The Dark Side of Social Media

This past month seventeen of Osama bin Laden's final writings were made available by the Countering Terrorism Center at West Point after the raid that resulted in his death and captured the cache just over a year ago. The bin Laden documents are available here in both an English translation and Arabic for those that are up for a challenge.

The documents released to the CTC and available for public consumption are documents written by several authors that, as they recognize "cannot be ascertained whether any of these letters actually reached their intended destinations", due to the scattered methods of electronic storage they were extracted from.

However, these limitations should not detract from the value of these documents and the weight they placed on incorporating media strategies into their strategic political calculus. Networks like al-Qaeda and its affiliates, though violent, are savvy to the nature of modern media markets and how news is consumed. Osama bin Laden writes in one of the most recent document released, dated to May 2010, to Shaykh Mahmud 'Atiyya. The recipient of his letter was the designated successor of Sheikh Sa'id, the nom de guerre of Mustafa Abdu'l-Yazid, who served as a primary actor within al-Qaeda Central (AQC).

Throughout the letter bin Laden remonstrates against the excesses of al-Qaeda affiliates and the urgent need to concentrate media relations under a single charge within AQC.

This brother would be in charge of the media as is the case in the regions - otherwise the position of the General Manager of the Media divisions in every region; no publications would be made unless he reviews them, to include the leadership speeches. He would have the right to stop any publication that includes a term considered outside the general policy, whether in the context or timing. 

Here, bin Laden  supports the centralization of media relations and hopes to bestow upon this new position of the General Manager of the Media decision making capacity to limit the autonomy of regional affiliates. Is this a shrewd or sensible decision on the part of bin Laden to centralize control of messaging when operation aspects remain in the hands of regional affiliates?

The operational drive for message cohesion stems from bin Laden's desire to correct misperceptions about the al-Qaeda network and begin an outreach campaign through media channels to change this.

Committing to the general lines, designed according to the Shari'ah policy in our Jihadist operations and our media publications is an extremely important issue; it will achieve... great gains for the Jihadist movement - most importantly gain the crowds of the nation, correct the wrong impressions in the minds of the Mujahidin.

In so many words, bin Laden is attempting a public image campaign after many years of strife and bloodshed worldwide that had left the reputation of the al-Qaeda network in tatters. Tarrow's cycles of contention provides an excellent framework by which to analyze the current wave of protests throughout the Arab speaking world. The Arab Spring has given al-Qaeda no media boost and has raised questions of the network's ideology and its political and social relevance in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The media strategies imagined by bin Laden before his death resemble an effort to retain centralized control of messaging from the periphery of a networked organization. The wishes he expressed might have been detached from the technical reality of where messaging and digital activity resided within the Jihadist movement. As increasingly individuals turn to message boards and networks embrace social media to relay information that might otherwise have first been released to broadcast media sources, such as claiming credit for a bombing campaign.

Final Individual Paper

Quiet on None of the Fronts: Digital Integration in the 21st Century Campaign

Introduction

The commercial benefit of a federalist system of democracy ensures that there are elections to be conducted at every level and every year. To thrive in such a competitive environment and win elections, professional campaigners need to stay up to date with the latest techniques and practices. Since the 2008 presidential election, social media has been at the forefront of media buzz (Preston 2011) and it has increasingly become the location that voters get and discuss political information (Pew Internet 2011). Social media has become a new battle ground for political campaigns to be waged in. The familiarity of the ground war to get out the vote and the air war’s slick thirty second television spots are now being joined by Facebook, Twitter, and others as campaigns continue to march to where the voters are.

Costs of Campaigning

            The presidential race in 2012 is gearing up to be the first USD$1 billion dollar race in the nation’s history. President Obama’s re-election effort alone is looking to top the billion dollar mark (Overby 2012). In the previous presidential election, then Senator Obama spent a total of $16 million on his online effort during the campaign. Thus far his re-election campaign, Obama for America, has spent $35 million on digital efforts and infrastructure (http://www.retargeter.com/infographic/the-digital-campaign-landscape-infographic). Digital ad buys are up several hundred percent from just four years ago as well, having jumped from $22 million spent by the Obama campaign in 2008 to $159 million spent by the end of March by Obama for America (http://www.retargeter.com/infographic/the-digital-campaign-landscape-infographic). In addition, conventional media buys are still prevalent and growing as well. Mass media buys are increasing in cost and rapidly becoming the purview of Super PACs. The first three Republican presidential Primaries saw spending TV ad campaigns hit $32.5 million (Wilson 2012, 1). Campaigns are becoming more costly, and efforts at the state level are no different.

            Looking back at what has been covered prior through blog posts, state wide elections in Washington are on pace to become 10’s of million dollar affairs. To date Democratic candidate for Governor Jay Inslee has raised $4.8 million, while his opposition Republican candidate Rob McKenna has raised $4 million (Public Disclosure Commission 2012). Each of these campaigns has spent approximately $2 million, leaving each on an equal footing financially. These are astronomical numbers and it’s early in the election cycle. Campaigns are still hiring staff, field efforts are getting fired up, and offices are being opened in strip malls and suburbs across the US. These numbers will only continue to grow. To provide proper perspective President Barack Obama has raised approximately $191.7 million in contrast to the GOP front runner and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney and his $86.2 million (Federal Elections Commission 2012).

The new realities of contemporary campaigns are pointing towards a digital war that cannot be ignored. The potential to lose out on all manner of resources is at risk if campaigns ignore digital media and omit social media in their communications strategies; volunteers, financial contributions, earned media, situational awareness, going negative, responses to negative attacks, and information accessibility are all possible at a speed previously unattainable.

Return to the Ground War for Contemporary Campaigns

            Nielsen (2012) captures the reboot that political campaigns are undergoing for the 21st century. Political campaigns are increasingly focusing on the ground war and the direct voter contact it entails through door-to-door and phone banking efforts. However, voters are now being targeted at an individual level with data driven efforts led by the major political parties (Nielsen 2012, 6). The major parties retain significant influence and power, despite campaigns rapidly transitioning to a networked structure, by granting access to a universal voter file and parsing out the technology and training to access it (Nielsen 2012, 165).

Why Social Media Matters When It Comes To Political Activism

Social media and the wide array of social networking platforms that are currently used across the world have an undeniable influence on political activism. Could the necessary awareness been raised about SOPA and PIPA ahead of their floor votes any other way? Political activism and digital activity can be problematic when attempting to define and quantify activity. Earl and Kimport (2011) argue that the Internet is capable of supporting two types of e-tactics. E-mobilization occurs when digital infrastructure supports offline political activism and e-movements are based completely on the Internet (Earl and Kimport 2011, 8-9). The authors acknowledge these two exist as ideal types and that the majority of movements opting to implement e-tactics will lie somewhere between the extremes. However, an important affordance of the Internet’s structure is its ability to lower the cost to “creating, organizing, and participating in protest” (Earl and Kimport 2011, 10). Social media can lower the barrier to becoming actively engaged with politics and conversely, for campaigns to reach out to voters.

Social media provides new access point to electorate and a wealth of potential knowledge about each potential supporter. Pew Internet (2011) recently released a study showing that voters are going online in increasing numbers for information about political campaigns. The Pew Internet (2011) study referencing the use of the Internet as a medium gaining in importance and the use of social media to increasingly discuss politics amongst friends. During the 2010 mid-term election, 73% of adult internet users used digital media to gather information on the election and individual campaigns (Pew Internet 2011, 2). While broadcast television is still the primary means by which the electorate learns about elections and campaigns, the Internet has ascended rapidly in importance. Adult voters contacted turned to the Internet 24% of the time when it came to gathering information about the mid-term elections in 2010, up from just 7% during the 2002 mid-term elections (Pew Internet 2011, 3). It also shows they are discussing politics and campaign views in real time on social media. Targeting voters through these channels can lead to persuasion and data extraction.

            Integration of direct contact, existing knowledge, polling, and digital profile can lead to more nuanced and timely targeting of voters across a breadth of platforms.

No Platform an Island

Any strategic communication strategy must guide all digital channels of communication towards the goals of voters’ education and attaining votes. Secondary goals are volunteer recruitment, financial contributions, positive mentions, and information accessibility. This requires a campaign being mindful to minimize overlap between digital media and reducing redundant messages that voters may encounter as they begin to engage with a campaign across multiple platforms.

The primary or strategic goals of a campaigns digital communications strategy cannot stray from the essentials. Figure one provides a visual dynamic that clusters digital tools by their type, social media, email, and the campaign website. Figure 1 also emphasizes the orientation that digital media should have in a campaign, voter outreach and education. Strategic communication goals need to be focused on; maintaining campaign message, diffusion of platform, vote attainment. Losing track of the primary goal of political campaigns and putting the tool before the goal can complicate. The secondary goals of a digital media strategy aimed at political activism revolve around; volunteer recruitment, financial contributions, and endorsements by constituents.

Data Extraction for the Digital Campaign Effort

The most important take away of interaction with constituents via digital media is data extraction. The data harvested from interested voters can be folded back into the campaign data to strengthen the ability to provide nuanced targeting for direct voter contact during get out the vote (GOTV) operations. Campaigns need to be mindful of finding and using tools to measure and extract data in addition to the creation and management of a social media presence.

Data to Make the Wheels Turn

            The magnitude of data we all create via our digital activities is immense and easy to get lost in. Campaigns should use social media to extract at the minimum the necessary information to continue to support fundraising and field efforts concentrating on direct voter contact. Johnson (2011) notes that as data volume grow campaigns will be able to better challenge conventional wisdom that particular communities are locked into one party. To further this effort campaigns need to focus initial data extraction on; name, email, phone numbers, and permanent address.

Data that is gathered via social media enables campaigns to place us in a social context. It also allows campaigns to take advantage of the presence of homophily in our social networks. We ourselves, by providing the initial contact information for a campaign can be used as entry point into broader network, guided by recent research on social network sites and political deliberation. The basic idea behind homophily is that individuals have a tendency to associate and bond with similar others. Research on homophily and how it relates to social network theory can be found in the work of McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook's work, "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks". To corroborate this in a political context, approximately 18% of all users of social networking sites have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone because of the political content that they posted (Pew Internet 2011).

Using Social Media to Identify Supporters

Clicktivism, or online political activity, needs to encompass the mentality of “Like +” or moving beyond the bare minimum to include meaningful contribution to networked publics as they arise on a campaign. This necessitates on the part of the campaign new content by which voters can interact, appropriate, share, and contribute to; Posts, Tweets, Pictures, Tagging, Infographics, Videos, Surveys.

Clicktivism to Votes

            Social media provides a powerful instrument by which campaigns can reach out to voters in a more nuanced and personalized manner. It also enables campaigns to harvest data on individual voters at a faster rate that can be brought to bear on efforts to contact voters directly. The value social media adds to political activism lies in the information that voters hand over to campaigns. There is no excuse to not tracking the actions of your audience when it comes to digital media and political campaigns. From incredibly expensive presidential contests to a local school board race, political campaigns have a proven track record of using data to target voters in hopes of identifying supporters and getting out the vote when it counts. However, the pursuit of information about voters cannot stop where the analog world ends. As voters increasingly turn to the Internet to find information about politics and discuss it, they create a rich digital profile which campaigns can begin to mine for insights into their political identity.

Money Talks

Money talks. It's undeniable. Got the bills you got the power.

Cheap, economical, inexpensive. These are no bywords for a modern political campaign. Washington State is home to one of the most competitive gubernatorial elections country wide at the moment. Before April’s fundraising numbers come out, the Democratic candidate – Jay Inslee – has raised $4,835,145.19 and spent just north of $2 million. 

The GOP candidate – Rob McKenna – has raised $4,008,625.96, and has spent just south of $2 million. 

These two campaigns for the governor's mansion in Washington are basically in a dead heat for fundraising. $800,000 is pennies when the money can roll in by the tens of thousands in a single day. The money currently expended on the path to the governorship are not small numbers but they pale in comparison to what has been generated so far on the Presidential level. President Barack Obama has raised approximately $191.7 million in contrast to the GOP front runner and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney and his $86.2 million.

These are astronomical numbers and it’s early in the cycle. Campaigns are still hiring staff, field efforts are getting fired up, and offices are being opened in strip malls and suburbs across the US. These numbers will only grow. By the way, don’t even get me started on the figures that are coming out of Super PACs at the moment. If 2010 was a cycle with training wheels, they have definitely been removed now.

Where does this money go? And how does it relate to digital media?

ReTargeter, a digital communications firm has a nice blog that cooked up a clever piece of infographic the other day. Digital media advertising buys, implementation of social media to inform voters, and targeted online fundraising have exploded in their use by every campaign. 

The contrast between 2008 and now is an increase many times over. Why the increase? Returning to studies mentioned in earlier posts by Pew Internet, US voters are turning to the Internet for political information, sharing political news, and interacting with campaigns. When the electorate turns to digital venues for news and information, and to social networking sites to discuss political positions and the happenings of the day campaigns need to follow. Pew documented that around 22% of the electorate went to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to discuss politics during the 2010 election cycle, a full 73% went online to get their political news, learn about campaign platforms, and engage with them. 


Neglecting to have at the very least a listening out post on each platform arrests a campaigns to react to news and crises as they break.

 That being said, most campaigns do not have millions of dollars to huck around. Most campaigns don't have large professional staffs and instead are one or two beyond the candidate augmented by a never ending shuffle of volunteers and paid canvassers. How do these campaigns march to the sound of the gun er, Tweet and stay ahead of the game when it comes to digital media? 


Follow the big guns. If Barack Obama's campaign website has buttons that say "Donate" instead of "Contribute", its a pretty good bet he's spent a fair amount of money and time optimizing the wording. 

When Mitt Romney's website engages you immediately with visuals that are easy to share via social media, don't ignore it!

These campaigns have the money, staff, and web traffic to conduct the multi-variate testing necessary to optimize content and strings of pages to boost conversions. Their social media is a mixture of campaign postings and references to volunteers, and their content on social media rarely overlaps. Where is the incentive to follow both Facebook and Twitter if a campaign is going to rehash the same item on both at the same time? 


Money talks. Up ticket races have the money and infrastructure to push the capacity of digital media to translate into volunteers, contributions, and votes that down ticket races do not often have. Campaign websites and social media offer a day to day case study of the current best practices in campaign politics. Like a good Marine once told me, adapt and overcome. 

Strategy Strategic Strategery

As a kid, when the first generation of First Person Shooters became popular with my friends, I was still nose deep in my books and board games. The few video games that I did reach for were more akin to glorified board games than anything coming close to what systems could pump out at the time. Don’t get me wrong the sports games of the mid-90s, like Madden and NBA Jam, were near and dear to my heart. A sweep right from Aikman to Smith was a proven winner in Madden ’94. I took more than a few teams through the entirety of the NBA Jam season in a perpetual state of fire but when I met Sid Meier I never looked back.

If Civilization 1 was a young and innocent love, the second edition in the series was true, mad, and deep. My life has never been the same since. I turned into a turn-based, civilization building, strategically minded junkie. Where friends loved the pace of engagements in FPS games, I loved the ability to methodically push towards victory in my turn-based games.

A war here, a religion founded there. Guiding double digit economic growth over decades, negotiating complex treaties to prevent an upstart from contending for global domination.

These were my jams, this was my childhood. Strategy was the name of the game. Defining a long term goal, working on all fronts to accomplish it, anticipating adversity, and innovating as the situation evolved.

The urge to see the whole picture has not left me moving into a graduate education and an imminent return to professional life. When reading Strategy as a youngster I learned the value of seeing the big picture. But the big picture is elusive and always changing. Some say the Devil is in the details. If that’s the case, then a strategic platform needs to provide the big picture while retaining those devilish details to ensure that plans can be updated as the situation unfolds. Finding a platform that can replicate the games of my youth and the products of my imagination has always been a goal of mine. With Weave I had found my platform.

Weave is an open source database visualization program that runs atop Adobe Flash. It creates an interactive and nuanced presentation of data allows for large quantities of information to be uploaded and analyzed quickly from a wide array of sources. The visualizations shown are of projection from the 2010 UK election. Each Westminster BLAH BLAH is colored respective of each party’s results. The scatter plots below the mapped results capture voter turnout results against the percentage of votes garnered by the winning party and voter turnout results against income.

Weave, with its ease of data entry and visualization, can allow for election projections based on day to day data extraction from campaigns, polls, and media sources. The platform’s capacity for layers of information constructs a highly responsive model that can be adapted to a variety of strategic needs. Weave can map a variety of data inputs as varied as digital media outreach, GOTV operations, vote turn out projection, partisan performance projections, and fundraising hot spots. The University of Massachusetts - Lowell and the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC) collaborated to create a, "highly flexible and robust application development platform designed to support multiple levels of user proficiency – from novice to advanced. Weave also offers the capacity to integrate, visualize and disseminate data at nested levels of geography."

The geographically visualizing varied data inputs have the benefit linking digital efforts to political efforts to mobilize targeted peoples. This capacity to link online with the offline will be invaluable when confronting a new political landscape as the US enters the first election cycle after re-districting.

A Whole New Ballgame

There is no excuse to not tracking the actions of your audience when it comes to digital media and political campaigns. From incredibly expensive presidential contests to a local school board race, political campaigns have a proven track record of using data to target voters in hopes of identifying supporters and getting out the vote when it counts. However, the pursuit of information about voters cannot stop where the analog world ends. As voters increasingly turn to the Internet to find information about politics and discuss it, they create a rich digital profile which campaigns can begin to mine for insights into their political identity.

Beyond data extraction geared towards a conventional get out the vote (GOTV) effort, namely addresses and phone numbers, new facets of a voter’s online identity can begin to be deconstructed.

No longer do voters and potential supporters need to be viewed in isolation, rather they can be placed in an appropriate social context. An examination of supporters and social media networks invites new measurements and rubrics by which to analyze influence and relevance. Robert Hanneman identifies that power in a network is relational. A voter with 10 followers on Twitter or 20 Facebook friends has less power and less reach than a voter with 1,000 followers and 2,000 Facebook friends. At its most basic level, identifying prominent members of a digital network relies on degree centrality. This form of centrality is a measurement of the number of ties an individual has to the network as a whole. The voter with 1,000 followers on Twitter has 100 the number of ties the voter with only 10 does.

A voter with a high degree of centrality in a digital network has a higher degree of influence than a voter that has a low degree of centrality.  Programs that measure and visualize a voter’s centrality allow campaigns to quickly and visually identify prominent supporters that can magnify their reach through digital media. NodeXL is a program built into Excel Spreadsheets. The program recently featured a new plug in that enables Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, and Facebook pages to be uploaded and analyzed using Social Network Analysis.

The program allows for easy to use outputs that can be used for the identification and targeting of voters on the Internet via digital and social media in the hopes of spreading the campaigns message that much further.

The graph above is a visualization of 1,000 Twitter handles whose tweets included the phrase Pink Slime, or a meat by-product that has come under particularly harsh scrutiny lately. The visualization tracks Twitter handles that follow each other, tweet at each other, and reply to each other. Granted, it can be an overwhelming site at first glance. The cascading lines in seemingly every direction, the different colored communities densely clustered together, the different variations of keywords and #’s that define each community. But clarity does come.

These sorts of exercises are crucial for a campaign above and beyond the raw extraction of data can be harvested from Facebook Likes and Twitter followers. Prominent members of a digital network that are identified by their centrality can function as new entry points to uncharted networks of potential supporters or donors. Voters that may not have been able to be linked in the past can now be quickly identified as friends using programs like NodeXL and SNA techniques to be more effectively marketed towards.

What does the future hold for digital media and politics? The sky is the limit as we set to work each and every day creating thickly descriptive personal profiles through our actions on the Internet. Whether campaigns pursue SNA based strategies to target us, identify personal influencers in our life, and target us beyond our doorstep and landline will be decided in the months ahead.