New media and social media are growing in importance as tools for campaigning, voter education, policy debate, opinion polling, and scrutiny of elections – in other words, all the roles played by traditional media but with more decentralized, interactive and user-driven mediums. A description of the roles of new media can be found under New Media.
Should new media be monitored as part of elections media monitoring? Given their increasing importance and impact on electoral processes in many contexts, it is logical that they should be monitored. However tools to do so are still nascent, and the challenges of monitoring social media are both substantive and logistical. The prospect of monitoring new media elicits a number of substantive questions such as: Given the convergence of new media and more formal, traditional media, at what point does elections-related regulation kick in? (Some regulatory systems now have answers to this question, making the monitors’ job easier). How is it possible to judge if and when new media is important enough that it needs to be monitored? Is it necessary to monitor both formal new media (such as the online versions of newspapers) as well as informal social media (such as personal blogs), even if these are not regulated under elections-related laws? Logistical questions need to also be considered such as: What social media should be monitored? Will the monitoring be cost-effective?
A few recent international Election Observation Missions have acknowledged the roles new media plays, and commented on them, but have not included them as part of formal media monitoring. The 2011 EEAS mission to Nigeria, for example, acknowledged that
[t]he seven largest dailies have their on-line editions, which alongside with citizen journalists' reports posted on-line became a meaningful source of information during the elections. Different types of social media (like Twitter and Facebook) were broadly used by both electorate and politicians, since more than 40 million Nigerians have access to the Internet. [i]
The 2012 OSCE/ODIHR mission to Russia stated that
[t]he penetration of Internet continues growing and it is increasingly becoming a source of alternative information [with 50% internet penetration amongst Russian adults]. In particular, social media are evolving as a forum for political debate and are used as a new tool for mobilizing and organizing people. [ii]
Both of these missions, however, carried out formal monitoring only on traditional media.
There are now many social media monitoring (SMM) tools that trawl blogs and social networks for key words, and are primarily used by the private sector to track ‘buzz’ about brands. Currently, SMM tools are used in elections mainly to track voter intentions and electoral campaign issues, for example in the lead-up to the US Presidential elections of 2012.
[iii] Social media have also been monitored by organisations interested in preventing electoral violence in real-time by monitoring keywords cropping up in social media, for example in Nigeria in 2011.
[iv] Election media monitors can use SMMs to find out, for example, whether campaign and direct access rules are being broken, whether voter education and political campaigns over social media are reaching wide audiences, whether in general freedom of speech is thriving, or if there is censorship or self-censorship in the social media environment
[i] “Nigeria: Final Report, General Elections April 2011”, (European Union Election Observation Mission, observation report, 2011), 30 http://eeas.europa.eu/eueom/pdf/missions/final-report-nigeria2011_en.pdf
[ii] “Russian Federation Presidential Election, 4 March 2012”,
(OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Final Report, 2012),12
[iii] One example of such tracking is Meltwater Buzz. See: http://election2012.meltwater.com/index.php/wordcloud/index/all/2012-05-11#
[iv] Michael Terrazas “Crowdsourcing Democracy through Social Media,” Georgia Tech College of Computing (blog), October 11, 2011, http://www.scs.gatech.edu/news/crowdsourcing-democracy-through-social-media
