Don't just rely on Twitter in the election

Smart politicians still prefer to chat in person

What if we had an election and nobody followed it on Twitter?

Just imagine it. An election free of arsey GIFs. Free of bots. Free of the poisonous and pointless partisan banter that passes for “debate” in 280-character bursts. You know, follow an election like they used to do it, way back in ... 2006.

It's a proposition we in the Twitterati ought to test as the country gears up for the election for which the prime minister is now touring the country preparing the ground. And the people who ought to be first in line to test it are the politicians.

How many voters has a politician ever persuaded on Twitter? Very few, considering it's a platform that rewards preaching to your converted. And how many politicians have you come across on Twitter who have changed your opinion of them either during or in between elections? Zero, right? Because no platform that encourages instant and unfiltered emotion-driven takes to an audience who are already invested in you will ever represent someone's best foot forward to a swing voter.

Looked at from the other end of the telescope, however, it's easy to spot the dangers of campaigning via Twitter. As many a politician has learned over the years, one loose tweet can lead to embarrassment and sometimes even defenestration. Why take the risk?

The risk becomes even less understandable when you consider that a large chunk (most?) of the people who follow an MP don't even live in that person's constituency. Why perform for that audience? Put differently: Who cares what anybody outside of your constituency thinks come election time? Knocking on doors is a better use of time. Who knows? An MP might even have a real conversation with someone who can be persuaded.

To be fair, most politicians in tight races get it, and will therefore be spending a lot of time on the doorstep. It's the sure losers and winners who will have extra time to play, and who's to say you can't have a Twitter fight when your majority is thousands deep and there are twerps on the other side to tweak? Then again, maybe it's time we took the tweak out of politics.

As for the media, Twitter is a way of life by this point, too useful a tool to be left out of the toolbox. If that is to be, then it's essential journalists remember they have other tools and that spending endless hours in an echo chamber isn't the straightest route into understanding sentiment across the country

(or to understanding the meaty policy the parties will hopefully be dropping). Of course, with COVID-19 likely to restrict traditional campaigning activity, and with media budgets no longer what they were, there is every chance reporters will be stuck at home or in the bureau, spending even more time online.

Which isn't to say there won't be anything when they look there. There will be hundreds of online campaigns running currently, each one presenting an optimized message to a prioritized audience. The trick for anyone covering the campaign will be ensuring they have online profiles that meet the target demographic criteria in each critical battleground. We've now had three elections in the fully digital age and it feels like we've yet to have the coverage that reflects the profound change digital has had on campaigning, particularly from Facebook.

While Twitter gets most of the oxygen thanks to its heavy use by journos and politicos, it's on Facebook that the parties make their most sophisticated pitches. Geography, demographics, it's all there for the ad programming. Add in the increasing influence of sister-platform Instagram, and relative newcomer TikTok (where cringe politicians go to get memed), and this election will be happening in more places than ever. It is incumbent on the press to sniff these parallel campaigns out to understand and report on the pitches being made to Canadians.

Given I don't have Facebook anymore and find it hard to stay off Twitter, I'll have to settle for limiting my election consumption to what the parties are actually saying and releasing during the campaign. You know, like they used to in the olden days.