THE FACEBOOK FACTOR

Canada’s political parties are savvy about using social media to reach voters, but platforms also carry risks.

Facebook was a big-league player in last year’s federal election — it may even have helped drive up the impressive voter turnout numbers.

But while Canadian politicians of all stripes were using the social medium in new and interesting ways, the same cannot really be said of the media.

The Canadian media’s less-thaninnovative efforts to come to grips with Facebook are analyzed in an interesting new study by Carleton journalism and communication professors, published in a chapter of a recently released book on the 2015 federal election. (The book is titled, as coincidence would have it, The Canadian Federal Election of 2015.)

With more than 20 million Canadians using Facebook, voluntarily pouring personal information and opinion into the public sphere, it’s little wonder that politicians would see the medium as a valuable channel — to send and receive data about the electorate. And use it they did in the last campaign, for question-and-answer sessions with the leaders and, in Justin Trudeau’s case, to unveil the Liberal party’s platform.

Behind the scenes, digital teams for all parties were using Facebook to find and send ads to their target demographics, and cull audience data on which messages were gaining resonance during the nearly three-month-long campaign.

Facebook usage also produced some unintended consequences for politicians — notably the candidates whose reckless postings of the past came back to haunt them in the election and, in some cases, resulted in the end of their would-be careers in politics.

The media, to be fair, covered that Facebook dimension of the campaign. But the new study, by Carleton University’s Josh Greenberg, Chris Waddell and Mary Francoli, found that most print and broadcast media still didn’t really know what to do with Facebook as the election was underway. Politicians may have been using it to find new voters, but the media outlets weren’t using Facebook to find new audiences.

The jumping-off point for the study was the partnership announced between CTV and Facebook before the 2015 election — to see what that yielded for political coverage — but the analysis ended up with findings that stretch far beyond one network and into much of the traditional media as a whole.

Three broadcast networks were part of the study, as well as three major newspapers, including the Star, the National Post and the Globe and Mail.

Researchers tracked the number of Facebook posts by each media outlet, sorted them by content and counted which posts gained the most traction.

The detailed findings are too extensive to list here, but in summary, the researchers found that media organizations were using Facebook too often to post yesterday’s news or recirculated items, and all but CBC’s Politics page (and the Star’s, in the final weeks of the campaign) were dominated by non-election stories.

Nor was the media getting much interaction with the public through Facebook.

“The findings from our study do not suggest that Canadians turned to the Facebook pages of the media outlets we studied to actively engage with campaign issues or to get others involved in electoral politics,” the study states.

Though CTV promised that its Facebook partnership would produce coverage “in a way that no other media organization can,” the Carleton academics’ research found that there was ultimately nothing overly distinctive or different in any of the ways that the big media outlets used the social medium during the election.

That’s a problem that needs to be fixed. As Waddell, one of the authors, said in an email to me, it highlights the continuing question for the media on whether to treat Facebook as a collaborator or a competitor. When people get their political news through Facebook, it’s Facebook getting the lion’s share of advertising dollars and audiences.

“The risks for media are loss of more advertising revenue . . . loss of traffic on news websites and, I think most important, brand obliteration,” Waddell said. “People who view news on Facebook have no idea where it comes from, or who is the source — so much for newsrooms competing for who can be first with something.”

Waddell stressed that the authors want this research to be just the start of a long, hard look into how Facebook can coexist with the media, and how they can mutually benefit amid a shared desire to gather advertising and audiences.

That’s not just a lofty goal. With the traditional media now struggling with questions about its future existence and sustainability, news outlets are going to have to find a way to work with Facebook — better than they did in the 2015 campaign, according to this study.

Or, as the book chapter itself warns in its conclusion: “The future of political journalism will have to accommodate the powerful role of Facebook in the media ecology of today.” sdelacourt@bell.net