{"id":11649,"date":"2016-04-18T15:06:57","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T19:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/?p=11649"},"modified":"2024-12-11T01:06:52","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T01:06:52","slug":"charge-facebook-cavalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/2016\/04\/18\/charge-facebook-cavalry\/","title":{"rendered":"Charge of The Facebook Cavalry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note:<\/strong> This blog post\u00a0is part of a series entitled Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook.\u00a0\u00a0The other posts in this series are \u201cThanks Be From Trump? Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 1)<\/a>\u201c,\u00a0\u201cWe, The Bernie Revolutionaries: Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 2)<\/a>”\u00a0and \u00a0“A Flash of Clinton: #Facestumping -Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 3)<\/a>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Charge(!), in military terms, is a battle manoeuvre whereby combatants rush at each other at top speeds to engage in close fighting. Online, in the hotly contested American election, Facebook is shaping up to be a place where this classic military manoeuvre is playing out for all to see. Passionate supporters are charging onto the social networking site, egged by their favorite candidates and inflamed political rhetoric, posting across candidates’ Facebook walls, showing their support \u2013 but increasingly also their disdain.<\/p>\n

The fact that social media is playing an active role in the 2016 US Presidential primaries is far from surprising.\u00a0 After all, Barack Obama\u2019s unexpected surge to victory in 2008 has been widely attributed to his campaign\u2019s ability to \u201crally the troops\u201d both online and off. As part of the Social Media Lab\u2019s ongoing research on how social media is changing the ways in which people communicate, we collected publicly available posts made to the official Facebook Pages of Clinton and Sanders, to examine how supporters (aka the \u2018troops\u2019) of both behave on the social network. Specifically, we wanted to know whether these followers only defended the home front (posting messages of support to their preferred candidate\u2019s page) or whether they also charge into enemy territory (attacking the opponent on the competition\u2019s own page).<\/p>\n

For the purpose of this exploratory analysis, we used Netlytic<\/a>, a cloud-based social media analytics platform developed by the Social Media Lab. We collected a dataset containing Facebook messages posted on the official Clinton and Sanders Facebook Pages by their followers between February 7 and March 27, 2016. In total, we collected over 26,126 posts (16,201 from Clinton\u2019s page and 9,925 from Sanders\u2019).<\/p>\n

We isolated the content of those 354 people who posted to both Clinton\u2019s and Sanders\u2019 Pages, then we\u00a0took a random sample comprising 30% (or 105) of those users and manually coded their posts into the following four categories:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In Support<\/strong> of\u00a0a candidate,<\/li>\n
  2. Against<\/strong> a candidate,<\/li>\n
  3. Neutral<\/strong>, or<\/li>\n
  4. Spam<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Of the 105 people who had commented on both Hillary Clinton\u2019s and Bernie Sanders\u2019 Facebook Pages, 72 posted negative statements against Clinton, whereas only 23 attacked Sanders. Out of those same 105 users, 60 expressed support for Sanders, whereas just 19 did so for Clinton.<\/p>\n

    WHY SANDER\u2019S SUPPORTERS ARE PLAYING OFFENSE\u00a0?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n

    While attacks were made to both candidates\u2019 Facebook Pages, more were made against Clinton and in support of Sanders. At first glance, this seems quite odd when comparing total Facebook Page \u201clikes\u201d \u2013 as of March 26, 2016, the two candidates had comparable followings: Sanders with 3,561,288 likes, to Clinton\u2019s 3,015,789. However, other publicly available Facebook metrics suggests Sanders is dominating in a numbers game elsewhere.<\/p>\n

    Since we began aggregating data in February, Sanders has consistently enjoyed higher rates of being \u201ctalked about\u201d on Facebook.\u00a0 The \u201ctalking about\u201d statistic on Facebook can be found in the \u201cLikes\u201d section of a Page, and is an amalgamated measure of engagements<\/a> including a shares, posts, RSVPs to events, and recommendations.<\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n

    We also reviewed the potential reach of both candidates through Facebook\u2019s Ad Manager. To do this, we set the ad criteria to include all users aged 13 years and older located within the United States, who had an interest in each candidate. (Facebook defines \u201cinterest\u201d as \u201cPeople who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to a topic<\/em>\u201d or in this case, a presidential candidate.) Surprisingly, Clinton had the lowest potential reach of any of the leading candidates with 1,500,000. Sanders, on the other hand, was projected to have a potential reach of 9,700,000, along with Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n

    Thus, despite comparable Page Like statistics, according to Facebook Ads, Sanders enjoys a potential reach over 6\u00a0times greater than that of Clinton. Moreover, half of Sanders\u2019 potential reach (55% or an estimated 5.1 million) on Facebook are to Millenials (which Facebook defines as \u201cpeople who were born between 1982 and 2004<\/em>\u201d), arguably the most connected and tech savvy generation<\/a> to date. See the chart below.\u00a0Millenials are also twice as likely as those aged 55 years and older to engage in trolling behaviour online, according to a 2014 survey by YouGov<\/a>. Clinton\u2019s potential reach to Millenials on Facebook is a paltry 36% (or just 550,000 users). Thus, it is not surprising that Sanders supporters are more likely to be attacking Clinton on her page than Hillary’s supporters attacking Sander on his page.<\/span><\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n

    According to Facebook Ads, Sanders\u2019 Facebook army could be substantial \u2013the potential reach that was interested in both Sanders and Clinton totalled 450,000. If our initial findings hold in a wider data set, and 57%\u00a0of those users displayed similar tendencies to those in our random sample, the Sanders supportive army could number 256,500.<\/p>\n

    Charge!<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
    \n

    About the Project:<\/strong> This project is a collaboration between Alicia Wanless<\/span> (@lageneralista<\/a>)– Director of Communications,<\/span> SecDev Foundation<\/a>, Anatoliy Gruzd<\/span> (@gruzd<\/a>) – Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, Philip Mai<\/span>(@phmai<\/a>)-Research & Communications Manager, Marc Esteve<\/span> (@netmev<\/a>) Postdoctoral Research Fellow,<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0Veronica Chernyavsky, Research Assistant,\u00a0SOCIAL MEDIA LAB<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Facebook and other social media sites are transforming our politics. Today, when politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or Jeb Bush want to attract voters\u2019 attention, they turn to social media. Within seconds, a well-timed tweet or Facebook post can be delivered directly into the hands of supporters and the public at large. \u00a0For example, when Jeb Bush announced his intention to run for the US presidency, he used Facebook<\/a> to make the announcement.<\/p>\n

    As more candidates and parties flock to social media, it is now easier\u00a0to analyse a candidate\u2019s campaign, both in terms of messaging and engagement, to determine how effective they are at using social media platform such as Facebook and to connect to their supporters. Knowing how, when, and what a candidate posts on social media says a lot about how they position themselves on the political stage, their campaign resources, their relative social media savviness \u2013 and even their personality \u2013 arguably all things that dictate where presidential hopefuls will land in polling.<\/p>\n

    As part of the Lab’s ongoing \u00a0research on how social media is changing the ways in which people communicate, we have been collecting and analyzing\u00a0publicly available Facebook posts found on the official\u00a0Facebook Pages of the five leading\u00a0U.S. presidential candidates: Donald Trump,\u00a0Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The dataset used for this post was collected\u00a0during a period of one month from January 21 to February 22, 2016. To analyse the posts collected we used the Lab\u2019s automated social media analytics tool Netlytic<\/a>. \u00a0In addition,\u00a0we also manually reviewed and coded a small subset of the dataset containing the 25 most Liked posts from a two week period between February 2 and February 19, 2016.\u00a0We opted to study Facebook post for this research as the social network enjoys the highest rate of usage by Americans, with 71% of the online U.S. adult population<\/a> enrolled. \u00a0And Americans are using Facebook to discuss politics. Of the most talked about topics on Facebook (both globally and in America) in 2015, the U.S. presidential elections topped the list<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Note: This blog post\u00a0is part of a series entitled Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook.\u00a0\u00a0The other posts in this series are \u201cThanks Be From Trump? Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 1)\u201c,\u00a0\u201cWe, The Bernie Revolutionaries: Facestumping \u2013 Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 2)”\u00a0and \u00a0“A Flash of Clinton: #Facestumping -Presidential Campaigning on Facebook (Part 3).” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[491,490,489,37,265,264],"tags":[404,8,410,409],"class_list":["post-11649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-post","category-online-communities","category-org-soc-med-use","category-politics","category-research","category-web-apps","tag-election2016","tag-facebook","tag-trolls","tag-us-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11649"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21492,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11649\/revisions\/21492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}