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PAKISTAN’S first general election was in 1970. The campaign was long, and relied primarily on traditional corner meetings and rallies. In comparison, our 10th general election has become a much more sophisticated operation, with increasing use of social media and advanced political marketing.
The effective use of different communication channels to reach voters and mould their perceptions and preferences is key to winning. This is why strategists and consultants who can navigate the science of elections are in high demand. In the UK, Lynton Crosby is credited with David Cameron’s two wins, as were Alistair Campbell and Phillip Gould with Tony Blair’s election victories. Gould’s The Unfinished Revolution is a master class in political marketing. Hussain Haqqani is thought to be first election consultant in Pakistan playing a key role in Nawaz Sharif’s campaigns in the ’90s.
In contrast to this era, campaigns are now fought on both traditional and new media. The real tension lies between what media theorists call the ‘monovocality’ of newspapers and ‘polyvocality’ of digital and social media. With print media’s decline, the broadcast media, which has grown exponentially, is set to play a bigger role in the election campaign. The old-style political rallies to reach voters will have their role too.
In terms of political rallies, the PML-N is ahead of other parties. Fearing political obscurity following his disqualification from office, Nawaz Sharif got off to an early start and organised several rallies to get his message out. The message is simple — ‘respect the vote’ — and is backed` by a personal story of a politician wronged by the powers that be.
On the other hand, the PTI has organised fewer rallies, yet it has a huge presence on social media, where political attack ads are a routine affair. The PTI’s successful social media presence is largely because its vote bank consists of a large slice of the country’s youth, who are social media savvy.
At a time of heightening media restrictions on the PML-N’s outreach through print and broadcast media, the party is increasingly relying on social media. To attract the youth into its fold, the PML-N launched Maryam Nawaz. An active Twitter user whose tweets are widely circulated and discussed, could she have obstructed the PTI’s youth juggernaut on social media?
Political parties across the world now have active social media cells and friendly social media groups. In the 2017 British election, social media eclipsed the influence of British print media. For instance, pro-Corbyn articles penned by internet blogger Thomas G. Clark were viewed more often than the print media and other media outlets combined. Corbyn’s campaign also owed its unexpected electoral performance to its superior social media strategy.
But, as seen in several recent elections in the West, social media is also being used in dubious ways and raising legal and ethical concerns. In the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, it was revealed that Facebook users’ data was used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters. In his testimony to the US Congress, Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Facebook’s outsize role in inadvertently swinging elections in some countries. Going forward, he also identified the 2018 election in Pakistan as being vulnerable to such influence.
Though sophisticated concepts such as micro-targeting have not yet caught on fully here, the macro-level propaganda by different political parties and other interested state institutions through Facebook and social media is already in spate. Articles on social media’s role in the Pakistani election have shown that political parties have created fake accounts to spread misinformation and fake news about their opponents.
Adding to this, a large part of message framing has revolved around portraying the political class in general as being thoroughly corrupt and incompetent, or casting candidates who are critical of the establishment as anti-state and pro-Indian. Together, these messages add to the near constant refrain of regime change. These macro messages have often trumped fine-grained micro-targeting strategies that are the hallmark of Western democracies.
For example, the outgoing PML-N has already been fixed in the mind of the people as irremediably corrupt by the drip feed of consistent messaging through sections of broadcast and social media. A report by Pildat has termed the pre-poll process hugely disadvantageous to the party, characterising a vast swathe of private media as acting under the influence of state institutions.
Whatever the outcome, the 2018 election will furnish a rich case study of how the monovocality of newspapers versus the polyvocality of digital and social media will play out.
The writer is a public health and development consultant.
Twitter: @arifazad5
Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2018
