Facebook's power to mobilize fans in the electoral campaign. Case Study: 2019 European Parliamentary Elections in Romania

Tanase Tasente

doi:10.47577/tssj.v4i1.100

Abstract

Since 2008, when Barack Obama won the United States election thanks to Facebook, that success model has been improved year by year, and at present Social Media has become the main channel of communication in electoral campaigns, ahead of traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers). The novelty of this communication mechanism can be described by decentralizing the communication to social groups of online opinion leaders and eliminating the horizontal dimension, in which mass-media and political actors played fundamental roles in disseminating the political message to the public. In Social Media, the message is decentralized from source (political actor's Facebook page) by some ordinary users, which in time become influential leaders in the virtual environment. Moreover, political parties that managed to mobilize most fans to disseminate political information in their social groups (strong and weak links) managed to achieve better electoral scores. Our study focused on analyzing the campaign on Facebook in the electoral campaign of the main three parties in Romania, which won the most mandates in the European Parliament: the National Liberal Party (yellow), the Social Democratic Party (red) and the Union "Save Romania" (blue). The election campaign took place from 27 April 2019 to 25 May 2019 and the voting day was on 26 May 2019.

Highlights

Along with the development of the Facebook, the principles of the media communication have changed
Media Era, the SNSs are working on principles such as “social interaction”, “multidirectional communication” and “the public impose the media agenda”. The novelty of this communication mechanism can be described by decentralizing the communication to social groups of online opinion leaders and eliminating the horizontal dimension, in which mass-media and political actors played fundamental roles in disseminating the political message to the public
In Social Media, the message is decentralized from source by some ordinary users, which in time become influential leaders in the virtual environment

Summary

Introduction

Along with the development of the Facebook, the principles of the media communication have changed. Media Era, the SNSs are working on principles such as “social interaction”, “multidirectional communication” and “the public impose the media agenda” The novelty of this communication mechanism can be described by decentralizing the communication to social groups of online opinion leaders and eliminating the horizontal dimension, in which mass-media and political actors played fundamental roles in disseminating the political message to the public. Granovetter's theory refers to the relationships between structures, the intensity of social ties, and the dissemination of information in offline social networks. Strong links are presumed to be located within groups among actors with many friends in common Translating this theory into analyzing communication through social networks, we find that SNSs have generated secondary groups of a different nature than we know them in traditional social networks, namely groups and virtual communities, aggregated according to the criterion of individual interests. Virtual groups no longer take into account indicators such as spatial proximity, age difference or socio-professional membership, as is the case with offline social networks

Research objectives O1

Findings

Conclusions