Instagram and other Social Media Apps. Jason Howie / Flickr. Some rights reserved.
The role of online platforms in elections has been much discussed in the aftermath of the US presidential election, with fake news and targeted advertising on social media hotly debated. Our pre-election review assesses available data on key online trends in this year’s UK General Election. We begin by an overview of the growing importance of social media for political news and opinion, followed by a large-scale analysis of political content distribution on Facebook during the campaign period. Finally, we examine current practices in political advertising online.
The content discovery mechanisms on Facebook in particular are shaking up the UK’s partisan press landscape. Highly opinionated, pro-Labour online publications with no direct print equivalents (such as The Canary and Evolve Politics) are reaching larger Facebook audiences for their content than most national news brands, and overall coverage weighted by distribution is much more left-leaning on social media than in print or on major news websites on average. The shift is at least in part due to the youth of the Facebook user base relative to likely voters, and it remains to be seen whether Labour’s warm reception on social media will translate into a higher youth turnout. However it is already clear that Facebook as a political news platform favours stark opinion over reporting — even more than print newspaper layouts and news websites.
Facebook is also taking the lion’s share of both the main parties’ online campaign ad budgets, with Labour determined not to be outgunned on the platform as it was in 2015. The platform’s ad targeting tools are much better at digesting voter databases than they were during the last General Election, making it a powerful tool for targeted campaign messaging in marginal constituencies. Little data on the targeting and reach of the parties’ Facebook campaigns will be available until after the election, but the use of voter data has already prompted an investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office and citizen group Who Targets Me?.
