In an effort to procure relevant content on my social media platforms, I spent the past week mining the Internet for articles on the use of social media in US Election 2014. One would think that with the election last Tuesday (November 4th), surely there would be plenty of articles on the use of political social media to populate my Twitter feed and Facebook page. This task was not so easy, and I have to say that my reaction was layered. At first, I thought it was very odd that there weren’t more articles, but as I began to consider why this may be the case, I developed a few theories:
- Midterm elections garner significantly less voter participation than presidential elections, so it stands to follow that the number of articles about social media and Election 2014 would not be as plentiful as the coverage was in Election 2012;
- Midterm elections produce a more fractured climate – the “top” races are at the state level for governor and US senate. In this environment, it becomes much more difficult and cumbersome to study social media coverage in each state with elections; as a result, it becomes complicated to write an article about political social media in general on a national scale. Articles on social media on the more local, state level were written, but these were more like case studies than overall assessments of social media usage in politics;
- Getting the metrics that are involved in an entire campaign may be better suited for researchers than journalists, as it can be a daunting undertaking. It is easier to have more anecdotal accounts of social media participation with more narrow applications than it is to do an exhaustive study with wider reaching implications.
Academics, journalists, political practitioners and interested citizens have vastly unexplored territory to cover to better understand the role of social media in politics. With political participation by the electorate at such lows in contrast with the opportunities for unprecedented levels of political communication enabled by social media, the challenge remains: how do we get citizens who express their political opinions on social media to voice their opinions where they have the authentic power of a registered vote – the ballot box?