Political spin works for leaders on social media

Political leaders are using the Internet to connect directly with masses and tune out who do not conform

Even his inveterate opponents wouldn't contest that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has few peers in employing social media for political gains. Since August, when he overtook Amitabh Bachchan on Twitter, his personal handle @narendramodi has been the most followed account in India, and he is the only non-Bollywood personality on the top 10 list of the microblogging site, besides his official @PMOIndia handle which is ranked 10th. In comparison, Barack Obama, the outgoing US president, has the fourth slot in his country. Wait. Modi is also the first world leader to use a Twitter Mirror, an exclusive app that produces autographed selfies and posts them on Twitter while he is on tour. He is immensely popular on Facebook too. Like Obama, and US President-elect Donald Trump, Modi has zealously used these alternative platforms to navigate his way around the print media and TV outlets.

With more political leaders following in their footsteps in this rapid transition away from conventional communication channels and using social media as the lynchpin of their campaigns, the global political landscape is witnessing a massive churn, a key aspect of which is the participation of and interaction with the common man via the internet. While billions were spent on social media campaigns in the recently concluded US presidential election, leaders elsewhere are also investing a substantial amount of time and energy on these sites. German Chancellor Angela Merkel maintains an Instagram blog called Bundeskanzlerin; and Vladimir Putin of Russia puts out bold statements on Twitter, making commentators wonder whether the web is being used for Cold War-style propaganda. From Greece to Brazil and China (where Facebook and Twitter are banned) to Canada, leaders are taking exclusively to social media to vocalise themselves, a trend that makes the TV reporter Christiane Amanpour worry about the future and usefulness of journalism through traditional media, edited and filtered.
Social media has the power to link people who would never have met otherwise, but like a double-edged sword, it also promotes ghettoisation by encouraging homogenous groups to bind. A smartphone with a net connection is for some a window to the world, but it could also tune people out who don't conform.
Modi understands both. So do Obama, Trump and other leaders like Canada's Justin Trudeau and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. After all, what came in handy for Erdo?an to address and rally people against a 'military coup' earlier this year was FaceTime, an iPhone video chat feature. "Go to the streets and give them their answer," Erdo?an told a reporter who held up her phone to CNN's camera.
The triumphant Narendra Modi campaign of 2014 used video-sharing apps and social media pages to connect with disparate groups across the country and deployed technology to reach villages unconnected to the power grid, an outreach exercise that featured mobile vans and holograms. Having achieved vast popularity through direct contact, Modi now routinely addresses his countrymen with his Mann ki Baat radio programme and frequent Twitter videos.
Modi learnt it the hard way. Faced with an unofficial boycott and vilification in mainstream media following the 2002 Gujarat riots under his watch as Chief Minister, Modi first began to strike up friendships with editors of local dailies. A functionary of the Chief Minister's Office would regularly scour Gujarati newspapers to pick up bad news - say, about a school without a roof in an interior part of the state. The Chief Minister would despatch an official right away to have the problem fixed. Then the CMO would contact the daily's editor to thank him for bringing it to their notice. Impressed, the editor would reward the leader with favourable write-ups. Next, the 'war room' at the CMO began to align with religious groups and gurus such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and corporate bodies. It was around this time that Modi discovered the power of social media. It was exactly what he needed. He had found a sure-fire way to get past mainstream media.
The Prime Minister's latest salvo was fired from his phone app, asking the people of the country to answer a set of 10 questions. It was entirely consistent with his penchant for bypassing traditional media and making himself loud and clear on social networking sites, especially Twitter. This time round, he also sidestepped what he himself had described as his temple, Indian Parliament, to reach out directly to the masses to drum up support for demonetisation. The questionnaire of his app survey, intended to elicit answers on the scheme, seemed designed to gather data that would counter the spiralling criticism of his move to nix Rs500 and Rs1000 currency notes. The exercise highlights the rapidly expanding influence of social media and other instant messaging apps in shaping political preferences and moulding public opinion. Interestingly, it also puts the spotlight on the nature of the medium where the message, with all its trollsome meanness, could be as effective as it is fallacious and deceptive.
Most politicians have discovered that social media is almost ubiquitous now, and none of them wants to miss the ride, be it for airing their opinions, cracking jokes or connecting with grassroots workers and colleagues.
Globally, though, attacks on opponents have got nastier by the day. In the US, Trump invariably refers to The New York Times, which has been highly critical of him, with an adjective: 'failing'. Trump has kept up a sharp attack on the media, which he claims was out to malign him and ensure his defeat. His tweets and videos, however, struck a chord with blue-collared Whites in the US, who voted overwhelmingly for him after a bitterly fought election that saw candidates stooping to new lows and the media resorting to highly partisan coverage.
Politicians worldwide have also gained enormously from social media. In the face of vehement attacks from 'rightwing-oriented media' on the UK's Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn had told his 'grassroots supporters' early this year that as a measure to overcome censorship, it was necessary for them to use social media to communicate with the public. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got extremely active on Twitter by posting videos and photographs in an effort to make citizens feel they can regularly interact with him.
Such instances are proof of how useful social media may be for politicians to assert their importance by appealing directly to millions. The Indian Prime Minister claims tremendous popular support for his policy against black money: his app's 'poll' reports that 90 per cent of respondents are in favour of his latest move. Indeed, there's a flip side to politics on social media: practitioners could engage in spin at a faster clip than ever before. It helps their cause that social media lacks the checks, balances and other filters of traditional media, and so individuals can drive home arguments without such restraints as verifiable facts.
Indeed, these platforms offer vast potential for gross misuse and manipulation. Lately, any comment that is not in line with purveyors of the so-called nationalist spirit is pounced upon and targeted by large battalions of online trolls.
Besides, one of the major concerns is the massive proliferation of fake news around the world. Armed with social media handles, each individual is his own publisher, and often that freedom is abused. Not long ago, Russians in Germany instigated attacks on migrants from trouble-torn Middle Eastern countries, including war-ravaged Syria, by faking a story of a 13-year-old German-Russian girl being raped by Syrian migrants. The story, which attracted millions of views on Facebook, claimed that the girl was snatched from a train station and that Germany was trying to cover it up. Hundreds of migrants had been assaulted by the time it was confirmed that the story was fabricated.
Recently, a report said that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg was dead and also stated that the incidence of fake news on the social networking site he built was exaggerated. It was untrue. Soon, Zuckerberg shared his plan of attack against phoney news stories on his social-media platform. But battling fake news on texting apps and social media sites is easier said than done, and Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor, himself an avid social media user, points out that fake news is deeply worrying because there is no way for people to tell reality from falsehood. "I have myself received forwards and posts on WhatsApp and Facebook attributed to me that I have never written! Very often such fake stories profess the opposite of what I actually believe. It goes to the heart of the most important dilemma of the Information Age, the question of the reliability of information," he says, emphasising, "If you don't know what to believe, truth itself becomes a fungible commodity and society gets fragmented into bubbles of people who each inhabit their own perceived reality."
The danger is stark. "People authoritatively cite fake news stories as the basis for their sincerely held and totally wrong-headed beliefs. It's deeply alarming," says Tharoor.
In a world where the political narrative is being squeezed to fit smartphone screens, agendas that don't suit social media often get swept under the carpet. Well-known Economist Jean Dreze says that poverty is the least important subject in such a political discourse. Whoever talks for the poor suffers in his political career, he claims.
The networked population in India is rising rapidly. According to a 2016 report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, nearly 60 per cent of India's 462 million Internet users access it through smartphones, which are far more affordable than computers and tablets. This figure is expected to rise exponentially in coming years as mobile phones become cheaper and commonplace even in rural areas. This is why political parties of all hues want their cadres to be online with an ear to the ground. Meanwhile, charges fly that various leaders are buying up bots and using other technical tricks to exaggerate their followings; the same tweets being posted by multiple accounts is proof of that. They also use trolls to launch often-vicious campaigns against rivals as soon as they post a comment.
For a new form of media that takes pride in mobilising people for a cause and bringing strangers together, it is an unfortunate reflection of its power that it also divides people and alienates those who are not willing to go along with what's 'trending' on popularity charts. As the writer Nicholas Carr said, "Social media favours the bitty over the meaty." Unless the rational minds of the world unite in self-policing, history will remember the trolls and narcissists as the victors.
-The Open magazine (openthemagazine.com)