Social Media, Mobile Communication, and the Elections: Examining Independent
9.5 Conclusion and Discussion
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related to the number of campaign strategies used or deterrence and harassment.
However, number of election related posts was positively related to number of cam- paign strategies used. And, it seems that frequent election posting was related to the likelihood of deterrence and harassment.
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signifi cantly related to getting more followers, and so was frequency of social media posting by mobile devices. In other words, the more expressive the candidate was, the more followers they had on Weibo.
Third, to some extent however, “being mobile” seems to detract from the chal- lenging task of running a LPC campaign. Frequent social media use through mobile devices was proportional to the amount of “selfi e-posts” – posts about candidates’
personal life and personal experience (mostly not related to the election). In a simi- lar vein, frequent social media use through mobile devices was positively related to the amount of posts with emotional expressions. In contrast, using social media via computer was positively related with the amount of election related posts.
Fourth, mobile devices demonstrated their techno-advantage regarding their capacity for creating multimedia content any time anywhere. Candidates posting frequently with mobile devices were more likely to include pictures and videos in their posts. Finally, active Weibo users, regardless of platform used, were more likely to drop out of the elections. Campaigners who posted a lot about the elections were most likely to engage in offl ine activities, and subsequently to receive pressure from the government .
So what do these fi ndings lead to? Obviously, it would be untrue to claim that new media technology succeeded in helping grassroots candidates take over LPC representative seats – considering the fact that only 2 out of 128 candidates won the election and more than 20 % of the candidates dropped out during the course of their campaigns. Despite such catastrophe, it is nonetheless naïve to conclude that new media technologies fail to promote democracy in an authoritarian regime. More refi ned analysis is needed in terms of understanding the complexity of social media and mobile technology impacts on political participation and elections in the Chinese context.
Regardless of the election results, social media has greatly empowered the can- didates in the sense that it provides a platform for participating in politics by lower- ing the cost of running an offl ine campaign and the political risk associated with it.
Despite the suppression from the state, a civic and democratic culture could be fostered through campaigning with the ubiquitous social media tools (for a descrip- tive analysis of the social media content, see Shen 2015 ). Active Weibo activity attracts both media attention and attention from the electorate.
But the use of mobile technology seems to help little with the campaigning. The features of mobile communication such as its organization and coordination power were not particularly shown in the current case. Frequent mobile device users did not mobilize the electorate or ask for help more frequently than others. Mobile social media use did not show a distinctive infl uence on candidates’ campaigning behavior other than being more emotional, having more selfi e posts, and more posts with multimedia content.
There might be several explanations for this. First, at the individual level, the candidates could be blamed for their lack of initiative to adopt the technology, or inexperience in utilizing mobile social media for running a campaign. It is clear that social media use via mobile devices was not popular. Even for users, the frequency of use was far lower than accessing social media through a computer.
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Second, the scenario of utilizing communication technology matters. Different situations call for different tools. Running an election campaign could be highly different from joining in a protest or demonstration, where swift on-site coordina- tion and real-time communication are desired. It is possible that the independent candidates prefer crafting campaign messages on a computer than on-the-go, so that more cognitive effort may be invested to think through the strategies.
The last plausible explanation is the pressure and censorship from the state. It is obvious that the independent candidates faced a real dilemma concerning their cam- paigns. On the one hand, assuming that they knew social media could help them amplify their voices, they wished to reach out to as many voters within their election district as possible, and they would be active and expressive on Weibo as much as possible. On the other hand, being excessively active would certainly attract atten- tion from the government , which would incur devastating impacts on their cam- paign. Mobile phones could possibly be tapped, and email accounts hacked. Both aspects received well supported evidence from the empirical data. At the descriptive level, the data showed that 11 (8.6 %) candidates’ Weibo messages were censored;
fi ve candidates mentioned their email accounts or personal computers were hacked;
and one candidate mentioned being under surveillance. The correlation pattern was also consistent with candidates’ concern: positive correlation between the number of election related posts and receiving harassment and deterrence from the govern- ment , as well as positive correlation between social media activity and dropping out.
Understanding this dilemma between speaking out and attracting undesirable attention from the authorities might lead to a low-key and non-confrontational strat- egy in their campaigning, that is, refraining from posting messages to the public but communicating via private messages, and avoiding use of mobile communication tools. Apparently, this dynamic was beyond the reach of this study. On the other hand, it is also possible that posting more selfi e content could be a strategy to divert the attention of the authorities – to dilute one’s social media timeline with more personal and non-election related posts might reduce personal political sensitiveness.
All things considered, the fi ndings from this study shed new light on the use of social and mobile media technology for political participation in contemporary China. Having said that, the current study has a number of limitations to acknowl- edge. First, there are a few caveats about the data used. It adopted a non-obtrusive data collection method – scraping content from candidates’ social media accounts.
With this method, many indicators generated from content analysis are only proxy to the concepts they refer to. In other words, indicators of this study measured what happened according to what the candidates said on their Weibo, rather than directly measuring what happened. Researchers had no ways of verifying the facts. For example, some candidates publicly announced on their Weibo that they dropped out of the elections but others did not. Also, some candidates often mentioned what they did offl ine to garner support but others did not. Social media content should not be treated as a record of factual information because face and impression management strategies are constantly employed when people post messages online.
Second, this study only looked at the frequency of different social media behaviors .
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Future studies could examine the messaging strategies of the independent candidates.
Finally, although we studied 128 independent candidates and their Weibo activities, this study on 1 year’s local election campaign is only one case among many other online collective actions in China. Hence, comparative studies across cases could help reveal the cross-context variation of technology adoption and its impact on politics.
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© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
R. Wei (ed.), Mobile Media, Political Participation, and Civic Activism in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-024-0917-8_10