PS21: Social Media and Politics Discussion

London 18th May 2015

Panel: Chair-Peter Apps:Executive Director PS21

Tim Hardy:Technical writer, commentator and activist, Beyond Clicktivism

Sandy Schumann: Wiener-Anspach Post-doctoral ResearchFellow in social psychology at the University of Oxford

Jonn Elledge:Journalist, New Statesman; Editor, CityMetric

Peter Apps: Thanks for coming this evening. Im Pete Apps, executive director of PS21. From the rightpractically, if not politicallyis our first panelist this evening, Tim Hardy, social media activist and one of the brightest thinkers on social media, politics and this kind of thing.

Sandy Schumann, Oxford University social psychologist, expert in social media, politics, activism, slacktivism, conflict, and all manner of other things, and, unusual in this group of people, shes actually professionally qualified in what she does, which I find hugely admirable. And Jonn Elledge, who definitely isnt, editor-in-chief of Citymetric. Jonn I met when I was about seven when we attended the same primary school. He was always a slightly better, slightly funnier writer.

Both Tim and Sandy are PS21 fellows and Jonn Elledge, Im happy to say, is joining our board as one of our trustees.

Tim, to start with you, over the last five years youve been involved in social media activism, trying to bring down the government one way or the other, which Id suggest hasnt gone terribly well. What are your key lessons from the last five years on social media in British governance?

Tim Hardy: First of all, what do I mean by social mediaand I think for the purposes of this discussion we can limit ourselves to Twitter and Facebook, but obviously theres a whole world of different platforms out there, some of which are far more popular with young people, that may have a different impact, and theres a number of areas. The way that the media has adapted to the environment means even things like comments on websites have aspects of social media these days because theyre part of a media identity. You have continuity between your comments and you have relationships between people who leave comments.

But lets just focus on the big two beasts: Twitter and Facebook. The next thing is, what do we mean by politics? And again, there are many ways to define that. On a very narrow level we can talk about electoral politics and power, and if the last election shows anything its that the ability of social media to win an election is very much up for question. Twitter is for whatever reason left-leaning and Labour-supporting while Facebook is far more conservative, and the Conservative party invested very heavily in ad campaigns on Facebook, which obviously had some influence as well but we dont know what that influence was.

The stuff that Ive been involved in is slightly outside that parliamentary process. Social media, particularly five years ago when it was still relatively new, felt very much like everything was up for grabs. There was very little commercial engagement with platforms like Twitter. Businesses didnt really know how to manage it. Media companies didnt really know how to engage, obviously theyve moved in and filled that vacuum. Organizations like BuzzFeed exist almost entirely as autofeelers of social media, taking stuff thats been tested by the market and then monetizing it. In an hour, usually.

But early on, there was a slightly Wild West feel about it. I was involved with UK Uncut, and one thing we did a lot was organize through social media, and one of the things we did has been theorized into a horrible word: QUARN, Quasi-Autonomous Recognition Network. And the idea behind that was that UK Uncut didnt have any conventional command control structure. UK Uncut was an ideology embodied by slogans, organized in a way that the slogans could be shared through social media. Similar to the way Anonymous operates.

Apps: Or ISIS.

Hardy: Or ISIS, although ISIS has perhaps a more established ideology. But yes, ISIS do follow similar patterns. Anyone could say I am Anonymous and Im doing this or anyone could say I am UK Uncut. And with a very small number of people, just a basic website and a bit of social media clout we could decide to have a meeting where everyone was invited, organize their own hashtag. And anyone could participate in these conversations.

Apps: These were essentially flash mobs.

Tim: They were essentially flash mobs. So we would say right, were going to do things on Saturday, we know the ideology behind UK Uncut was very basic, there were several corporations that werent paying their fair share of taxes. They were using tax avoidance schemes. Some of these corporations were of course intimately connected with the party that was ringing in a series of cuts and we just wanted to highlight that.

So we would decide that everyone would participate, there would be this kind of crude democracy of retweeting ideas that seemed quite good, and people would recognize. Boots looks like a viable target, why dont we turn Boots into a hospital? Someone said that. Id like that or favorite it or retweet it, follow the hashtag, you know just other people in your area doing that. Then you say, Hey, are you going to go to Boots? Why dont we go to Oxford Street? Then someone else would say Im in Birmingham, is anyone else in Birmingham?

And this way, from nothing, people would self-organize, and find one another, and could then go and close down Boots, or TopShop, by demonstrating in a very nonaggressive, playful kind of way that always played well with the media outside these stories. We were attacking them in terms of public relations and publicity. And this worked extraordinarily well. At the height, in a week wed close down every single store in central London every weekend. Without any kind of formal structure.

Apps: So what happened?

Hardy: What happened? Well, the police arrested 150 people in former Masons. And former Masons was never meant to be the primary target The goal that day was the Apple Store but they, cleverly, or just not stupidly, had very very good security. So a somewhat desperate Plan C was to go to former Masons, which most people had never even heard of. And it was a bad call for many reasons. It was a particularly bad call because the police, who were unable to catch the people who smashed stuff up, decided to make a lesson of nonviolent protestors who just wanted to have a picnic. The terms of peoples bail conditions meant that they couldnt go back in to any protests in central London for, for example, six months or a year.

I was involved with another group that weekend so I was fortunate enough not to be arrested. But there were about twelve of us left over who went out the week after with a full contingent of nine police vans around us and the warning that if we walked into any one of those stores we would be arrested.

And that was it. As a tactic, it was over.

Apps: Do you think it was a success or a failure?

Hardy: It succeeded in its own terms in that it became part of the debate and I think in the run-up to the election in particular we saw that both Labour and the Conservatives accepted that there was money to be found from the schemes and the public was against them. Whereas when we started we were roundly condemned in quite strong terms by David Cameron and definitely not supported by the Labour party.

Apps: Sandy, what does the actual data tell us about how effective social media is? Either these campaigns outside parliamentary or democratic politics or within?

Sandy Schumann: In fact there are several studies for and against, as usual. So we do know that particular cost-benefit analyses involve voting or any other form of political behaviorprotesting, or sit-ins, or something like thatso definitely having access to information is much easier and quicker and have changed those calculations. So theres been a wonderful experiment on Facebook. 61 million Facebook users have been involved, and it did show that in 2010, during the congressional elections in the US, there were about 40,000 additional votes being raised just by adding an I Voted icon on Facebook.

Apps: So its just kind of encouraging people to vote in the first place.

Schumann: Exactly. So theres definitely support for that. We also know that these sort of self-organized actions are basically based on social media. So we dont need institutions anymore, we dont need leadership, we dont need hierarchical structures. People just act on personal interpretations and rationales, find each other, and can coordinate these actions. Theres evidence from Spainthe Indignados. From the Arab WorldTahrir Square. There were wonderful researchers there doing interviews and from that we do know that Facebook played a role in getting people out on the street.

On the other side, we also know that the internet, especially in non-democratic countries, can also produce the opposite effect.

Apps: You get a chilling effect, kind of. You can actually use it as a tool for oppression.

Schumann: But also, having a lot of information about how your government is doing and comparing that to governments around the world can actually discourage people from getting engaged in politics and voting because they feel like they cant change much and they feel like their government is

And then, Im just going to bring up my favorite term, slacktivism, which Id like to not use any more, and Im going to advocate for not using this term anymore, because it refers to a notion of being unmotivated to act, and my own research showed that people who do engage in those quick and easy actions like signing a petition or liking a Facebook pagethey are actually motivated to make a difference.

Apps: And they can have an effect, right? I mean, the Bring Back Our Girls thing had a limited effect but it was real.

Schumann: It does raise awareness, indeed. And even Kony2012, which loads of people were criticizing, and it should be criticized in different ways, but they did raise millions and millions of dollars and it did raise awareness for Africans and conflict in Africa that probably no one had ever heard of.

Apps: Well talk a bit about Bring Back Our Girls in a bit and I shall get Emmanuel to talk about the impact thats had on Nigeria. But Jonn, youve been telling Twitter all week in large capital letters that you have many thoughts and things to say. So what are they?

Jonn Elledge: Youre probably mistaking marketing for reality.

I think its very easy, particularly if youre a journalist, who writes on the internet, to mistake Twitter for a representation of reality, and its very much not. Journalists overstate its importance because to a large extent its how you talk to your mates in other publications and so on. So its much more important in the medias mind than it is in reality.

But the website I edit, Citymetric, is part of the New Statesman, which is a pretty small magazine, and so we were kind of pulled into the election night, and my role in the election night was finding the funny things that were happening that we could use on election night while we were waiting for actual results. At about five minutes to ten oclock, Sophie writes a press release saying theyd done some research on social media and that Labour had basically won the election. I was thinking, fantastic! Exactly they kind of thing were looking for. Five minutes later, the exit poll comes out, nobodys interested in anything funny anymore, and the fact that Labour won the vote on Twitter suddenly seemed entirely irrelevant because it had no connection to what was going on out there on the ground. I think part of that is because people mistake social media for something its not. Its very good as a communications tool, its sped up the speed of communications about as fast as it can go now so once the information is out there it can spread like wildfire. But that doesnt change how the information makes people think about stuff, its just transmission. Theres no sort of ideological purpose to that.

The difficulty is that theres also a tendency on social media for people to create their own little bubbles. So in the aftermath of the election results I know a fair few people whonot so much proudly as smuglytalked about voting conservative, which, apart from what this might do to friendships or familiar relationships, does mean that in five years time when the next election rolls around, Facebook is going to become even less useful as a tool to predict whos going to win the election. Because youre suddenly only seeing the information from people who agreed with you to start with.

To go back to my original point, I feel there is a great tendency within the media itself for that kind of echo chamber effect to work. I think probably the most psychologically interesting result of the election a couple of weeks ago was the fact that until that exit poll came out, basically the entire country had convinced itself that a hung parliament was inevitable. There was no chance that there could possibly be a majority government. And we were all massively wrong. And I think one reason for that is that wed been repeatedly reinforcing that impression, not just through newspapers but minute-by-minute on Twitter and Facebook. So you know, its very easy for something to harden into a seed of wisdom. Thats the downside but I think the positive is the kind of stuff Tims talking about, that it makes this kind of network-based organization possible. And also, Twitter makes it very difficult to repress information. One of the best uses of twitter, Ive seen by mere organization,was 3-4 years ago when the Guardian ran a story that basically said there is something we are not allowed to tell you. Its in parliamentary records but there are reporting restrictions, we have a letter from the royal aids, We can't touch this.

I'm suddenly sacred to say out loud what it was cause I have no idea if there were reporting restrictions still in place, but twitter managed to take this piece of information and find the exact details of who had gotten an injunction out of whyin the space of about 45 minutes.

Hardy: It destroyed the super injunction world essentially.

Elledge: Yeah, basically. It becomes if information is out there somewhere and people want access to it, IT is extremely difficult to repress it umm and that wasn't true even 5 or 6 years ago.

Apps: Now one of the things, I wonder is, and am always struck by on twitter is people with allegedly large no of twitter followers actually don't usually have that many in old school terms. You know a100,000 twitter followers is a lot. Well, its not really in a country of 60 million people. You know that. Its fairly negligible. Its fewer people you see on twitter if you took out a poll over a volume station then people want to look at it and I mean.

Elledge: I think that that's certainly true, but I think the same thing that makes twitter deeply unrepresentative is that it also means that those 100,000 people are probably, they each have their own networks and they disproportionately are likely to be journalists or people that have think tanks or politicians.

Apps: I mean that number is strikingly, probably includes the number 10 policy unit. The cabinet office, every MP, free researchers per MP and everyone on every national newspaper, which makes you wonder who the other 100,000 are. And you know it works, well once you actually squeeze that and actually you've got you know an elite group of, several thousand people and then 90, 000 other random in a country of 60 million people and no one ever looks at them cause you just keep on through their twitter feed to see whether they are being followed by the one important. They kind of miss the big picture.

Schumann: And we can say that even though you might be send a tweet or Facebook ordinary filtering works, so not everyone follows who you sees what you write or its a politics section being Fergusson was a great case for that where people on fb heard nothing about Fergusson because Facebook filtered out stories about Fergusson because they were too polarizing and you don't go to Facebook to hear about negative upsetting stories. Twitter at the time didn't have that filtering mechanism yet so you learned about Fergusson and twitter knowledge changed as well so echo chambers or actually

Apps: I mean the question here really is what stage of the bubble are we in, right? I mean it looks to me like most of the people I know have a lots of followers on twitter acquired them in a hurry between 2008 and 2013, as far as I can make out, and then things kind of sort of evened out since then. I don't know how much things have gone on since Facebook continues to become much more powerful. What would your prediction be for the 2020 or 2025, how has the social media's space going to look different?

Hardy: I'm weary to predict because I can imagine it looking dramatic, I can imagine Facebook and that seems unimaginable to most people, but I can imagine Facebook being the AOL of tomorrow. I mean, we've been here before we've had dominant platforms and they vanish such the nature of the internet is that these things don't last. I mean, particularly Facebook is a walled garden and the history of where does it have has the openers always seem to triumph. On the flipside, maybe that won't happen this time, maybe it will be something different or maybe it won't be Facebook, maybe we could see a massive kind of Balkanization where by people move into very strong filter bubbles. Where they only want to hang out with people that they know. We could have different patterns. I mean at the moment social media has this extraordinary role in some, in many people's lives, in that it is a performative space where we are all performing, we are creating a public persona which is something historically very few people have ever had to do. Whereas, now an ordinary person is doing that there and is telling their friends. They have one eye there is they are small sea conservative on future employment prospects, their curating their relationships with one other, they are self-censoring - they are saying things they dont necessarily believe because there is a kind of group think among the people they believe.

Its this, I personally think is horrible, I really do. I really dislike social media but I dislike that aspect of it, though I think it is kind of unfortunate. It's a necessary evil.But, I could say that changing if - IF - people retreat into smaller groups for example, if the social media platform came along where you could only follow people that you have some kind of material world relationship to.

Apps: Which is closer to Facebook.

Hardy: Which is closer to Facebook, but it's not limited. I mean if you start looking at cryptography and public key cryptography and the idea of historically people using PGP you'd have key parties where people would swamp their inscription keys they would identify one anothers use of action and met you in person. I know when you use this electronic signature that it is you and I can trust you. You build these webs of trust and that's very much old school, cipher punk stuff, but it could come back. I can imagine a social media platform that's completely encrypted that Buzzfeed can't look at to see what's trending but nor can GCHQ or NSA and everyone there in your social media network. Which is much smaller, has met you in the physical word, and you've had some kind of exchange and in that case you've got a completely different thing going on and then we would have. These are some thought experiments in the moment, but you would have people who exist in lots of different ones who then communicate between different groups. To me that could just as easily happen.

Apps: Sandy, what's your take? What seems to be the direction and travel for you when you look at trends in social media?

Schumann: It's kind of a long line, like you were saying, because we do see that anonymity does become a big part of people's privacy. But, cause you can be private now as well if you know how to use platforms and we see these very surprising effects where people actually share much more about themselves if they feel like they can control what they share. So there is this paradox, and even though Facebook lets you control who sees your pictures, or plus you have your circles, and you can actually control who knows where about you are. If those measure are in place actually people are over sharing much more so, but, at the same time people become extremely concerned about it and, especially we did some work with activists and in that community they are actually looking for....

Apps: Its very limited. It would have stopped UK taxes form achieving the one thing they did achieve because everyone was noticing it existed and therefore started a conversation about tax avoidance. I mean what's your take John, do you think things are going to become more narrow and personal and the rest of us just aren't going to be aware of what's happening in other people's social networks?

Elledge: I think a significant birth, one of the fastest social networks over the last few years is snapchat which is where there's no record of anything. So a lot of teenagers and so on who kind of don't really want anyone to be able to look at the kind of things they are sending each other, for reasons you know exactly. Prefer that to something like Facebook or twitter where there is a paper trail. The other thing we've not really talked about in these conversations, is whether the social networks we only use now are viable in the long term. I think Facebook, as everyone said, is more profitable. Twitter last time I checked it was still not clear how it was ever going to make any money and everybody is on Facebook to the first approximation. You're old relatives will be on Facebook and posting pics of their grandchildren and kittens. Twitter is much more of a bubble. It's a much smaller selection of people and therefore, it's not clear that it's ever going to be possible to make an advertising model work on there. So you are seeing an increasing number of promotive tweets, but they still don't seem to have settled on something that looks like a profitable business model. I hate the idea because I am a proper twitter addict. I think we have consider the possibility is its just not going to be there in 5 years time because it couldn't make any money.

Apps: Yeah, the other thing that is interesting is that the generation of people our age who put themselves or their career in part on twitter are by and large. You know, is the closest approximation to people who didn't win seats and because you know

Elledge: There is an overlap in some cases.

Apps: Well indeed! It's, you know, they are again that group in the echo chamber and certainly the labour party and voters who do not appear to have voted for the labour party. I mean MPs who were part of that group. One of the things I'm not sure I buy into is the argument that if you go back to 100 years in politics or longer than that, or politics in Rome, lots of people believe that they were at the local level and you were able to maintain those kind of relationships because you'd be in politics with locals and you could always stand up and shout things and people would vote for you on what those things were and then they would either get someone or they wouldn't. One of the interesting things about social media is, despite attempts to the contrary, virtually all the platforms that have survived are global, right, so there isnt an Egyptian TwitterSchumann: yeah but there is a Brazilian Facebook and a Chinese Twitter, Facebook

Apps: Yeah well in the Chinese case it basically because they put up walls so high that the existing platforms couldnt work

Schumann: No, but there are country specific platforms for sure they sometimes run in parallel and they sometimes fill other niches. But of course the ones we all know and we all talk about, they are global. And I still think they will be growing for a while, but you are true it will be the older generations that drive the growth

Apps: Jonn, if youre a British political party and youre looking at this, clearly you still have to play the game that counts in old style electoral politics whats the lessons from that?

Elledge: I think its about the differences between two main social networks, were talking about Twitter is very good at shaping the message, but if you want to win a battle against the media, then its not a bad..

Apps: or be noticed by the media

Elledge: Yeah. One of the sillier things that came out of this campaign was the Millifandom teenage girls crushing on Ed Miliband and that was an entirely, that was a Twitter story. And that was making the news for about 36 hours. So Twitter is very good for kind of shaping the story. But if you actually want to win hearts and minds I think Facebook is much more effective because it has a much wider reach. So I think theyre both important but in different ways and in limited ways.Apps: What would your takeaway be, Tim, for effecting mainstream political change, to get a message out there, is social media failing or fading?

Hardy: Is it fading? Yes, I think its one thing that a lot of people complain about is this kind of information fatigue or information overwhelm. And its becoming a full time job just keeping up with you social media and the things that are coming in, the new stories were hearing about. Which is why, of course, Facebook has algorithms which have an inherent bias in Facebooks case the inherent bias is they want you to be entertained and amused to keep you there, so anything nasty like a riot, they just wont talk about that. Twitters beauty is that its only just beginning to do that, it hasnt really

Apps: Its always had things trending, right?

Hardy: It has trending but that doesnt affect what you see. You can choose to chase the trend and that an identify things that are happening, although thats mostly marketing these days or teenage girls who happen to like a particular band to a degree I find extraordinary. But the flipside of that is that its very hard to keep up with all of it, if you just sat and watched everything that was coming in, if you follow more than 80 people theres no way you can have a meaningful relationship, and yet, most people follow hundreds. And the more people who follow you the more rude it becomes not to follow back so theres a kind of structural thing going on there. So you can do that, you can if youre technical put in your own algorithms, you can create lists that you scrape for stories, but thats not open or available to everyone. And I think that things get lost, and its stories that are quick and easy, things that are easy, stories that are easy will spread and people will pay attention. But anything that requires a greater degree of engagement that will challenge your ideas and it more complicated, is less likely to get a hearing. So there is this kind of inherently small c conservative function that is going on there where anything that upsets the world or upsets what you believe in is less likely to get engagement.Apps: Does that fit what youre seeing Sandy?

Schumann: Yeah, what I wanted to point out, because both of you were talking about the distinction between Twitter and Facebook, so what we look at in our research is distinct platform norms because every platform you engage with is supposed to encourage certain behaviors. So Twitter is a lot about information, and the majority of users are just lurking, they never tweet themselves, they just absorb information, whereas Facebook is much more about engagementApps: Are they lurking or are they just not signed on at all?

Schumann: Lurking, yeah so we do know that they absorb information, but they literally just use it as a news outlet. Whereas on Facebook people are presenting themselves, so liking a Facebook page is much more than just getting information from the page, it also shows to your friends that you agree with them. So the campaigns, or we worked with Greenpeace for instance, they use Twitter and Facebook very differently and, although information is still the main function, especially on Facebook the features make it much easier to build dialogue.

Apps: I wonder if it party just mimics better the way that people conventionally socialize, so if you tweet on Twitter that youve gotten engaged or married over the weekend, it would be subsumed with everything else, whereas on Facebook it will get sucked out, or if someone dies the odds are youll find out on Facebook, whereas on Twitter it kind of disappears into the wall of noise much faster and harder.

Schumann: And also on Twitter people find it even more difficult to estimate who their audience is. So on Facebook, although everyone overestimates who sees what they share, people are more precise. But on Twitter they have no idea if it could possibly be public literature

Apps: and can be found five years later, the scenario that when you become famous people will read everything that you ever tweeted, find the stupidest thing youve ever said and then throw it immediately back at you. Emmanuel, on the Bring Back Our Girls point, you wrote a really nice article about the slightly unexpected second or third order effects that had in Nigeria, just kind of summarize what they were.Emmanuel Akinwotu: Yeah, so most people would have heard of Bring Back Our Girls and that was basically when the 270 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria, the government had a little bit of a lapse in terms of taking the issue seriously, so people started to tweet #BringBackOurGirls just as a kind of half-hearted we need to do something and I think the anger built up because of the inactivity. But then it served a wider purpose that I think many of the people who started the hashtag didnt think it would

Apps: It went global, so a lot of people who didnt know anything about Nigeria got into it.

Akinwotu: I think it says something about how current affairs synchronizes with Twitter, and I think they go hand in hand quite often and I think media outlets exploit that quite well. I think in the Nigerian incident one of the people who initially took to the handle and pushed it very far was a woman called Obiageli Ezekwesili, previously the vice president of the World Bank and previously and Education minister, so she had a huge profile. That in a sense made the events even more significant because the government saw it as an opposition tool to discredit them but the wider world had a quicker reach because she had the profile to take it further than many people in Nigeria could. And I think that then meant that it was so antagonist to the governmentApps: Which is not how the rest of the world saw it

Akinwotu: Exactly, but the government took a very defensive approach. And even now, only last week the head of the army said that the Bring Back Our Girls campaign is... that their main raison detre is to make sure that the army officials lose their jobs. So there is still this inbuilt skepticism in political circles

Apps: Despite Nigeria getting a fair bit of kit and help as a direct result

Akinwotu: So I think in Nigeria it played out as a political agent, an insecure government was really spooked by it. But to the wider world it was a huge thing, and even now, for example, protests were in London and Washington and all over the world, and that was through #BringBackOurGirls London or #BringBackOurGirls DC

Apps: And the government fell, right, in the election?

Akinwotu: Yeah that became there were a number of things they failed on but that was the biggest thing that was the biggest international discreditor of their legitimacy. And I think you can owe a lot of that to the way the #BringBackOurGirls campaign galvanized public opinion.

Apps: The Kony2012 thing had almost the opposite effect, it increased international support for the anti-LRA campaign, which meant that it secured Musevenis position and strengthened his hand in domestic politics. So you get these bizarre second order effects, which no university student in the Midwest tweeting #BringBackOurGirls or #Kony2012 could ever envisage happening. When it comes to an international level its a pretty unsophisticated tool, right Tim, and yet things can take off very easily on a global scaleHardy: Well it makes me think of that description of the revolutionary mob, that you try and ride the tiger. You cant really control it because it is, on some levels a genuinely spontaneous outpouring of individuals and as such there is now way that you can guarantee that you can steer the outcome of anything, there may well be secondary effects and if you decide its not going the way you want theres no way of saying lets drop this campaign and try something different. You can try a second campaign, but you never go viral twice. One thing that, I think it was Sandys point and Peter you touched on this, is whether, in my pessimistic vision of these organize private network of networks, you wouldnt have things like UK Uncut or the Middle East various springs

Apps: You couldnt have something that requires the Guardian to get it going

Hardy: It requires a different dynamic. But there is also a question about the limitations of what comes out of these movements. UK Uncut is quite specific, but very often, anything that is self-organizing like this has a certain it can run out of momentum very quickly, things like Occupy, they dont actually there are all sorts of philosophical or political reasons why you might want to have a leaderless group with no definite program, but in practice what seems to happen is that you just get instability and then greater people from a greater organization, often military, step in and take advantage of that instability and seize power.

Apps: Or in a slightly better case scenario you end up part of the mainstream, right, I was struck by how fast Obama zeroed in on the rising wealth gap after Occupy, it took about a week. And while that doesnt mean you grab the whole message, you grab a bit, you see most political leaders say something about tax avoidance, with varying degrees of credibility or insistence. So you do get into the wider message its just that you only get so far. This has always been the case, Michael Bourkes broadcast from East Africa in 1984 created LiveAid, created in Ethiopia fascinating second and third order effects in East Africa that are still going on today. But the bottom line is that the only four people on the planet who could have done that and only BBC correspondence (East Africa) had enough clout to pull that off in 84. It might well be the case today that they would be one of those people, but a wide variety of other people can do something and again the Kony2012 was a great example of a viral video created by a person who doesnt seem to have a vast understanding of what it going on, but who could push it. How many of these things do you see on a smaller level, Jonn?Elledge: Im going to do that annoying thing of asking a different question, sorry. Im wondering how many of these things there are that dont take off and so none of us can name them? Because its easy to look at something like Twitter and think its democracy, but its not. If youve got 500,000 followers you have a much bigger impact than someone with 20. So youre praying for a retweet from Caitlin Moran because thats my traffic sorted for the day. There will be campaigns that kind of got lucky, where one of these people with that level of clout spotted it at an early stage and put rocket boosters on it. There will be dozens of equally worthy or social media friendly causes that just never manage to get that far, that we therefore dont have the faintest idea of what they are. Which is not the question you asked at all, sorry, what was the question you asked?Apps: How many of these micro things are there where something on a local level gets grabbed

Elledge: Theres a lot of them about we had great success with a story last week about planning regulations, which doesnt sound massively sexy I know, but a developer didnt have planning permission to knock down a pub but thought its London we can get away with this, so they knocked it down. So that went viral, and then three weeks later the council ordered them to rebuild it exactly as it was before, so that went viral as well.

Apps: Which they probably wouldnt have done had they not realized they had the popular political clout to do it right, government bureaucracy gone mad

Elledge: Very possibly not. But its easy to look at the stories that went viral afterwards and think well I can see why that one did, but looking at ideas beforehand you cant predict it, some things will just not take off like that. Every one in twenty stories will get a really good take up, but you cant predict in advance which one it is. There is loads of stuff that I write or see which I think is incredibly worthy and I think everyone should read, and it goes nowhere. And then theres other stuff that takes off in exactly the way that youd hope, its very unpredictable.Apps: I think a lot of it is about length of headline and length of hashtag right, #UKUncut is a really good one, once you get to about 12 characters it isnt. Is there any evidence one way or the other about what works and what doesnt?

Schumann: Well emotions always work, I think, you were saying some of those dont take off, but its the same with offline events as well. I was at an event last week and someone talked about a protest and there were four women walking around and there was no one watching, as so she said well that clearly didnt have an impact. Its the same online or offline, there are always things that dont have an impact, that dont take off. What does work is anything that evokes emotions, mainly negative ones actually. Because we do know that negative emotion has more of an impact on us, we pay more attention to that.

Apps: How about humor?

Schumann: Um, Im not sure about humor.

Elledge: There are sentence structures that give you an almost physical urge to click, to find out what lies behind it. Like Upworthy, its dreadful, it makes Buzzfeed look like the Times, but it specializes in AB testing these headlines, and it only fixes on one when it works out which it the most successful way of putting a story out there. So the number of things you look at and think I know this is going to be hateful, but you have to physically restrain yourself from finding out what the story is. So there are ways of manipulating people to do it.

Apps: The Daily Mail sidebar of shame

Elledge: Yeah, its easy to get lost in that for hours

Apps: Im going to throw it to Sophie from Demos at the back, you guys spent a lot of time looking at this over the last this election, what have we missed, what are the key takeaways of what you looked at? Sophie Gaston: I think the main thing was that, compared to 2010, every MP was on Twitter, all the parties engaged with it. We saw some interesting things in terms of who was being responsive. Basically David Cameron has not replied to one tweet, ever, which is quite interesting.

Hardy: Probably quite sensible

Apps: Whereas Ask Miliband went disastrously bad I seem to remember a few years ago

Elledge: I am told that David Camerons party trick is reading out responses to his Twitter feed in a silly voice.Gaston: I think, you know, there was a lot of activity and there was a lot of sharing, there was a lot of campaigning. We did this thing where we mapped the Twitter-sphere which showed that not only was Twitter a political media echo chamber, but there were actually sub-echo chambers within it which were each of the parties, um all the main media organizations, um you know, and then its funny because there are some people that are complete outliers like Boris Johnson, for example, who is not even a Tory Twitter-sphere. Hes actually completely on his own, um, and-

Apps: And how do you measure that?

Gaston: So we were looking at the way in which people interacted, um so who are they retweeting, who are they tweeting to, who is tweeting back with them, and we mapped reactions-

Apps: No one retweets Boris basically.

Gaston: Well actually its more that hes focused out. He speaks more with his constituents and with the general public whereas all the other parties and journalists mainly just talk amongst themselves. It was really interesting to see that the media actually does have the mediating role right in the middle. Weve got Labour Twittersphere is about twice the size of the Tories and much more active.

Apps: How large is the LibDem Twittersphere these days?

Gaston: Um, its quite contained, and then George Callaway with his own sphere. Hes the most active MP on Twitter, also the most aggressively negative and uses the most swear words, we mapped sort of the language. One thing that was really interesting was when we started to look at the semantic analysis, how they were speaking and we measured how often the MPs were going out against party lines, so they were actually sort of going out against their party policies, and we were just seeing it increasing, you know, having more and more. I think the thing is that when MPs start engaging in social media they buy into that cult of individuality as well, so they become sort of separate entities from their parties in some way, and its much harder for party HQ, to control them once theyve got their own-

Apps: I mean I do wonder if Carswell would have kept his seat had he not been the expenses guy, and you know who all took you know, say I had a separate political identity, separate to his UKIP identity. It kind of comes back to a bit, I mean youre right in that I think Twitter kind of favors the slightly radical, you know I mean in the Boris Johnson kind of sense of way, and which is, possibly stretching the definition of radical beyond its conventional political usage and you know where people you know play in a-people play on being a character. Its almost a wider version of the cult of celebrity, right, as much as politics in the way they interact.

Sophie Gaston: Yeah definitely, and I mean, theres a huge scale of actual value of those communications. A lot of, you know, you can be tweeting the most, volume is not whats most important. I think its sort of how you use it and with whom youre engaging. But yeah, the impact of those particular tweets varies immensely.

Apps: Yeah, its kind of impossible to modelor is it? Sandy, I mean its not possible to model this kind of stuff right, to say this is the perfect tweet?

Schumann: Oh, of course it is. I mean

Apps: So what is the perfect tweet? I mean its kind of, you know-

Schumann: Its not my domain but I mean machine learning is doing a great job.

Apps: So kind of sort of one-third Kate Middleton, sort of a bit Prince Harry in a Nazi uniform

Schumann: I know computer scientists who are basically working on you know putting together that formula, and I dont think they are too far off, because you can measure impact, so you just trace back you know, what were the defining characters and you work that a couple of times through the algorithm and um yeah, so maybe next time we should invite a computer scientist who does that, Im sure they can tell us more about that.

Apps: So you think well get to a stage where this is will be kind of much more engineered-

Schumann: Of course.

Apps: I mean at the moment everyone in social media is enthusiastic amateurs, almost right, and in 2010 they definitely were, but thats probably gonnawell have a bunch of thirty year olds in five years time who grew up with this.

Hardy: Plus as Jonn says, we were already seeing that with Upworthy and Buzzfeed

Elledge: And there has been a backlash against the Upworthy-style, and now people do kind ofthey resent being manipulated in that way. Theres so much noise about it that Upworthy basically got pushed off Facebook, which you know killed their traffic overnight, and so I wonder if like, if you ever work out what the perfect tweet is, does the perfect tweet change? Because suddenly that becomes the thing everyones doing and therefore

Apps: But that might be the perfect tweet.

Hardy: The one weird trick.

Apps: Any questions from the floor?

Audience Question: Yeah. Its very interesting that weve been talking huge amounts about Twitter and Facebook. Actually I find more interesting in terms of social media actually the support network tied to websites, the money saving experts, the-before I hopefully got on the way of becoming a house owner and my daily fix was housepricecrash.com, and because-actually I think that reveals far more about peoples needs and wants politically than potentially Twitter and Facebook, and I just wonderis this something [unknown phrase], but are they engaging with those places where actually people are a lot more honest about what their problems are?

Apps: Well I thought you saw an immediate change within the British army as asked, British army river service took off in Iran 2003, 4, 5 and it allowed you kind of, to have a certain level of you know, and you saw people like Dannet trade off it quite aggressively, I think, it wasbut it changed the dynamic. Before that there wasnt a way in which you could have semi-, semi- but not very anonymized discussions, you know in theyou know agitant ready, as long as it wasnt too damaging, they were fine with it and then, you know, someone managed to go too far and throw on a ton of bricks, well how important are these second-tier platforms to you know the mumsnet and so forth-

Elledge: Well I think they are-I think thats a pretty good question because I think they are extraordinarily interesting because they are sort of one step removed from that public sphere. You dont have Guardian journalists writing ten pieces a day commenting for free on whats going on on the mumsnet forums, well actually you do occasionally, but um-I wont repeat what it was, it involved either youve heard of it or you havent. People are morebecause theyre communities of interests rather thanpeople arent coming along to make some kind of point or play some kind of role, although inevitably that happens to some extent in any interaction. And I dont thinkI think the financial onesI think the money supermarket there is a little bit of engagement with politics and political parties there because there are policies that have a direct impact on finance and its very obvious-housepricecrash is a bit ofI mean I dont know if it has changed, been a few years since Ive looked there but it was a bit UKIP without being UKIP, it was quite extreme views.

[overlapping speech/laughter]

Umdefinitely the outfields.

Apps: Its also I mean, I think Ive seen this happen elsewhere, in fact. Once you have a website where youre talking one side of the market, it essentially becomesthey make it right they make it wrong. Within that community they will become completely delusional because they will look endlessly for whatever evidence supports their thesis.

Elledge: Right, well Sandy you wrote something about Anonymous, I think where people in these groups, they tend towards extremism. Is that right? Im trying to remember in your-

Schumann: Yeah, but Anonymous? Um-

Elledge: Just the way that these people

[overlapping speech]

Schumann: But I think what is trueI think it was about ISIS that I mentioned therethat they do use certain services, certain platforms as a form of identity. So um, if you do use, I dont know those blogs or if you comment there, you know, immediately it also expresses part of your identity, which probably means youre a mom, and youre

Apps: And British right? I mean these are national networks by and large.

Schumann: Yes exactly. So um, I think this was about ISIS and how they use the dark web actually, not because they necessarily want to be anonymous and encrypt their communication, but because using the dark web actually shows you are part of ISIS. But I found your question very interesting because in a way the question is also do parties actually listen toI think that was your question right, and from what I know, at least from NGOs and advocacy groups they still have a lot of trouble withso they look at their Facebook page and they look at their Twitter and they see what happens there, but they rarely ever venture out into the whole websphere andto get ideas or yeah sentiments from there so, but I dont know whether maybe the analysis in Demos, if you saw, um or if you looked into that, how parties actually gathered information or sentiments.

Gaston: Yeah I think mainly after this string of campaigns we saw the campaigning tactical element of it. What we did see was like that, you know, you could say Labour won the digital campaign but in another way the Tories won it, that they were just more under the radar [overlapping speech], together in exercise. They used it to basically break down micro-constituencies, they used it as part of a targeting exercise in the same way that we see in the States, that kind of grassroots

Apps: Because Facebook will allow you to target people below the age of 30 or above the age of 50 in a particular location, right, you just kind of

Elledge: Which is one of the reasons why the Conservatives put so much money into advertising because its not about the adverts, its about the relationships between the people who click on those adverts. If I have a Conservative advert and I click on it, then everyone in my friends list is a potential Conservative voter. Let me just quickly say, I know in 2010 Nick Clayton engaged a lot with Student Room Co UK and indeed made policy announcements for the first time in Q&A sessions in Student Room. I dont know whether they did that in 2015.

Apps: I mean Jonn the other place that people talk of course is common pages on newspapers. You know, I mean if you look at, you know the kind of-you know the best place to gauge the UKIP is the Telegraph comments page, the Guardian comments page is probably a similar place.

Hardy: Those are the best places to gauge UKIP to be honest. UKIP do have a bit of a stranglehold on

Apps: But there are big problems for people owning common pages, right?

Hardy: Yeah, the site Im in charge of doesnt have one because you are legally liable for any comment anyone leaves on your page, and so after awhile if youre getting a certain number of comments its a full time job just to kind of make sure that no one is saying anything thats legally actionable and could therefore destroy your entire

Apps: Is this a problem YouTube simply hasnt noticed?

Hardy: Um, I think YouTube probably gets away with it because theyre American, so I suspect they-I would guess thats where that comes into play. But I couldnt give you a definite answer for that one.

Apps: Any other Questions?

Audience Question: We talked quite a lot about Twitter and number of followers equals, you know, sort of directly proportional to the impact youre likely to have, and you touched a second ago on, you know, everyone and if you click on a conservative advert, probably in your, or you can make an assumption that everyone in your friend network is actually allied to you. Im not sure I buy that at all actually, I mean I think, its interesting with Russell Brand. You know, theres a big fuss made about the fact that Russell Brand had nine million Twitter followers and therefore was hugely influential and Miliband goes off and has this obsession with [unknown phrase] and in many ways it played out. It would be fascinating to know how much impact Brand then coming out and saying vote of Miliband actually had, because I question seriously whether it was that much. I think a lot of people follow him out of curiosity. The uh, you know, just have a look at the way I do this stuff myself. I track all sorts of people whose views I like and also people whose views I dont like. The uh, and Ive got the same in terms of my-well I dont do Facebook-but LinkedIn, Ive got a massive spread of different people on that. So theres a real danger of too much assumption in this, in terms of the way its going to get used.

Elledge: But statistically you are more likely, to, Im not saying you are automatically a Conservative if you click on a Conservative advert or that your friends are, but you are more statistically more likely to than the-

Audience: Yeah, I buy that.

Elledge: And as for Brand, I mean, the man told his followers not to vote, whether he has an influence on them or not, he told them not to vote and then after it was too late to register to vote-and his followers were predominantly first time voters, potential first time voters, then he said go and vote for this-

Apps: We also dont know how many of his followers are British, I mean the one thing Ive learned-not just through promoting PS21 stuff and, you know, we are babes in the wood in this respect, but also in trying to sell stuff on the Amazon Kindle platform. The way you get lots of followers is that you train an audience of nine billion people, or possibly 300 million Americans, and you know, which is, definitely the way that someone, you know, how-I doubt that more than half of Brands followers are based here in the UK. Which of course means that the one effect he would have had is that lots of people who had never heard of Ed Miliband heard about Ed Miliband, an achievement which in UK political terms is utterly worthless, although it might slightly increase the chances of getting a chat show in New York, should he wish to go for one that If he was promoting a celebrity, paradoxically that it would be very effective, you know Brand is a great way of reaching nine million people somewhere. You know for a quirky Brand thats quite interesting, but you know for an election thats going to be won or lost on what 35-year-olds in Brighton vote for, its probably not that effective and if youre playing in the southwest of England, you couldnt be less effective if you tried. I mean, how much do people know about who follows people Sandy, or is it people just listing their numbers?

Schumann: I dont think a lot of people actually use that function to-you mean whether I check who follows you and then depending on that-

Apps: Yeah when people are proud of having seven thousand followers and-

Schumann: Oh of course, of course. The same goes for Facebook friends. Theres some interesting studies looking at personality traits and obviously its the classic neurotic people who are more likely to appreciate attention on Facebook. So theres actually some reverse engineering going on where we look at peoples behavior on Facebook and then we can pretty um yeah, almost to the same degree of precision as a personality test determine what are someones personality traits. So and yeah, a lot of people are very much out there to just get attention and clicks and likes, and followers on Twitter. I am, as well, Im very excited if someone follows me. I had two UKIP politicians follow me and then I thought oh, I can actually control who follows me-

Apps: Your name will also go on the list.

Schumann: Yeah, of course that is a very essential need that all of us have to get attention and be loved. Social media works in a brilliant way to satisfy their need.

Apps: Right, but they werent trying to be loved, they were just trying to get a vote form somebody once every five years and then let everything else look after itself. I mean thats-people forget that democratic politics is so much a one-trick thing, right Jonn?

Elledge: Um yeah, it doesnt really matter what people are saying about you in the intervening five years if they get thereApps: Any more questions?

Audience question: I was just wondering what you thought about the shy Tory phenomenon, how this plays into everything youve been talking about. I mean, from my own experience I come from a more of a conservative media even though I dont vote Tory. Its interesting what you said about Facebook being more of a Tory territory, um, because I found, you know, tracking my news feed that actually the Tories, my Tory friends and swing voters who actually ended up voting Tory were very quiet, and it was left-wingers who were very vocal. And um, I dont know, the manufacture mantra sort of comes to mind, theres no such thing as society. Does that extend to social media, is there no such thing as a social media society? Or less of a social media society for people who vote conservative? Are they more private in terms of their political views? Are they less predisposed to be passionate on their Facebook walls or on Twitter about how they feel about politics and how theyre going to vote? Is that partly why people get this impression that Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook is more left-wing?

Elledge: Several responses to that, why I am not entirely convinced by the shy Tory. Im not entirely convinced there is such a thing as the shy Tory or that its significant, I think thats polling companies going oh my God we really screwed up weve got to blame someone else, it was those damn shy Tories. Secondly, on Facebook the algorithm if you yourself, even if you come from a Conservative background, if you yourself are more responsive to stories that are more liberal or left-wing, then Facebook will give you those stories and it will give you the comments, and it will promote material that matches your beliefs. So you wont see as much from conservative friends. And Ive forgotten my third point.

Hardy: I wonder if its that right-wing politics is less performative, I think so much as sort of left-wing shattering the internet is people wanting to show their mates how right on they are, how much they care. Its difficult for people to get infused about saying well frankly I trust these guys with the economy more than I do Ed Miliband. Its not really the same kind of performative aspect to it, I think maybe its just quite-

Apps: I saw a few rants after election day from non-shy Tories which were basically oh the NHS has vanished the world hasnt changed, and that was primarily a reaction against the Tory-hating sort of diatribes on the left. But that was the first time it really punched through, and I suspect in many cases youre right, the first time they really felt they had something to say aside from maybe a snide comment about Ed Miliband here or there, and they generally kind of shut up.

Schumann: And again on Facebook people are usually quite aware of who their audience is. So if your friends believe that most of their friends are left-wing they will perform an identity that their friends appreciate and may not be expressing their political views. We also know from the US at least that people in general dont appreciate political commentary on Facebook, and they dont want to be convinced, persuaded, on Facebook-

Apps: They want cat photos.

Schumann: Exactly. So that is true, usually a little bit now over the years. There has definitely been change between 2008 and 2010 and maybe some people are more susceptible to those dynamics-

Apps: I just want to throw a question back at you quickly, and well come to you. I mean what was your being in Tunisia in a country that social media changed, you know slightly later? What was your reading of how important social media really was in that polity?

Audience: Obviously it was definitely important in terms of-yeah more-less in terms of people like armchair anarchism, more in terms of hands-on lets organize a demonstration and lets go downtown and demonstrate about this or that. Its also more interesting from a journalists perspective because weve got organizations like Ansar al Sharia which are virtually the only way in unless youre talking to people on the ground, is via their Facebook and Twitter feeds, and its kind of interesting how people over in Washington, people in London, in think tanks who are basically creating whole papers based on analyzing based on Facebook posts and Twitter posts so, um yeah even though it is eventually important-

Apps: Ill just take one last round of questions and then-

Audience question: I was just going to say that I looked at my Facebook feed but I do believe there is a shy Tory phenomenon in the sense that everyone has such a heavily curated sort of persona that they got on to Facebook and I think that theres almost-if youve grown up believing, well not believing, but that there being such a camp of Tories for the poor, I think theyve come closer together nowadays and I think if youve grown up with that view, youd be very embarrassed to put up a view shouting about being willing to vote for the rich party, whereas people still agree-or still want support for the poor. I think the issue people have with shouting about Tories is deemed as like-as youre going against the working class, which I dont agree is quite as-its not as clear cut anymore. So I do believe in the shy Tory thing. I think theres an embarrassment about saying a conservative view whereas a Labour view is Im proudly standing up for the working class

Apps: Any other questions? Yes.

Audience question: You mentioned political internet networks, and I was wondering if there had been any specific studies done on countries other than English-speaking countries, because a lot of social media studies revolves around America and the UK. For example in Romania, where I come from, they had elections last year, if I remember correctly. The president that actually won the elections he had, I think one of the biggest followings on Facebook out of most national political leaders in the world, and he essentially won the campaign through his social media campaign, through the Facebook campaign and he was able to connect people from the diaspora to people at home. It was all done on social media, people encouraged each other to go vote by posting Facebook photos of the queues at the different embassies around the world. I was just wondering if there have been any studies about countries where social media had such an obvious impact because he was not expected to win by anyone across the world or across the country because the opposition party had a much more traditional campaign that people werent analyzing however he had only a mainly social media campaign-

Apps: And again, you know you have a diaspora that is closer to the original country population than some places where diasporas left thirty or forty years ago, right?

Audience: Not really, I mean most people in the Romanian diaspora dont really have an interest in going back or contributing to the country. However, I feel like they kind of rallied around the social media campaign, I think hes had something like over a million Facebook likes and followers, which is very unheard of in a political leader, and it was a big social media campaign. I didnt see anything about it anywhere.

Schumann: Well there was some work that was done in Chile as well, where we basically see the same effects. Theres also work being done in Turkey, not just related to Gezi Park but also to Erdogan obviously is doing quite well on social media. Hes using those tools, as we mentioned earlier not just to control people but also to mobilize supporters for his campaign. So oftentimes the underlying dynamics are pretty much the same across-I mean the reasons why people vote are often very similar. I wouldnt be surprised to see that happening in Romania.

Apps: Although having said that, the difference between Arabic-language Twitter and English-language Twitter is probably the most extreme example, where people say-often the same people say very different things in English and Arabic. The world looks very different from certainly an Arabic perspective if you could read these things. Are there any more questions? No? Oh, yeah, go for it.

Audience question: Have you ever considered the possibility that months before the election the conservatives, I mean the government in power-kind of funny way of uh-not allowing some people to register? Did you-

Apps: I guess one of the things that social media is effective against actually right, is the more egregious examples of social media fraud-Im sorry social media fraud, social media fraud is probably a new thing-I mean conventional election fraud. What are your thoughts on that?

Hardy: I think thats part of-that goes back to Jonns earlier point about it is really hard to stop information from getting out. If people notice something odd is happening, it would be shared. I mean the flipside of that can be quite negative, sometimes this information about the identity of the victims of crime, which should be kept private-

Apps: Theres also this-we know, in this borough of Tower Hamlets, that information available in Bengali and information available in English were again starkly different, which is one of the reasons we were had a dispute over who won the election, you know three years ago. You can create interesting dynamics then by playing very, you know-by varying the sort of types of politics by reaching out to a bunch of people who dont speak a language, where therefore if you have a platform that can reach them, you have a much more powerful clout.

Elledge: In the US presidential election in 2012 there were reports in social media about much longer queues outside polling stations in predominantly African-American areas than there were in white areas. I have no idea whether anything sinister was going on, but just the suspicion that something might have been, meant that the people sort of pushed back really hard and were willing to stand in that queue for a very long time just to make sure that their vote was not taken from them-

Apps: And they knew they were being featured on Twitter and Facebook while doing so right

Elledge: Theres a feedback loop yeah.

Schumann: And I think some thing-sorry to interrupt. In Turkey when there was this power stumble, people immediately thought that Erdogan was practicing how to shut down the electricity to-when they had the elections to well play around with the votes that were being cast.

Apps: I mean social media is a gift for the conspiracy theorists, right?

Hardy: Just for the record, I am far more inclined to believe in Labour party incompetence than conservative party conspiracy. I think they just didnt do very well. I think it might be comforting to tell ourselves otherwise if youre on the left, but I think its nonsense-

Apps: Excellent. On that note I think we will break out the wine and continue these conversations in smaller chunks.

Transcript by Carrie Cuno, Rhea Menon and Vanessa Pooudomsak