Followers do not make voters

IF Roosevelt was radio and Kennedy was TV, Obama in 2004 used social media (SM) to mobilize the public online. Obama was able to raise awareness of and financial support for his campaign where he used 15 social networking sites. But to follow what Obama did in the US and apply it here is an erroneous proposition because the data points in the US are highly developed while in our country databases are entirely designed by each campaign team, whether in national or local races. Clearly, followers are not matched with registered voters which makes any correlation hard to come by.

In the last May 2022 election cycle, there had been a mushrooming of so-called SM “experts” duping candidates that they could make them win an election, whether national and local just by increasing their followers on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. Social following is not an indicator of electoral success. There is no relationship between the number of followers a candidate has on any given SM platform and winning an election. Politicians, candidates and political parties should know that there is no direct correlation between the number of followers and winning an election.

One SM “expert” charges P3,000,000/month and another is asking for P50 million for six months’ work. Sitting through presentations of these people really makes one sick because they make so many promises, but they do not understand a tinge of political strategy. Another gets imports from Vietnam and Pakistan to shore up followers and create a post to viral. And yet another proves they can do it by asking the potential client for his/her account and in three minutes, voila, your followers increased by 300-500. The flash-in-the-pan operation gets a candidate or a politician to buy in without knowing that followers are not voters.

Take the case of one candidate going from zero to a million in a few months only to learn late that he had only 10,000 registered voters from among the followers. Easily from the look of it when the followers were higher than the total registered votes for the province and the client was just running for the district, red flags should have been paid attention to carefully. But the client was overjoyed to have reached a million followers. Another case involved a campaign that used raffles to stoke the voters of a city to follow the candidate. The raffles had cash, appliances, tricycles and a vehicle. And the candidate was just throwing money to the SM team forgetting to campaign with the voters. Still another used a provider to attack people online that were calling the candidate out so his team of trolls would spread the call-out and the attacks, creating a halo of support online.

What is the role of SM in politics and campaigns? Clearly, there are two reasons for them to be in SM: A candidate goes to SM to amplify his/ her message and cascade these messages between, among, and across followers, but conversion happens outside any of the SM platforms. Large followers also tend to make MSM pay attention to a candidate and there lies the connect between MSM and SM. MSM report what is trending in SM. The reality for candidates is they do need to mobilize their base of supporters. SM might have an impact on voter turnout and voter mobilization, but the voter base is entirely different.

Can a viral moment be of the wrong kind? Some campaigns are experimenting hence it can be creative or it can make mistakes if one does not know their target audience from the start. When mistakes happen, when they go viral, then they have to deal with the consequences on SM. The strength of SM becomes also its weakness: virality.

Several studies have come out on the impact of posts by politicians. Posts might “set the agenda of traditional media and thus improve visibility; their performance can attract new party members, substituting for the general decline in party membership and the lowered transaction costs on these platforms might facilitate micro-donations through which political actors can raise millions. Through the lens of network media logic, we argue that the premise for all these beneficial outcomes is a large digital followership (e.g., fans or followers) that actively reacts to politicians’ public messages (e.g., likes or retweets) and thus enables messages to spread through the network. Hence, the success of political actors’ communication on SM should be defined as their ability to build a large digital followership and trigger as many reactions from their followers as possible.” Politicians’ success on SM depends on their personal background, political activity, and media coverage, and also their followership and the platform.

“SM users do not correlate with the general public. It is a skewed sample, it is not the broader public.” Follower rates would have a relationship with voter turnout or winning elections, but it is not direct and there are various reasons for such. The basic questions to ask: Are you talking to your base? Are your followers registered voters? And are your followers going to vote?

So, when you start asking these experts on strategies and how to put together the winning combination, they would often say, “if you are talked about, you will win,” or ”spend more to get the needed numbers,” or let’s do ads (without much reason why?), among others. Worse, when you realize you have been conned, they abandon your account, take all the databases, and sell them to another (hopefully, not your opponent).

There are many reasons why one wins or loses an election. Basic is the knowledge of voters, which covers demographics and psycho-graphics. Conversion is critical from the noise in communication channels to the ground, and the E-day operation drives things sometimes to surprising endings.

SM has changed the game, allowing incumbents and challengers to speak directly to constituents on everything and anything, from policy to what they had for dinner. Unfiltered communications oftentimes are considered authentic. But organic is better than amassing followers that you cannot parse and use the standout qualities of SM to convert to votes. Votes win candidates and not followers, until Comelec puts sense to data points.