New media consists of the Internet, mobile phones, social media networks such as blogs and micro-blogs, social networking websites, video-sharing sites, and others. In other words, new media is a broad term that describes a range of media that are utilized for many different purposes. Some of the things that make new media different from traditional media (radio, television, newspapers and magazines) include:

• They are usually interactive;
• They use digital, online and mobile technology;
• They are often audience-created and user-driven;
• They function in real-time;
• They are usually borderless;
• The information is often short-lived;
• They are more difficult to regulate – and to censor;
• The infrastructure for publishing or broadcasting is usually cheaper for individuals to access;
• They do not always adhere to journalistic standards and ethics.

However, the line between traditional media and social media is often blurred, with most ‘traditional’ journalists using the internet as a key source of information for stories; and many traditional media creating online editions or transforming into fully multi-media outlets. Traditional media also utilize ‘citizen journalism’ pieces – for example CNN’s iReport which invites any viewer to contribute stories. Traditional media sometimes rely on personal mobile phone images and video to cover hard-to-access stories such as military violence against democracy protesters. Large media organisations like the BBC require most of their correspondents to have skills in a range of traditional as well as online and interactive media. Almost all major news organisations now have significant online versions, many of which are interactive.

There are many views on the overall impact of new media, but few contest the fact that it has spurred further globalization, allowed for communities of interest (political and otherwise) to better organize and communicate despite geographical distances, changed the face of traditional journalism, and blurred the lines between published and personal communication. In addition, new media has allowed individuals, groups, and smaller companies to challenge traditional media monopolies – which have become a growing concern of democracy advocates worldwide - by using the borderless and relatively inexpensive infrastructure of the Internet to voice alternative perspectives.

New media offers new opportunities for elections stakeholders. Like any technology, it also has limitations and challenges however. This section reviews the impact and relevance of new media to the each of the key roles mass media play in elections.[i]

New Media as Watchdog

New media has begun to play a key part in reinforcing transparency in democratic processes, including elections. Short Message Service (SMS), i.e. text messaging, is now being used around the world by many election monitoring groups for quick gathering and disseminating of information on election irregularities, quick-count processes, as well as other purposes. In Montenegro in 2005, an SMS-based quick-count process helped defuse tensions regarding the integrity of the referendum election count, and thereby helped persuade voters trust the official referendum result.[ii]

Citizens use new media to monitor electoral fraud. In the 2012 elections in Mexico, social media networks were used to expose vote-buying, including video posted across social media networks of a warehouse stuffed with grocery give-aways, allegedly intended to bribe voters. In addition, “[a]t least three groups…set up sophisticated websites where citizens [could] upload complaints and videos or other material to document irregularities. There [were] also social media sites for reporting alleged fraud in real time.”[iii] As a further example, in the 2012 presidential elections in Russia, activists created a new social media platform ‘Citizen Control’ specifically designed to bring all social groups together to monitor the elections.[iv]

Social media is also used to improve candidate behaviour and improve candidate-voter interaction. In Malaysia in 2012, Transparency International (TI) asked all elections candidates to sign a voluntary ‘Election Pledge.’ TI stated “[t]he purpose of the pledge is to recognize that it is the responsibility of every candidate to fight corruption, practice good governance and uphold the rule of law. The pledge also emphasises the crucial role citizens play in monitoring their politicians by providing a platform where the public can monitor and comment on candidates’ performances.”[v] What was unusual about this pledge was that it actually required candidates to open accounts on the social media networks and to interact with voters on them.

Traditional media’s watchdog role is significantly enhanced by its utilization of new media as both a source of information and a mouthpiece for elections reporting. By monitoring social media discourse, observing citizen journalism postings, and by creating new media of their own through blogs and micro-blogs on official media websites, traditional media’s elections investigations have become faster, more diverse, and more interactive.

Social media has also been utilized extensively to monitor hate speech, as well as social media ‘buzz’ that might lead to or signify elections violence. It has also been used to monitor and map on-going elections-related conflict. Tools have been created especially for this purpose. For example, the Ushahidi crowd-sourcing software gathers data from SMS, Twitter and email and combines it on a map using Google maps to show the geographical spread and scale of violence.[vi] Similary in Zimbabwe, Sokwanale digitally mapped reports of election violence and intimidation.[vii]

New Media as Public Educator

The decentralized, multi-media, and interactive nature of new media has opened up its potential as a public education tool. For example, EMBs, international democracy promotion organisations, civil society groups and others have made extensive use of YouTube and other video sites to share civic and voter education videos.[viii]

EMBs have Facebook profiles to attract new voters and provide information to existing ones, as well as to get feedback. Elections New Zealand, for example, has an active Facebook page with 10,000 likes[ix] and the Jamaica EMB’s is also considerably active.[x] The UK Electoral Commission puts out almost daily tweets on Twitter with announcements of key dates, guidelines, highlights from reports, and so on.[xi] There are also a few independent websites that promote voter registration, such as Rock the Vote in the US.[xii]

New Media as Campaign Platform

Creative use of new media for political campaigning continues to grow, and candidates and parties now use a full range of tools to woo voters. Many political parties and candidates of course have their own more-or-less sophisticated websites. British Prime Minister David Cameron used the ‘Webcameron,’ an Internet video diary, to appeal to voters in the 2010 UK elections and beyond.[xiii] All the UK parties used ‘viral’ advertisements, which spread through online social media, as a key part of their campaigns in the same elections.[xiv] Barack Obama famously used social media to raise funds and spread campaign messages for his successful 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, which some call the first ‘Facebook election’. According to one news article, 60% of people preparing to vote in the 2012 US presidential elections said they expected candidates to have an online presence. [xv]  In addition, in some contexts the fact that new media is cheaper for campaigning than traditional media means that smaller parties can ‘punch above their weight’ in terms of campaign exposure. It has yet to be demonstrated that this advantage equates to better electoral performance however. In the 2007 French presidential elections, candidate Ségolène Royal, who ran against Nicolas Sarkozy, spent more money than any other candidate on a diverse and interactive new media campaign, thereby generating a large amount of public online activism which likely gave her a higher profile than had she focused on traditional media.[xvi] [xvii]

Online campaign techniques differ not only in medium but also in message, tone, and timeframe. It appears that it is not so much the quantity of new media usage by candidates that appeals most to voters, but the quality and interactivity. This suggests that new media has provoked greater expectations of political candidates for direct (online) interaction. The 2010 UK elections saw demands for dialogue by middle class mothers with politicians online[xviii] In the 2008 elections in Macedonia, leading parties use of new media for campaigning was also ‘unprecedented,’ however, commentators expressed disappointment that ‘the “social” portion is absent in their use of social media.’ The blog posts are mainly transcripts of their rally speeches, and the content is basically recycled from their TV commercials and other uses such as to be fed to traditional media, analysts, journalists and similar actors, but not blogs per se. The posts are long, different audiences are targeted in each post, and personal experiences or input from the politicians is lacking.”[xix]

There is greater pressure from audiences for online media to be succinct (particularly with regard to micro-blogs) and comical (particularly in viral videos).[xx] Also, counter-intuitively, campaigning using social media can take a long time, in that candidates need to build social media profiles, a process which takes weeks or months.  New media campaigning often requires the ‘long campaign’ model, in which politicians maintain social media presence in pseudo-campaigning modes between elections. According to some analysts, this suggests that new media campaigning might privilege incumbents, depending on the regulatory environment and the extent to which candidates and potential candidates are pro-active online.[xxi] Indeed, new media offers the potential of ‘perpetual campaigns’.[xxii]

New media activity can be an accurate predictor of electoral outcomes - or not. The losing candidate in the Egyptian run-off presidential election received almost triple the number of Twitter mentions as the winning candidate, so in this case Twitter mentions certainly did not translate into electoral victory.[xxiii] However in the 2010 elections in the UK, social media monitors such as Tweetminster’s analysis fairly accurately predicted the winners and losers in the electoral debates. Election campaign managers now use monitoring of social media (called sentiment analysis) extensively to understand voter opinion patterns. One commentator on the 2012 US presidential elections stated that “[t]he 2012 campaign may not be decided by social media…but those tools offer a wealth of information about the national mood….Twitter [is] a focus group in the wild — hundreds of thousands of tweets, offering raw responses to each debate or speech, as seen on cable TV.”[xxiv]. The campaign led by Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria (2011) was credited with the successful use of social media.

Social media can also pose risks for candidates. There have been cases of candidates posting comments on social media forums that have backfired. Perhaps thinking that Twitter reached mostly a sympathetic audience, perhaps firing Tweets too quickly off-the-cuff, or overestimating the tolerance on social media for bad jokes, young Scottish candidate Stuart MacLennan was sacked by the Labour Party after posting Tweets that “described old people as 'coffin dodgers', branded one woman a 'boot' and joked about slavery.”[xxv]

Media as Open Forum for Debate and Public Voice

In many countries, new media has become one of the most vibrant platforms for people to voice views, share information, interact with leaders, and debate key elections issues. New media offers the advantages of being ‘democratic,’ allowing anyone to post their opinions on blogs and micro-blogs, share links, send and forward emails, create websites, and so on. It also has the advantage of working in real-time, thereby allowing people to keep up with dynamic and ever changing developments. Finally, new media is also much more difficult to censor or silence, as governments cannot easily suspend blogger “licences”, raid offices of Twitter users, or prosecute someone for posting links on Facebook.

The use of new media in the Arab Spring uprisings is an example of the contribution of these new tools to political change. As some analysts writing in mid-2011 put it:

Seeing what has unfolded so far in the Middle East and North Africa, we can say more than simply that the Internet has changed the way in which political actors communicate with one another. Since the beginning of 2011, social protests in the Arab world have cascaded from country to country, largely because digital media have allowed communities to unite around shared grievances and nurture transportable strategies for mobilizing against dictators. In each country, people have used digital media to build a political response to a local experience of unjust rule. They were not inspired by Facebook; they were inspired by the real tragedies documented on Facebook. Social media have become the scaffolding upon which civil society can build, and new information technologies give activists things that they did not have before: information networks not easily controlled by the state and coordination tools that are already embedded in trusted networks of family and friends.[xxvi]

New media continued to be important in the wave of elections following the Arab Spring revolutions. While acknowledging that the Internet was still only a luxury of the wealthy and therefore should not be overly emphasised, one Egyptian commentator noted that during the lead up to the presidential elections social media was dominated by elections opinions and debates. He observed that Facebook “[u]sers posted images with political messages defending their own candidates or criticising their opponents, adding their own commentary.” Meanwhile, popular activists wrote opinionated blogs, regular news media carried out non-stop real-time online coverage, speeches from presidential candidates were shared on YouTube, and Twitter was buzzing with micro-debates on the elections.[xxvii]

New media has provided voice to segments of society whose voices might otherwise not be heard. For example in the UK, one pollster dubbed the 2010 election the ‘Mumsnet election,’ in which “the parenting website… was changing political debate. Mumsnet's infamous webchats force politicians to address parents as equals, on issues of Mumsnetters' choosing: with other social media it has…given ordinary women the confidence to challenge politicians in new ways….the internet shapes the battleground for female votes.”[xxviii] This is an interesting example of the amplifying effects between new and traditional media, in that interactions on a website with a relatively small audience were picked up by the traditional news media which then increased the online interactions.

Uncensored debate on new media has started to impact electoral outcomes. The Malaysiakini online journal in Malaysia is an example of new media which provided an alternative voice and has had a significant electoral impact. “In March 2008, the [ruling party] made its worst showing at the polls in half a century, losing its two-thirds parliamentary majority for the first time since independence. Facilitating this was the growing prominence of online journalism, which diminished the massive BN advantage in media access and “shocked the country” by documenting gross police abuse of demonstrators, particularly those of Indian descent.”[xxix]

New media has also allowed traditional media to dodge censorship. According to an article in Journal of Democracy, for example, "[w]hen  Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez forced Radio Caracas Television off the air in May 2007, it continued its broadcasts via YouTube."[xxx]

New media lends itself to informal and ironic opposition too. For example during the UK 2010 general election campaign one of the most successful independent sites was a satire of a major party’s election billboards. Using what was felt to be an overly ‘airbrushed’ photograph of the party leader, visitors to mydavidcameron.com could create and publish their own digital versions of real posters, complete with amusing slogans.

Regulation of New Media

Are the regulatory practices and styles of reporting that have developed over the years for conventional media equally applicable to ‘new’ media? When it comes to regulating the behaviour of new media, many of the assumptions that underlie the regulation of conventional media simply do not apply. For example, the space to publish material on the Internet is literally infinite, compared with the assumption behind broadcasting regulation that the frequency spectrum is a finite resource that must therefore be shared. The convergence of traditional and new media also means that governments face the challenge of where and how to draw the line with regulation. Are opinionated blogs to be regulated as third party campaigning? Can blackout periods be enforced beyond the country’s borders or even within country borders? And so on.

Certainly there is growing international consensus about rights to freedom of expression and information in new media. In 2011, the UN Human Rights Committee recommended:[xxxi]

“the states take all necessary steps to foster independence of…new media and ensure access of individuals to them (para 15)….and specifically indicated that “operation of websites, blogs or other internet-based, or other information dissemination system [sic], including systems to support such communication, such as internet service providers or search engines” (para 43), need to be compatible with paragraph 3 of Article 19 of the Covenant.”[xxxii]

Paragraph 3 covers the very limited circumstances under which freedom of expression may be restricted, namely to protect the rights of others and for national security reasons.

Like other advances in media technology in the past, new media are seen as a threat by some governments.  As UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay stated in 2012:

The Internet has transformed human rights movements. States can no longer exercise control by claiming a monopoly over information. This has resulted in a backlash effect and intensified attempts to unduly restrict access to online content or Internet as such….there is also a real concern that methods to identify and track down criminals may be used to crack down on human rights defenders and suppress dissenting voices.[xxxiii]

Ultimately, the Internet and other new technologies are carried on media (such as telephone lines) that are owned by governments or large corporate owners, and that often require some kind of licensing to operate. For example in Turkey, according to an Open Society Foundations report, 

The most significant threat to news diversity and quality remains the repressive legal restrictions under which journalists operate. If anything, this has intensified in response to the rise of digital media. Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, makes it illegal to insult Turkey and national identity and has been used as a cover for internet censorship.[xxxiv]

The regulatory challenge posed by new media so far has been the following: old media can be regulated in a way that does not constitute censorship and enhances, rather than restricts, freedom of expression. Such regulation of new media has proven impossible. New media can be regulated, but the content of the Internet, for example, is so diverse and widespread that regulation has been heavy-handed and has amounted to censorship: interception of emails, closure of web sites, and pressure or legal action against Internet service providers.

The Internet poses a challenge to traditional views of media conduct in elections. Pre-polling blackouts on campaign coverage, for example, are difficult to police because of unregulated web sites. Meanwhile, in the 2012 French elections, an embargo on reporting results was ignored by online media in neighbouring Switzerland and Belgium, which published results 90 minutes early, thereby making that clause in French law almost impossible to enforce.[xxxv] A characteristic of the Internet that makes it difficult to regulate is its international nature. Attempts by national regulators to close down websites are met by the creation of mirror sites (replicas) beyond the country’s borders. Self-regulation by new media users is also more difficult if not impossible, and new media has sometimes ignored conventions that have been widely accepted by ‘traditional’ media  (for example by not reporting exit polls before voting has ended).

It is generally currently accepted that it is difficult to do anything specific to regulate new media around elections. The law defines what is and is not acceptable in terms of campaigning and other media-related activities. Therefore all media, traditional and new, as well as political actors need to abide by that law. In New Zealand, an attempt was made to specifically regulate third-party blogs during the pre-campaign period:

In the run-up to the 2008 general election, the New Zealand Electoral Commission requested that a citizen campaigner shut his ‘dontvotelabour.org.nz’ website down because it was in contravention of the EFA [Electoral Finance Act, 2007]. Its author, a pro-life activist, did not want to display his name and address on the website and eventually redefined it as a ‘blog’ to exploit ambiguities in the EFA. Meanwhile, adverts protesting against polytechnic funding cuts were withdrawn because their producer – a local mayor – was required to register as a third-party; campaigners feared that newspapers challenging government legislation on other matters would be forced to register as third parties in the run-up to elections.[xxxvi]

New Zealand attempted to keep a tight reign on third-party online activity that resulted in protest from the mass media and freedom of speech advocates, and the law was eventually changed. “As the New Zealand experience has shown, attempting to cover all possibilities risks appearing draconian and undemocratic and is, therefore, doomed not only to failure but to ridicule.”[xxxvii] While it is impossible to regulate for all possibilities, registered candidates, political parties and third-parties can be held to campaign rules for online campaigns as much as possible.

The Scope and Limitations of New Media in Elections

New media, like all technology, has disadvantages and limitations when it comes to elections. As with traditional media, access to new media is uneven around the world. While Internet use is growing in most countries, a much smaller percentage of people have access to it in developing than developed countries, as the graph below indicates. The United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) quantifies the status of Internet growth in the developing world as follows: “In developing countries, the number of Internet users doubled between 2007 and 2011, but 
only a quarter of inhabitants in the developing world were online by end 2011”.[xxxviii] The ITU’s table below gives a useful summary of the growth of Internet use in different types of countries. [xxxix]

Meanwhile, mobile phone usage is the fastest-growing technology around the world. Around 86% of the world’s population now has access to a standard (2G) mobile phone, which can be utilized for calls and SMS, a communications potential which is being exploited in all sectors of economic and political life in most countries. The third and fourth generation of mobile phones (mobile-broadband or 3G and 4G phones) are in fact a convergence of phone and Internet technologies and global access is also growing fast. However, disparities are huge with this latest technology, with only 8% of people in developing countries owning a 3G or 4G phone in 2011.[xl]

Thus traditional media continue to be the primary source of elections information around the world.[xli] There are, of course, combinations of media that have great potential in developing countries, for example the commonly used combination of radio and SMS which does not require internet access at all. A range of such combinations has been used to enhance elections-related interactions, to distribute civic and voter education, and for other goals.[xlii]

In addition to limited access, use of new media is affected by culture, regulation, demographics and other factors.[xliii] In the run-up to the US presidential elections of 2012, in a country with extensive Internet penetration, most research showed that television was still the most important media. "Social media has been much heralded but relatively little used by average voters and average citizens," according to the Pew Research Center. “[O]nly 2 percent of people sought election news from Twitter, 3 percent from YouTube and 6 percent from Facebook.”[xliv] On the other hand, other research found that social media would still play an important part in determining election results, with almost 40% of voters using information on social media to help determine their voting decision.[xlv]

In the UK, where the three major parties now use sophisticated online campaigning, new media’s limitations were evident in the 2010 elections. According to an article in The Economist, “[e]pisodes of WebCameron [Conservative candidate David Cameron’s web diary] [were] among the most-watched in the news and politics category of YouTube; his appearance at a south London college [the week of March 18, 2010] attracted 15,000 views in its first two days. But evening television news bulletins [drew] millions—as will, it is hoped, the three televised debates between the party leaders in the run-up to the election.”[xlvi]

In conclusion, while it raises new challenges and dilemmas, in general new media holds out much potential for all elections stakeholders, including EMBs. This potential is growing as global access to new media grows, as do innovative ways of utilising it.