TOPIC: How convincing is Williamson’s argument that the 2015 election in the UK was a ‘digital election’?
INTRODUCTION
Focusing on Williams argues that the 2015 election in the UK was a ‘digital election’? This article will discuss Williams’s arguments that prove that the UK election was digital. With the developing world, most people tend to use social media to campaign, and this is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other social media platforms, during 2015 general election in the UK most politicians used social media to table their manifesto and at the same time to spread the propaganda. William explained the “digital election” didn’t internet did election. Still, it changed the way of campaigning, where the big data was used by Facebook to spread propaganda about specific political parties.
Discussion
Facebook was of great focus during the campaign because most people in the world use it. Where the large part of Conservatives used Facebook for their campaign, they pumped a lot of cash on Facebook monthly, and it cost more than 100000 in a month for Facebook to advertise the party. Apart from them the SNP also invested a lot on Facebook, conservative had a different approach in Facebook where a lot of their messages were negative, and this helped them to increase the penetration on Facebook, in that it was seen as a nice in 2010, where only young people were using Facebook. Still, by 2015, the parents of the young people had joined, in short, Facebook has faced tremendous growth, hence allowing more electorate to access it. The party was not targeting a large number of people but the right people who will vote.
William went away and explained how some activist groups such as “Bite the Ballot” whereby they used social media platforms to get people enrolled for voting, particularly on the back of a far to the recent change to individual voter registration that threatened to keep many young people off the electoral roll. They managed to register over 450,000 people online, and this all happened on the last day of registration, but it was previous this all people would have missed out. Apart from what the Bite and Ballot did, we have so many vote matching website created, some of them were aligned to media outlets, and others were independent, the sites were built with the intention of educating the public about party’s policies and also help people to have a debate on where they stand, with this all emergence of sites, precaution should be there, this is where one of the sites told people to vote on Green despite on what the people put in, and it came out that the Daily Telegraphs tactical voting guide to have been programmed never to tell you to Vote SNP, and this enlightens us that the use of social media in the election is still new, uncritically accepted and has no regulation at all, this means in the next election people should only support and believe on voter engagement tools can never commit to code transparency and to being fully audible.
Technology has been used to connect people for a very long time, but in 2015 most politicians used this to communicate with a lot of people through the campaign. For these people to connect with you, you have to give them something reasonable that will keep them connected. Conservative tried their best to do this to people, they developed a web tool that explained the importance of their policies to every voter, and this is an excellent thing to the party because they get the information they needed from the party. It also helps the party to know how people are reacting. And this will help them come with new strategies. Where Facebook was the winning tool in the end, it was hard to ignore the in-depth data and rich importance in driving the campaign behind the scenes.
William explained that this was a digital election but not an internet election, because the internet never changed the outcome of the election. The style of campaign, the reason being that we have more social and digital, but there was a slight change in the way we use the tool.
CONCLUSION
Ii evident that society has helped people connect, and it is now used for the campaign purpose, William gives us what exactly transpired during a 2015 general election where social media was used a primary tool for the campaign, where people used it to provide information to his/her supporters, where people were made to believe that the information they get through social media was accurate, but instead the real value of social media was less and lay a big data, reliable analysis and how for campaigning target and power personal contact with high impact voters.