With the next United States Presidential Election set for November 2012, the two major American parties are already stepping up their campaigning efforts. Four years ago, Barack Obama utilised the internet more than any previous presidential candidate as he successfully ran for the most powerful office in the world.
Back in 2008, the Republican party seemed reluctant to get involved in a social media war with the Democrats, leaving the would-be battlefields of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube largely uncontested for their opponents. As social media news site Mashable reports, though, it looks like they may have reconsidered this position in recent months.
This May, Mitt Romney, seeking the Republican nomination once more, broadcast a speech live on Facebook in which he asked for financial support for his campaign, a move perhaps motivated by Obama's successful online fundraising attempts in 2008.
More significantly, the Republican party held Twitter's first ever Presidential debate last Thursday, which saw the tweeting of opening statements from the six hopefuls and the submission of questions from the public.
Although it may set a trend for more and more of these kinds of online events in the future, a number of problems were evident that raise the question of whether the use of social media tools in political campaigning is beneficial to democracy.
The obvious issue, as Alan Schroeder points out, was that the Twitter debate provided a cloak for the candidates, with it being impossible to know who is posting under a username. A lot of the tweets were just soundbites taken directly from campaign websites, and it is almost certain that many of the posts were written by script writers and aides.
Condensing answers on topics like the economy and the war in Afghanistan into 140 character snippets also runs the risk of trivialising serious political stories. Of course on the other hand, the debate provided a way for voters at home to interact directly with politicians in an unprecedented way, and the trending of the process raised awareness of the race for the Republican nomination and those involved in it.
The internet potentially offers a new audience for politicians. The question is whether or not it could change politics for the worse by making it even more of a personality game than is currently claimed.
This dilemma has yet to come to the forefront here in the UK, with social media being used in campaigning to far lesser an extent in British politics when compared with recent American elections. Could it be that it's a cultural thing? Us Brits love Facebook and Twitter as much as any nation, but perhaps we don't see them as political sources or tools in the same way as our friends abroad do. Maybe we just aren't as used to technology in electioneering as Americans are. After all, it was only last year that we had our first live TV election debate, showdowns that have been a major factor in American politics since 1960.
It remains to be seen whether social media will impact British politics more in the future. The Conservative Party used Facebook and Twitter a little in the run up to the 2010 election, and several individual political figures maintain active profiles on the sites. It looks like it might take someone using the internet in as successful a way as Barack Obama did in America for the political world here in the UK to fully embrace social media. As we are seeing in the US now, once someone makes influential use of a new campaign tool, the competition have to keep up.
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