With the elections that have passed in Pakistan this year, one can see that social media and technology play a great role in almost everything these days.
It is a well established fact that politicians do not win elections by just telling people their philosophies but by working on social problems that affect the general populace directly. Politicians have to really motivate the average voter to give them a chance, and this is no new thing for the Pakistani politician, after all they have been groomed to do just so since birth.
With the advent of technology, politics in this era has taken up to a more digital stand point as well. We see politicians not only engage with their supporters on the field but they have now also started actively engaging the masses on online platforms.
In the general elections of 2013, we saw the usage of social media for campaigning limited to mass level dissemination of information vis-à-vis activities of the particular political parties.
But in this age, where everything one does is always available scrutiny on social media the average politician in Pakistan needs to be visible to his people be it At births, marriage celebrations and funerals. He needs to be accessible, to be polite, to be a diplomat, etc. The list is long but everything boils down to be his only priority being to listen, filter which problems he can solve today and for whom.
Politicians haves also taken on to attract the voter base by switching to websites on the internet, and micro blogging on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. We have seen that they also take advantage of short SMS packages offered by various cell phone companies to send mass messages to the people in their constituency seeking their support in the elections. According to the rough estimates by the Daily Times, “one billion short messages (SMS) were exchanged on a daily basis in the country when the election was drawing nearer.”
According to a study called ‘Political Advertisements and Voters Behavior in 2013 General Elections of Pakistan: Exposure vs. Impact Analysis, “voters’ loyalties for their respective political party were also an important factor that reduced the advertising influence”. Concluding regarding exposure to various advertisements, voter loyalty still lied to whom they initially supported.
However, it is to be noted even though social media is now being used by big political parties such as PML-N, PTI etc, and the parties haven’t resorted to big data yet.
One of the biggest examples of using social media and big data for elections can be seen in the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign. According to an article by Dr. Pamela Rutledge in titled, ‘How Obama Won the Social Media Battle in the 2012 Presidential Campaign, “Not only was Obama the first African American to be elected president. But he was also the first presidential candidate to effectively use social media as a major campaign strategy. It’s easy to forget, given how ubiquitous social media is today, that in 2008 sending out voting reminders on Twitter and interacting with people on Facebook was a big deal. When Obama announced his candidacy in 2007, Twitter had only just started and there wasn’t even an iPhone yet,”
Furthermore, she recalls. “Obama dominated the social media space because his team got how networks work. The real power of social media is not in the number of posts or Tweets but in user engagement measured by content spreadability. For example, Obama logged twice as many Facebook ‘Likes’ and nearly 20 times as many re-tweets as Romney. With his existing social media base and spreadable content, Obama had far superior reach,” she explains.
According to various analysts Pakistan currently has a long way to go with regards to using big data but social media is in full use. Furthermore, Sohail Waraich, a political analyst who headed the election cell of Geo Television Network in 2013 general elections says PTI presence on the social media is the highest followed by the PML-N while PPP seems to be totally absent.
