Mediatisation is the process by which, since the 1990s, the media has been influencing political communication. After the Information Revolution, this process took a drastic turn. Political communication has changed in different ways with the infusion of ICT. Increasingly it is bringing to forefront the responsibility intermediaries, or platforms that connect political actors with the public have in the regulation of this form of communication.
There are various aspects to the nature of such communication, including information skewing, automated bots and paid content.
Information skewing and access to information
Not just direct political communication, but even news is computer mediated today. All major media houses have digital branches, and there are digital media platforms in themselves. Whenever an issue comes to the forefront, each media platform frames it depending on their own prerogatives. Diversity of sources is the best way to guarantee authenticity of information, however, indexing and ranking is done by internet giants who essentially private corporate entities, whose interests are market oriented, favouring the already powerful and invested.
For example, the idea of Free Basics, the dream of Mark Zuckerberg’s internet-for-all campaign, has essentially digitally colonised most of poor, third world countries to opt for their service. The idea of free basics, is that selected webservices are offered to people free of data-charge. This, while sold as a means of offering access to all, heavily skewers visibility towards websites and services that are of political and corporate interest. President Duerte of Philippines with the aid of free-basics, has led a campaign of fake news, trolling and intimidation towards his opposers and competitors. In 2015, Phillippines signed up for internet.org, Zuckerberg’s internet for all plan. By 2016, Facebook was primarily the only way for accessing the internet in the country. Duerte, a lawmaker way behind his other two competitors, used social media to gain on popular support. According to media reports, he employed troll farms of 400 to 500 people with a budget of $200,000 or more, to flood Facebook feeds with pro-Duterte content — much of which was false. The effort paid off: Duterte went from a marginal candidate to a mainstream figure in national online discourse. In the month prior to the election, 64 percent of all Philippine election posts on Facebook mentioned Duterte. One media article reports, after his election victory, more than 30,000 tweets mentioned Duterte in just a two-hour period, appearing at a rate that at times exceeded 700 tweets per minute.
There on, the online troll army has worked incessantly to threaten, intimidate and discredit all information that is not to the dictator’s favour- while he has killed nearly 12,000 Fillipinos in his war on drugs. Political Communication through Zuckerberg’s selective free internet has become, free fine hell. As a policy critic put it- just because someone is hungry, you cannot offer them half a slice of bread. The idea that regulated internet is better than no-internet, is a warped-up notion of rationing free-speech that can only be born in the saviour-complex mind of the privileged.
Political Advertisements
A world in which politicians are able to advertise only to large groups of people — as they do on broadcast television, for example — is one in which they have incentives to promote more unifying messages. But if they can slice and dice the electorate however, they like, those incentives are much weaker. That is exactly what happens on social media, with its features for microtargeting and user-preference based advertisement.
Political advertisements are not like regular advertisements pushing you to endorse or buy a commodity, it is a part of a system called an ‘influence operation.’ When a party is asking for your vote, they are also asking for your willingness to pass certain ideologies and mandates. In a paper titled ‘Dont blame it on Whatsapp: on rumours and lynch mobs’ Apar Gupta in 2018 writes ‘Since influence operations rely on the dissemination of partisan viewpoints, they often make use of platforms that appeal to their audience’s patriotic fervour. Therefore instead of questioning the veracity of the information, these campaigns appeal to an individual’s patriotic duty to share this information widely.”
A political advertisement decides whether you vote for clean air or cow-hospitals, for air-strikes or more employment, for transparency or a powerful troll army. it is an advertisement to choose who will decide the legislation and regulation for your country.
In the West, banning political advertisements is a way for greater campaign transparency, maybe- but for a country like ours, with a very different demographic, it could be a powerful tool in stopping any form of economic hegemony.
As per data released by the Facebook Ad Library report, between February and November 2019, the official facebook page for BJP has spent Rs 4.3 crores on political advertisements on Facebook alone. In addition to that, pages like myfirstvoteformodi has spent Rs 1.3 crores on political advertisements via facebook, bharatkemannkebaat around Rs 1.4 crores, and if we took all the different pages that are explicit endorsements of BJP, that amount hikes up to 4.816 Crores. Just on one platform.
CSDS results actually confirm that political biases are cemented by social media consumption.But the case against political advertisement is not just a whine against the violation of Article 19 (hegemonic flooding of a space with one narrative by paying money is an indirect violation of freedom of expression for all), it is also about a growing fear of selling our government to massive corporate interests.
The danger of campaign funding is that no one knows where the money comes from- we do not know who is backing this well-oiled machine of campaign propaganda, and what kind of regulation has been promised to these campaign donors in return for their patronage.
Out of Rs 689.44 cr as income from unknown sources in 2017–18 audit by Association of Democratic Reforms, the share of income from Electoral Bonds was Rs 215 cr or 31%. These bonds, introduced in the money budget in 2018 as a transparency reform to route all political donations through banking channels, thereby making sure tax-authorities can track the expenditure, is seen as one of the most retrograde steps in electoral transparency.
These promissory notes or bonds that can be donated to any political party recognised in the constitution, are issues in absolute anonymity. That means- noone knows who exactly is donating to a political party. The BJP raised about Rs 487 crore or 52.8% of the funds in 2017–18 through anonymous sources, according to its audit reports.
Aside from the opaque backing of political advertisement- there are clear lines that lead most electoral funding to big corporates. For example, BJP’s biggest donor is Prudent Electoral Trust. They have given Rs 52.7 crores to the BJP in March 2019, Rs144 crore in 2018, in 2017 and 252.22 crores in 2016. The Prudent Electoral Trust is funded by Bharti Enterprises, GMR and DLF Groups, along with JMMCO, Jubilant Foodworks and National Engineering Industries.
Buying influence through political advertisement is more effective with the birth of these Internet Giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. Facebook refuses to fact check its political advertisements, and through microtargeting, increasingly voters are trapped in echo-chambers of their ideological leanings and polarised drastically into opposing camps.
Automated communication through bots
Social bots are unique in the realm of automated software in that they are generally connected to a platform where they have direct interaction with actual humans. The impact of political bots — defined as automated scripts designed to influence public opinion, is hard to measure. However, they have been playing a significant role in political communication in the last few years.
Political bots are designed essentially to influence user opinion on important voter-agendas. In the context of the 2016 US Presidential Elections, they were used to generate content related to Roe Vs Wade, Anti-vaxx and immigrants, all important ideas on the basis of which Donald Trump consolidated his voter base. The idea is to create content for informing voters, promoting a certain version of news during a crises and padding real life political leader’s virtual accounts with follows and support.
Conclusion
Aside from these ICT specific forms of political communication, social media allows for direct conversation between political leaders and the public. Narendra Modi has not held a single press conference since his first term in 2014, and has reportedly even fired his press secretary. This comes at a time when his public engagement is at an all time high- he is one of the most followed men on twitter, and has his own radio show called ‘Mann Ki Baat’. While it would imply that political communication without press mediation has made the leaders more accessible, in truth, it closes all possibility of two-sided communication, making public engagement more of an ‘announcement’ process rather than a dialogue.
That aside, political communication over ICT, which relies heavily on user-preference has put people into political silos, where they cannot access a world outside of their immediate ideology. Moreover, it puts users in echo chambers, where you are only surrounded by like-minded individuals, that leaves no space for political dialogue or reasoning.
In today’s age, not only is it impossible to predict the exact implications of ICT mediated pol-com, but whether it would even be electorally legal to use political bots, troll farms or spread false claims using political advertisement, are all matters of debate. Then there is the additional consideration of how much responsibility do the social media intermediaries, or the platforms for political communication have in controlling hate speech, regulating political advertisement or weeding out bots. While Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter banned the use of political ads in the microblogging site, Facebook staunchly refuses to fact-check its paid content. With oncoming data protection laws being set all across the world, there might be more accountability expected from ICTs as new players in the field of electoral politics. However, its democratic nature is only as good as the government-corporate nexus allows it to be.
