time to reassess the effects of this policy in today’s changing landscape. . In the current environment, we found that while removing this content curbs some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of restricting political speech without significantly reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm. With that in mind, and with the 2024 campaigns underway, we will stop removing content that promotes false claims that widespread fraud, error, or lapse occurred in the 2020 and other past United States presidential elections.”
For years, we have seen key democratic processes undermined by misinformation, lies and hate spread on social media platforms.
Jon Lloyd, Global Witness counselor,
“For years,” according to Global Witness counsel Jon Lloyd, “we have seen key democratic processes undermined by misinformation, lies and hate spread on social media platforms. The companies themselves even claim to recognize the problem. But the research shows that they are simply not doing enough to stop the threats to democracy emerging on their platforms.”
“They have not begun to act proactively until the magnitude of the problem generated by the spread of false content and disinformation acquired worrying dimensions,” explains Manuel R. Torres. “These platforms,” he adds, “must not only limit themselves to regulating the space and respond to complaints, but they must have a proactive attitude, take the initiative and not simply react when the problem is generated”.
The professor of Political Science believes that these platforms are torn between their business model (seeking an audience) and the need to avoid, in his words, “a wild territory where all these types of nefarious practices, which are so detrimental to democracy They can develop.”
There is a whole underground of disinformation that is not visible to the eye, without moderators or verification by journalists. We do not know what is moving in that space that is understood to be private, but that has an enormous influence in determining the behavior of citizens
Manuel R. Torres, Professor of Political Science at Pablo de Olavide University
Although they have not been totally effective, content moderation caused the amount of false and extremely biased information to decrease between 2016 and 2020, according to a analysis by Professor of Computer Science Boleslaw Szymanski from the messages spread by Twitter before Elon Musk acquired the platform.
However, this decrease in false content on platforms has been followed by a boom in the same messages in encrypted and unmoderated applications, such as WhatsApp or Instagram, initially designed for interpersonal communication, but which are being used as social networks.
“Certain profiles that systematically distribute false information have been blocked or expelled and have resorted to platforms that are supposed to be for direct communication between users, but which in the end also have functions of massive distribution or, at least, of reaching many people”, explains Manuel R. Torres. “There is a whole underground of disinformation that is not visible to the eye, without moderators or verification by journalists. We do not know what is moving in that space that is understood to be private, but that has a huge influence in determining the behavior of citizens”, he concludes.
Szymanski has also detected the proliferation of supposedly independent influencers. “They arose from the dark,” warns the professor, who considers that these, “even without sending false news and simply propagating selected unilateral facts, can create a mosaic that is not real.”
In Spain, the Audiovisual Communication Law wants to regulate the activity of influencers, streamers, tiktokers and youtubers through a registry that allows their monitoring and if they comply with the obligation to protect the audience from content that incites hatred and violence or access to pornographic content.
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