Sharon
Brettkelly The Detail
Politicians who think
TikTok is an advertising platform for their party are
wasting their time, say experts
UK’s Andy Burnham
manages to turn a TikTok chat about bread rolls into a
serious discussion about the future of the political
system.
New York’s Zohran Mamdani makes a message
about rubbish bins sound fun.
Social media experts
call it manufactured authenticity, when a politician can
make a post look like an off-the-cuff chat to a
friend.
Today, The
Detail looks at the role of social media in the election
campaign, who’s good at it, and why some politicians try
hard and fail, while others ignore it.
The podcast
also explores the impact of a proposed social media ban on
young people and why it could backfire for
politicians.
University of Canterbury marketing
professor Ekant Veer says the rare gift of winning support
on social media is nothing to do with the political party’s
leanings, the politician’s age or how charming they
are.
“What Andy Burnham does and what Jacinda Ardern
has done in the past in New Zealand is use it as a way of
connecting with people, not just ‘and now you should vote
for me,’ but ‘I want to build a relationship, I want to show
you what my life is like, I want to show you what my values
are and I want to hear from you as well’.”
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Many
politicians underestimate the power of the “two-way kōrero”
and make the mistake of using it as an advertising platform
for selling their policies, says Veer.
Social media
users scroll past them for videos that take them behind the
scenes.
“We are forced not to stare in polite culture
at people, because in a western context, staring is seen as
impolite and it is seen as intrusive, while on social media
it is encouraged.
“When you allow people to get a look
into your life, then people will start to get addicted,
start to get hooked into that, and then the algorithm
re-inforces that and sends you more material like
that.”
Veer says politicians want to use TikTok
because about 40 percent of young people use it for their
news source, but those who don’t have the Burnham touch
should stay off social media and work on their strengths, or
they risk providing ammunition for their haters.
“If
you are good at it, leverage it. If you’re not good at it, I
would say stay away.”
The way New Zealand politicians
use social media has changed little over the two decades,
partly because it has failed to live up to its promise of
revolutionising politics, according to Dr Sarah Bickerton,
who lectures in public policy and technology at Auckland
University.
“It hasn’t been used interactively,” she
says. “The vast majority of New Zealand parties and
politicians use social media still in a broadcast
mechanism.
“It is one that gets around the gatekeepers
of traditional media, but it is primarily a broadcast
medium, because one of the promises for the online world,
even going back to the 1990s, was that it was going to
transform politics, that we were going to have that
connection.
“Some people even argued that we would be
able to do away with parliaments, because we would have that
direct connection to representatives, they would react and
converse with us, and we would have a revolution in
politics.
“We have not seen any of
that.”
Bickerton’s also written a chapter of a book on
the history of social media in elections around the world in
the last 25 years and describes how the different parties
have their own style.
She says social media does not
necessarily bring a party new voters.
“Social media
works best when you’re targeting the people who’ll vote for
you anyway. The rare exceptions when it broke out of that
mould are the exceptions who prove the rule.
“You’ve
got Mamdani, who turned his campaign into something wider,
Andy Burnham is doing something wider, but more often than
not, the parties’ approach to social media is more about
mobilising their base.”
Bickerton also warns that
political parties trying to appeal to young voters through
social media may find the new ban for under 16s will
backfire.
“Social media, online chat etc is the
predominant way those generations access media, so if you’ve
got new voters and you want to enfranchise new voters coming
into voting, disconnecting them from their primary source of
information is not how you do
it.”
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