Section 1.1.1 - Building up a news channel for a national campaign.
Raúl was journalist following the 2014 FA’s national campaign for one of the most prestigious and read weekly magazines in Uruguay. He had been working for almost 4 years in the politics section and covered the legislative sessions of the national congress, which he sometimes followed by looking at politicians’ tweets “because of lack of time to fulfil multiple commitments” (Raúl, interview, 2014). He considered Facebook and Twitter as sources of information and the best available method of keeping ahead of current affairs. For him, to “look at Twitter is the first thing to do in morning (…) you will first find the information on social media” (Raúl, interview, 2014).
He originally, thought of Facebook as a medium to connect with close friends and Twitter as a more professional tool for finding information. But, he soon realised the opportunities of using Facebook also as a source of information and as a channel for building an audience. His Facebook account was synchronised with Twitter and Instagram, so every publication that he made on those media was also published on Facebook. This synchronisation did not take place in the inverse direction and some of the material he published was only on Facebook.
Raúl described his magazine’s online policy that was limited, imprecise and did not facilitate connections and sharing articles on SNS. The magazine’s directors prioritised the paper format as journalistic and business model and had a pay subscription to an online site that was a secondary channel with limited access to some articles. He thought that they were wasting an opportunity to connect with a wider public, and although he had to specify his commitment to provide exclusive material for them, he knew that only a small part of all his work was published by the magazine after a lengthy editorial process. Facebook was a space where he was able to post content without having to wait the time of an editorial process. As a result, he decided to use Facebook as valuable channel to publish material and scoops to promote his own work. Other magazines and newspapers had a more active online policy, and Issac had a completely different approach to Facebook. He was also working in politics section for another magazine that considered the FA
campaign to be especial for its readers. He was able to observe, on the magazine’s WordPress dashboard, how the possibility of re-publishing articles on Facebook had increased exponentially the numbers of visits to the magazine’s site (Issac, interview, 2014).
Raúl and Issac considered that Facebook was only effective to communicate a message if people were able to recognise the identity and authenticity of account. They understood the information accreditation to be a necessary component of journalism and even more important on a medium surrounded by the notion of fakes news and data manipulation that has been already linked to Red Coloured Party and the use of bots on Twitter in February 2014. For these journalists, the possibility of distinguishing trustful information from unreliable information and the trustfulness of the sources was vital in platform where creating an account with any name was easily done. The most popular parties and presidential candidates used the Facebook verification services that added a small light blue tick symbol at the right side of the page’s name. This guaranteed the identity of an account69. Journalists could quote information posted on verified accounts as official channels of communication. They could say that was the position of public figure or institution and included it in their stories. Similarly, Raúl considered authenticity and reputation as key elements for posting articles, and he used his personal account with his real name as a form of being trusted and recognisable on Facebook.
For Raul (interview, 2014), a good article needed to catch the public’s attention with a story that could bring into debate something that was controversial or implied a change in public matters. Raúl acknowledge the active role and responsibility of journalists in using information from Facebook and its further dissemination, but he also described the journalists’ priority of exposing controversial material and catching the public’s attention. His description of what was required to gain this attention partially agrees with the analysis of a populist style of communication and the use of direct language by actors who denounced others of wrong doing (Engesser et al., 2017). Journalist could have a role in spreading political speeches that were controversial and could be sometimes inaccurate or not well supported. He understood this as part of a
69 This required sending digital proofs of identity and a monetary transactions to the Facebook customer service team that checked the information and enabled the verification.
tempting possibility because of the interest in obtaining a news scoop on Facebook. But, the publishing unchecked information was recognised as a bad journalist practice that many regular users on Facebook do not considered. The use of this platform as source of news was a regular practice, but it could sometimes magnify poor professional practices among journalists who in the quest of giving a first news might reproduced information without previously checking it (Issac, interview, 2014; Paula, interview, 2014). In line with the analysis of online populism and news circulation provided in the section 2.3 of the second chapter,
SNSs provided users, including politicians, with the possibility of spreading information without passing through the filters and selection criteria that Raúl (interview, 2014) and Issac (interview, 2014) considered necessary to apply before using and re-circulate information taken for Facebook.
Section 1.1.2 – Promoting the FA campaign on the news.
Campaigners were interested in catching the public’s attentions and part of their aims on Facebook was to transcend their regular followers on Facebook. Raúl (interview, 2014) referred to the notion of “transcendence” and “publications that transcend” to talk about the eventful situations in which a publication originally posted on Facebook could become the source for a newspaper or TV news. User on a Facebook pages were mostly understood as part of echo chambers that “amplify your message and do not change the mind of those who already have decided their vote” (Valenti, interview, 2014). Publicists and campaign staff saw Facebook mostly as a network of friends and “most people who are connected on Facebook already have similar political views” (Carlos, interview, 2014). Similarly, Ciudadana (interview, 2014), Pedro (interview, 2014), Lenina (interview, 2014) or Leandro (interview, 2014) considered that most users on the pages of political parties were the same party’s supporters.
For some FA’s campaign managers, a successful campaign on SNSs occurred when the content was taken by a newspaper or television programme (Carlos, interview, 2014; Mariano, interview, 2014; Federico, interview, 2014). Well-known journalists in well-established media outlets such as El País, El Observador, Canal 10 or Canal 4 could validate information in way that SNSs could not, and positioned the issue posted on Facebook as part of public debate to be considered by much larger and diverse public. Raúl had used pictures published on SNSs to prove that the actual amount of people at a political rally were not as many
as some media sources had claimed. Similarly, other journalists were able to observe the use of Photoshop in pictures on the FA campaign final act uploaded on FA’s official Facebook and wrote articles about the manipulation of images as part of a political scandal that the FA was able to clarify and quickly minimised70. Valenti was a relentless journalist and a prominent political public figure who wrote articles about Uruguayan politics and was often involved in TV debates. He was also the director of a news agency and advertisement company associated with the FA campaign in 2014. He has been affiliated with left-wing parties for decades and his career as a political advisor, campaigner and publicist has made him a public figure who supported the FA. For him, the only way to work in a political campaign was to be fully aligned with the party’s goal and ideas (Valenti, interview, 2014).
Valenti started using Facebook and Twitter to increase his audience with news already published on his online portal and to share and comment news with other users. To build an audience on Facebook, he sets himself targets, much like playing a game with their audience (Valenti, interview, 2014). As a well-known publicist working for the FA, he said on Twitter and Facebook – both public and open to all users – that in order to win the elections, he needed to reach certain number of followers on his Facebook account by specific dates. In doing so, Valenti encouraged people to connect and follow him on Facebook. Here, online Facebook indicators appear as a method for measuring the size of the audience and a personal game played with the number of connections made.
Valenti associated the measuring of followers with an attention economy on Facebook that considered the value of his account in relation to its capacity building a growing audience and catch the users’ attentions. Valenti (interview, 2014) repeatedly talked about a Youtube video called ‘Así funciona el mundo’ [this is how the world works], that he produced for the FA 2014 campaign and was shared thousands of times on Facebook. He considered the great impact of this videos and mentioned that more than 300,000 people have been reached with it. These indicators were measuring the users’ engagement with the video that he had posted on his account.
70 See the epigraph of chapter 1.
For him, the possibility of reaching a relative high number of Likes or users’ visualisations was related to the intellectual value of the content and its ability to eliciting emotions in the public. To be interesting and have impact, a message needed to provide good quality information. “For a good piece of story, the information needs to have a clear point of view and well supported message” (Valenti, interview, 2014). Raúl (interview, 2014) and Issac (interview, 2014) also considered the importance of establishing a reputation among a public to build an audience and facilitate the users’ engagement. In line with the idea of ethical capital
(Arvidsson and Peitersen, 2013), the message needed to be said by someone who was trusted and resonated in what the public were interested in reading and know more about.
To understand why campaigners were ashamed about the altered image of the FA final act on the river bank (see the first chapter’s epilogue), it is important to consider the damage create to the reputation of the campaign team and their capacity to communicate trustful information on the Fan Page. The message was clearly in agreement with the interest of a public who wanted to see a massive and spectacular political demonstration. And, it was able to elicit emotional responses from a number of users that it was usually much lower on other content previously posted on the Fan Page. However, a valuation on the veracity of the picture indicated that it was violating the basic minimum ethical standards for communicating and had damaging the credibility and accuracy of the page to provide information about the campaign.
Not only was Facebook considered as a means to grow an audience, but it has also been defined by Valenti, Issac and Raúl as part of a paradigmatic shift in the way of communicating with the public. They considered Facebook as a medium with its own language and dynamics which requires a learning process that was being discovered and evolving in Uruguay. “Here, the public have the need to say what they think and feel about a topic, a situation or a person; and they also want to be heard” (Issac, interview, 2014). Similarly, they saw the relevance or lack of importance of a content in relation to how the public was reacting and interact with it. A FA’s campaign manager considered that on Facebook “topics wash away from the campaign if nobody interacts with them” (Mariela, interview, 2014). The public had the ability to share content and make it more visible or ephemeral in the network.
“People have the chance to make comments, to say something; and that brings the opportunity of considering what the others are saying (…) there are some people who make creative and genial comments. The exchange of opinions, and the conversation with others is great source of inspiration” (Valenti, interview, 2014).
Valenti considered this as an innovative form of exchanging ideas and as source of inspiration to rethink political ideas and sensing the feelings of the public that could contribute for the making of campaign spots and writing an article on what it matters for the public in a campaign.
Section 1.2 – The value of Facebook for professional campaigners: information management,
paid advertisement and professional services
The National Commission was regularly composed by a handful of permanent staff who directly reported to the FA’s president, Mónica Xavier. But, the national elections marked an especial event for the future of the FA and demanded exceptional efforts from different groups inside FA and external support from volunteers and professional. The team was responsible for centralising and coordinating tasks with Facebook managers from different parties conforming the coalition, external publicists and political consultant, internal advisors, different groups of volunteers and contractors and technicians working with specific equipment’s to cover the rallies and activities across the country.
While observing the campaign activities of different actors at the National Commission, it became evident that winning the elections was the main reason that brought together all these actors. But, their approach to Facebook cannot be described faithfully in a single and unique way. This section does not describe in detail the activities of this team – analysed in the next chapter –, but it aims to introduce forms of value and logics for actions that this research only observed in this group. What distinguished them from others was how they self-defined as professional and adopted a logic for acting in which calculations of efficacy, costs and benefits included monetary transactions for advertisement and standardised mechanism for information management and monitoring the public.
In the 2014 elections, campaigners from all the Uruguayan parties agreed that Facebook was a necessary tool71 to communicate with a massive public of users (Carlos, interview, 2014; Federico, interview, 2014; Gabriel, interview, 2014; Mieres, interview, 2014; Moreira, interview, 2014; Nicolas, interview, 2014). “In the MPP there was request directly from el Pepe72 regarding the importance of using social media” (Nicolas, interview, 2014). And, the FA National Commission had been managing a Facebook Fan Page since September 2011. This page was regularly and systematically fed with content promoting of the party’s achievements and official messages that in 2014 included the promotion of presidential formula of Tabaré Vázquez and Raúl Sendic.
To understand why the National Commission used a Fan Page, the architecture of Facebook needs to be at least partially examined. The idea of a building up a large public without any restrictions in the number of users, and the possibility of promoting content by paid advertisement are central in the selection of these types of Facebook pages73. When entering a Fan Page, administrators find the Insight Page with hundreds of different indicators for understanding the public reactions to contents and messages prompting them to define a public and boost the reach of the contents. The Insight Page’s dashboards was designed to target, measure and promote further interactions with the publics as part of the idea of building up a public and campaign to achieve more and better results in terms of communicative and promotional services.
However, as it was mentioned in the very first pages of this thesis, professional campaigners considered that the use of Facebook was “still in nappies” (Gabriel, interview, 2014). The 2014 FA campaign showed limited resources in comparison to those used by international companies such as the infamous Cambridge
71 Lorenzo, the director of a marketing and public opinion research company, was the only exception to this opinion observed among consultants and campaign managers. He considered that Facebook was not relevant for political communication. For him, its popularity was declining, and becoming and obsolete medium (Lorenzo, interview, 2014). But, he was not working with any political party at the time of the elections and his views were not supported by any studies (Lorenzo, interview, 2014), and only reflect his opinion.
72 El Pepe is the nickname of José Alberto Mujica Cordano. He was the Uruguayan president between 2010-5 and leader of the MPP, which it was the party with more voters inside the FA.
73 To review the differences among the three main types of Facebook pages see the second section of chapter 1.
Analytica74 and other companies in the USA and Europe. The FA was still trying to understand the potential impact of Facebook for political marketing (Paula, interview, 2014; Federico, interview; 2014; Nicolas, interview, 2014). This research observed that at least one party inside the FA had the possibility to conducted segmentation techniques with anonymised and demographic geographically located data. But, this team did not have enough time and resources to apply any specific strategy based on that technique (Federico, interview; 2014). Their use of Facebook metrics – a theme elaborated in the next chapter – was based on descriptive analysis on how certain topics were performing well in terms of public responses to the content on a page.
For this team, value production on Facebook was connected to the possibility of catching the public’s attention with party’s messages and gained public support. And paid advertisement were means to increase the content’s circulation with which more public support could be obtained. Publicist like Valenti (interview, 2014) and campaigner managers such as Daniel (interview, 2014), Federico (interview, 2014), Mariela (interview, 2014) or Mariana (interview, 2014) knew that advertisement on Facebook was much cheaper than any other kind of media. By looking and trusting Facebook’s measures, they understood that it was possible to reach many people with a very small amount of the total campaign’s funds, and they considered advertisement on this platform as good value for money.
Similarly, this group of campaigners considered indicators as part of a logic that understood goals in quantitative terms. They aimed at reaching more people and Facebook indicators provided evidence on the impact of their activities towards that goal. For them, it became obvious that paid advertisement was necessary to show and achieve the increasing public support and content reach on this page. As a result, being on Facebook for these professional teams involved monetary transaction from which Facebook obtained profits and publicist and campaign managers the numbers needed to meet their targets. Pablo a
74 Marketing techniques using psychological profiling models have been used before the Brexit