 Good morning. My name is Thiago Silva and I will talk a bit about political campaigns. This is part of my PhD research and the research question is how informative other unmediated electoral campaigns made on social media in comparison to traditional media or if you want to frame it in a different way. To what extent is the agenda of traditional media in the electoral competitors from producing more informative and less conflict-driven campaigns? So... Oh, sorry. So the core concept of my research is the idea of media framing, this idea that one event can be presented in different ways. Journalists can highlight different aspects of these events and my event is electoral campaigns and what literature has been noticing is that when journalists report and talk about elections, they usually focus on the same aspects. These are strategy and the way parties campaign and the way they try to get electoral advantage or race. That is these news about opinion polls and who's winning and losing and also conflict and the attacks between these political actors. So why is this bad? But the most obvious reason is because then the news about elections are less informative because they don't discuss substantive political issues. But also has some impact on the audiences and the effect. It has a negative impact on the audience's attitudes towards politics. So it increases political cynicism. It means that citizens will start trusting less on politicians and also reduces the sense of political efficacy. So the idea that it's important to vote and it matters to vote so basically would decrease turnout. So this brings us the question why this happened? Why are journalists not talking about issues and are focusing on all other aspects and are two possible explanations? The first one is to blame the journalists and most of the literature does that. Basically some say that the journalist believes that are different from ordinary citizens. They see politicians and someone that just wants to win and they don't care about bringing solutions to citizens. This is not probably the best explanation because some research didn't find any difference between organizers and journalists regarding their attitudes towards politics. Other reason might be these media routines. They want to it's easier to report about race and strategy and requires less work for them that would be more difficult for them to write about substantive political issues. And also finally is this transformation in media and this media logic and the commercial logic when stories are distorted to get attention and to sell journals rather than provide important information to the public. But can also be that is politicians fault. And basically these mass marketing strategies that now they rule these actors might be having a negative impact on the content of their campaigns. Basically the idea that parties avoid talking about issues basically because they don't want to alienate part of their electorate. So this can be because societies are more fragmented, more complex and so it would be more damaging for them to raise some issues can be that parties are becoming similar and there is less to distinguish themselves. So they don't talk so much about issues because basically they have the same position regarding them. Can be this also it's more and more unpredictable for them to know what will happen. So they don't want to stick to have some pledges that they cannot deliver. Of course this doesn't apply to all actors. Can be also some constraints. Basically they don't have capacity to do what they want because some policies are like enforced or made come from a super national entity. Basically it is you who would force national governments to do something. So in that sense they don't have this opportunity to do what they want but they basically do what they are told to. Also importance of money this is more the case in some countries like US where this pursuit for money drives their agenda it pays at all. So they don't have so much time to discuss issues because their main concern is just about getting money. And finally also the uncertainty of the elections. Some studies show that when they are competitive usually the actors talk more about issues but when it's certain that they will win they will just they prefer to avoid them and focus on other aspects. So in this sense the internet came as an opportunity for journalists to bypass the messenger and communicate directly to the public. And this is a perfect instrument for us in theory to see what politicians really want to convey during their campaigns. Do they want to talk about issues or they simply prefer to attack the opponents and they prefer to focus on the way they are campaigning in this aspect. There is however a problem because the internet is this poor medium that requires an effort from the audience to read and reach this information. So basically what happens with the websites is mostly these supporters that go there and they are basically used to mobilize and recruit volunteers for other offline campaign strategies rather than inform about policies. They could do that with email. It's kind of they can push the message to the audience but the problem with email is that they are not good public mailing lists and in the result they only get these people these emails these contacts of people that sign their newsletters or sign go to the parties and give their information directly to the campaigns which ends up being mostly supporters and sympathizers of these parties. So it's very good for mobilizing but not really to inform and to campaign. Also if they get the contacts of these people that are not supporters it's also not good to send an email these mass emails because spam is a big thing and the people really don't like and they can have really negative attitudes towards these messages from politicians. So in that sense the social media rises amazing opportunities for politicians to convey the message directly to the public to a large audience but also diverse audience because it works as a two-step flow communication where you share this political information in your network of friends. So in theory it's not only supporters that this message will reach but can be also someone with different opinions in different views. Of course it's like these costiles have a good comparison like campaigning on social media and in general it's like throwing a bottle a message in a bottle to the ocean because we don't know who will pick it and but this uncertainty is in a good way is good because we can really see because they don't know who will get it so they can be more genuine and really talk about what they feel important they can use now internet to persuade not only to mobilize so what I did basically was to compare election campaigns made on the social media with with the news coverage of those same campaigns in order to test two sets of competing hypotheses. The first set is an informative news if journalists are in fact distorting the campaigns in order to gain attention or the second hypothesis is all of campaigns if parties don't really want to talk about issues Oh, I did it basically content analysis of the press two newspapers and the three social media the facebook the twitter and youtube and the for the duration of four weeks I collected this data and I old-fashionedly analyze it manually so everything was coded manually it was more approach more for quality rather than quantity and the the elections that I looked at were the west election 2012 Italy in 2013 Brazil in 2014 and 2015 Portugal so I don't have any juicy trump material and basically this serves two purposes the first one is it shows the number of tweets facebook and youtube videos that the political actors posted in these four weeks before the election and we can see that they use quite a bit all of them at the three different uh, we were using the three different social media and they use it considerably except perhaps the Movimento Cinque Stella I think I had only seven videos because this party had their own 24 hour online channel, so I guess youtube reason was not that important for them and this also shows that campaigns on social media can be quite different. Yeah, they like they Partisan candidates use it for different purposes some of them can be very informative like the bloc of the scherda that The majority of their posts was to inform about the positions on the parties of substantive political issues but can also be quite Uninformative again Movimento Cinque Stella and I will later talk What about possible reasons for this? Yeah, I guess they are a bit obvious but strategy some parties like The coalition of the incumbent parties in Portugal also focus most on these strategic aspects and much less on presenting the audience with substantive political issues and final conflict Some parties like PDL popular della libertà in Italy They had quite negative campaign on social media while other parties like or candidates like Dilma in brazil. It was a quite Low salience of conflict which is very interesting because if you follow the election and if you follow traditional media apparently Dilma was the devil only attacking the other candidates, but it doesn't reflect on social media So in a way it's quite don't get scared. I will skip this But basically the main message is that campaigns Can be quite different and used for completely different purposes either fund raising finding volunteers And talking about issues. These are not mutually exclusive. So it's basically one post could Refer to more than one category But I know it's like it's not the best slide in the world. I'm so sorry about that so about our hypothesis What can we say about this other? Traditional media really distorting the campaigns or other parties avoiding issues. So this table presents us the the results of a logistic regression analysis and basically what it shows is that The reference category is depressed. So when the number there is lower than one, it means that It's less salient that topic on on each one of the social media. So basically this confirms our My uninformative news hypothesis all results are statistical significant So basically strategy or trace is much much more common Likely to be used by journalists than than the politicians issues are like also more likely like the particularly in youtube if you see is almost 2.5 times higher yeah the YouTube is 2.5 times more likely than the press to deal with substantive political issues Finally conflict is also less salient on social media And funny also scandal Is much much much much higher on the press like In a way it makes sense. I guess it's bad for everyone to talk about scandals. So definitely in a way The social media are a bit less less negative in this aspect so basically this are good Good results in a sense. They are good for me because it made sense. I was afraid that maybe I would not Find anything significant But they are also good for democracy Because it shows that these new media and these new platforms have the potential to Originate more informative campaigns compared to the traditional media and what people used to Of course Of course, they are like Exceptions and they are also risks associate. I'm not Clearly saying that this is negative. I'm I'm nothing against the moviment or shink was teller And I don't want to offend anyone that but There are some authors that say that social media and internet is this tailor made platform for insurgent and populist parties and What we have been seeing is like It has been partly proved In the case of italy and the success of a moviment or shink was teller Even though as we saw before they don't talk about issues probably they don't want to alienate the electorate because they want to Reach every single one of them. So It's more about like this populist message us against them and less about content But can be highly effective on on the internet Also some surprises is the Berlusconi's party pdl that it was a highly Efficient campaign and on social media this party in fact surprisingly discussed a lot about substantive political issues Even though it also quite negative campaign, but basically and media also referred to it as Even though Berlusconi was the only candidate that didn't have a tweet account But even though after the election he said that he would learn more internet, but The pdl Have the For Have an approach the media to say that they had a campaign blast I'll campaign that they used the comments and user generated Information to improve the speeches and improve the message So even this party's like like Berlusconi that Clearly have monopolized the convention conventional media And that being this expert and delivering this television message also adapting to the to the new technologies and It can have quite effective results He almost won the election even though when it started the campaign It was nobody would expect that to have such an amazing result Perhaps i'm not saying this but it was related to this our dean style of campaigning and now internet played a role in his campaign, but so Basically, that's everything. I hope you understand understood something. Thank you