Vertical and horizontal communication on the Facebook pages of 2014 Brazilian presidential candidates (original) (raw)

The electoral campaign through social media. Case Study - 2014 Presidential Elections in Romania

Developing a real network-society, the political communication through Social Media is no longer performing unidirectional, the political actors and the journalists do not have the same influence on the masses, as they had in the classic systems of political communication and the online opinion leaders have become key-factors in all this equation. In this sense, the main purpose of online campaign staff is to empower fans to interact with the posts of the candidate. Thus, any kind of feedback - like, comment or share – decentralizes the political message in social groups of fans, where he has a greater influence than the political actor. Once the message is discussed in social groups, strong ties (friends) of the fans are persuaded to become, in their turn, fans of the political actor and the conversion rate increase and this process will continue as long as interaction rate is high. In this paper, we aim to analyse the communication process through Facebook in the electoral campaign for the 2014 Romanian Presidential Elections and to compare the level of support for candidates on Facebook and for the real vote.

Brazilian elections in social media: reviewing and systematizing the results of the main researches

This article presents and compares, through a literature review, the results of the major researches that discuss communication strategies taken in the social media by candidates running for public positions during the political campaigns in Brazil from 2010 on. The digital media have gained relevance in the Brazilian political context in the wake of the popularity " phenomenon " achieved by Barack Obama – especially on the Internet – during 2008 US presidential elections, and due to the changes in Brazil's electoral legislation, which took place in the following year, and allowed the candidates to use those tools in their campaign strategy. In order to support such analysis, scientific articles published in journals and/or presented at national conferences on communication, sociology and political science have been chosen. The selected essays focused on characterising and discussing the use of social media by candidates running for the positions of president of the republic, state governor, senator, congressman, state representative, city mayor and/or councillor in the elections of 2010, 2012 and/or 2014. By the end of the review, one compares the main findings of the cases discussed, and debates the common characteristics among them by setting the hypothesis that they can be defined as standard electoral communication strategies in social media developed by competitors running for mayor and proportional representative positions in Brazil. As a conclusion, one affirms that some strategies can be considered as standard, due to the high frequency of incidence in different campaigns, while the other one needs further research on the subject for its effective evidence.

Political Communication on Facebook: Comparing the República Portuguesa and La Moncloa pages

Journal of Education, Innovation and Communication (JEICOM), 2021

The citizens' weakened confidence in politics has encouraged political actors to establish direct communication with them. As social media platforms grow in popularity, political institutions have been using them for more autonomy in public communication. This study analyses the use of Facebook, the most popular social media worldwide, by República Portuguesa, the government of Portugal, and La Moncloa, the government of Spain. First, a literature review on social media use by governments is presented. Then, the results of a manual categorization of a sample of posts published throughout January 2021 are presented. The posts were categorized according to DePaula, Dincelli and Harrison’s (2018) typology of government social media communication, which consists of information provision, input seeking, online dialogue/offline interaction, and symbolic presentation. The article provides an understanding of the use of each governmental party’s Facebook posts as a communication tool.

Social Networks & Politics: The use of Facebook in the Costa Rican 2014 presidential election

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have changed the way how people interact in the new virtual spaces. Politics, as an expression of such interaction, is no exception to this. This study focuses on the contraposition of the mobilizing and normalizing theses, in its aim to demonstrate that social networks are a valid source for electoral political processes analyses. Therefore, the research focuses on the online dynamics generated by the five major presidential candidates in Costa Rica, during the 2013-2014 electoral campaign, in their official Facebook profiles. The study assess each candidate’s communication, interaction and, finally, mobilization capabilities as from these virtual spaces. Such data are complemented and contrasted with national opinion polls results, as well as the final election results, finally showing Facebook’s political value.

Do — and why do — people interact with politicians on social media? Evidences from Brazilian state level elections

Sociedade e Cultura

This article presents the results of the analyzes on Facebook campaigning of 140 candidates who ran for governor of the 27 Brazilian federation units during the state level elections. Following Vaccari and Nielsen (2013) analytical framework, we collected the total amount of Facebook posts’ context and interactions of all candidates for governor, to propose an advanced approach of their methodology. We describe the frequency distribution of attention that each candidate generated and use statistical regression to analyze the decisive factors for that amount of attention. In general, the results showed a very active digital campaigning. In the regression model, a competitive candidate and the candidate’s number of press citations were the most predictive factors. The study confirmed the results the previous literature has achieved in other contexts as well.

Political communication on Facebook: A case study of the European parliament profile page for the elections 2009

CM-časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem, 2012

This study examines the use of Facebook in political communication during the 2009 European Parliament elections campaign. Its goal is to explore the possibilities of the European Parliament communication strategy on Facebook as well as the interaction and participation of its online audiences. The analysis has discovered new concepts significant for the field of online political advertising, the specific campaign construction with its key themes and the particular form of interaction. The original contribution of this paper is seen in its efforts to reveal the campaign of the European Parliament on Facebook, which was not previously studied.

Political communication on Facebook: Comparing the Regeringen and La Moncloa pages

2020

The citizens' weakened confidence in politics has encouraged political actors to establish direct communication with them. As social media grows in popularity, political institutions have been using it for more autonomy in the creation and dissemination of information. This study analyses the use of Facebook, the most popular social media worldwide, by the Regeringen, the government of Denmark, and by La Moncloa, the government of Spain. First, the core theories of political communication are broached. Then, each country’s political communication cultures are discussed. At last, a structural analysis of the Regeringen and La Moncloa Facebook pages and a manual categorization of the posts published throughout June 2020 are carried out. The posts are categorized according to DePaula, Dincelli and Harrison’s (2018) typology of government social media communication, which consists of information provision, input seeking, online dialogue/offline interaction and symbolic presentation. This research aims at understanding the content of the posts on the Facebook pages and, taking into account the Danish and Spanish political communication cultures, discussing and comparing the results.

Political Affections on Online Social Network: The Opinative Priority During the Presidential Campaigns

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

How does the urgency on publicizing opinions was expressed in the uses of an online social network during a conflicted period of time like the Presidential Campaign in countries such as Brazil and United States? In these scenarios, it seems that it is not enough to simply reflect on certain relevant topics; it seems essential to externalize opinions that seek to establish an intransigent position. To understand this phenomenon, possible evidence can be found in the way communities of fans are organized, guided by the regulation of affections in the media and in education. Thus, the concept of "opinionative priority" is proposed to understand the disputes about the meaning of democracy that emerge in online social networks, being the attempt to corroborate, counter or refute a statement, in a power dispute. It is the tensioning itself resulting from the need to belong, caused by social networks, and participatory culture, because it is not enough to be and be seen, it is necessary to be part of the discussions, or to initiate a new one. These disputes treat diverse opinions as enemies to be exterminated, obliterating the pluralistic democratic condition, supported by the fundamental right of freedom of speech. Therefore, it is understood that the "opinionative priority" is more than a communication process, since it promotes a pedagogical action in which opinion is formed from absence of moderation, once there is no time for considerations; there is only the urgency to defend a point of view in social networks.

Online Campaigns in the Social Media Era: A Case Study of Twitter Use During 2010 Elections in Brazil

2012

The proposal of this paper is to discuss the relationship between social network sites (SNS) and the decision-making process, based on the assumptions of the sociological theory of voters’ behavior (Zuckerman et al., 2005). As SNS provide scaffolding for social interactions and information sharing, they lower the maintenance costs of relationships and make it easier for one to participate in larger social networks. Through social ties, like Facebook friends or accounts followed on Twitter, people receive political information even if they're not interested in accessing them. Based on Granovetter's studies (1973; 1983), we argue that people who have more weak ties in their networks have access to different sources of information, and thus are better informed. Contemporary studies on the social logic of politics (Zuckerman et al., 2005) present similar conclusions: the presence of weak ties on one's social network increases one's chances of being informed, recruited and mobilized by activists and political groups, leading to an increase of political participation. This study focuses on the use of Twitter during 2010 presidential race in Brazil, the country's first campaign with the use of social media. Through an empirical analysis based on a survey applied online, we seek to understand how Brazilian voters had access to political information, interacted with candidates on Twitter and felt about the use of social media during the campaign.