Social media, civic engagement, and the slacktivism hypothesis: lessons from Mexico's "El Bronco".

• Author: Howard, Philip N.
• Position: Report

Does social media use have a positive or negative impact on civic engagement? The cynical "slacktivism hypothesis" holds that if citizens use social media for political conversation, those conversations will be fleeting and vapid. Most attempts to answer this question involve public opinion data from the United States, so we offer an examination of an important case from Mexico, where an independent candidate used social media to communicate with the public and eschewed traditional media outlets. He won the race for state governor, defeating candidates from traditional parties and triggering sustained public engagement well beyond election day. In our investigation, we analyze over 750,000-posts, comments, and replies over three years of conversations on the public Facebook page of "El Bronco." We analyze how rhythms of political communication between the candidate and users evolved over time and demonstrate that social media can be used to sustain a large quantity of civic exchanges about public life well beyond a particular political event.

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Social media have become an important part of modern political campaigning. Campaign managers mine them for data. Citizens and civic groups use a plethora of platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and reddit, to talk about politics and engage with civil society groups and political leaders. (1) Candidates and political parties are also using social media to manage their public image in communications with journalists and the interested public. (2) While many factors affect whether or not political actors adopt social media, the vast majority today are at least actively trying to integrate social media into their campaigns. (3)

The problem is that despite the technological advancements, most political and activist groups are still in the dark on how best to mobilize people. (4) The main difficulty arises because citizens' decisions about how much to participate in a political cause depend on how they perceive the efforts of the political candidate or organization. (5) But the norms on social media platforms are continually shifting. As a result, people are constantly changing how they interpret the social media content and online efforts of others. It can thus be very difficult and time consuming for political groups to keep up with new technology and to predict the outcomes of sharing certain types of media and content.

This complexity has forced many political organizations and candidates to limit how much they use social media and who among their organization or group can use social media. (6) Politicians usually prefer to have a point person in charge of their party's social media strategy and even their own personal accounts. However, even when the point person finally understands how to mobilize citizens, it is not easy to transfer that knowledge to others. As a result, most politicians are very cautious about how they use social media and how much they interact with their online audiences. (7) This has hindered and limited our understanding of which political strategies work best to mobilize and engage with citizens.

Our understanding of social media and elections has also been bounded by the fact that most of the research has focused on the United States. In this relatively advanced democracy, social media have become a tool for some forms of civic engagement and political expression. Among the advanced democracies, this seems to have resulted in only modest forms of activism, such as petition signing or sharing political content from affinity groups over networks of family and friends. (8) Therefore, research on social media and civic engagement in U.S. politics has often sought to test, directly or indirectly, the "slacktivism hypothesis." We define the slacktivism hypothesis as the supposition that if Internet or social media use increases, civic engagement declines.

The argument that the use of social media has mostly negative consequences for public life begins with evidence that most of the content shared over social media is rarely about politics, and even when it is about politics it consists of short messages shared by people with short tempers in short conversations. (9) Citizens rarely use social media for substantive political conversations, and such conversations are often anemic, uncivil, or polarizing. Overall, online political conversations are relatively rare occurrences in comparison to the other kinds of things people do on the Internet on a daily basis. (10)

When they do occur, moreover, during major political events such as candidate debates, social media users will use digital platforms to learn about and interact with politics, but they tend to acquire new knowledge that is favorable to their preferred candidate. (11) Recent work has found that while many U.S.-based activist organizations believe that they are creating stronger communities and dialogues with their public through social media content, this rarely translates to significant mobilization with regard to public events, consumer activism, or grassroots lobbying. (12)

Researchers have demonstrated that social media use causes people to turn their social networks into "filter bubbles" that diminish the chance of exposure to new or challenging ideas. In other words, social media allow us to create homophilous networks. (13) For example, massive amounts of Twitter data have been used to classify users by party affiliation and homophily in the United States, with results indicating that average Democrats tend to be more homophilous than average Republicans, unless the users classified as Republican follow major Republican leaders. (14) Ultimately, public debates over social media may do little more than promote ephemeral engagement without translating to offline political impact. (15) When social media actions do have offline impacts, they are usually the same kinds of low-quality, high-volume actions that advocacy and political groups have long used to gain notoriety and news headlines for their organizations. (16)

In the early stages of the slacktivism debate, there appeared to be only a few very specific cases of movements originating from the Internet that both successfully mobilized people and achieved public policy goals, and often these cases involved a narrow range of technology access issues. (17) In more recent years the distinction between online and offline political action has evaporated, such that modern political candidates need to be savvy with multiple technology platforms and many kinds of campaigns spend significant resources on data analytics. (18) There are now multiple examples of traditional social movements that have scored impressive victories through their effective use of social media, as well as new social movements that have originated online and become stable civil society actors. (19) And complicating all of this is the growing problem of algorithmic control over social media messaging: automated programs can be used to activate citizens or to discourage their engagement. (20)

The argument against the slacktivism hypothesis is that political engagement over social media is always in addition to, not a replacement for, whatever citizens would normally be doing in their political lives. (21) There are important public conversations occurring over social media that grow especially intense during important political events. For example, research has found that social media use helps people build their political identity and community awareness, which even results in financial contributions to relevant civil society groups. (22) Indeed, social media, like other Internet-based communications, tend to supplement our intake of information about politics, elections, and public policy, and allow people to be more omnivorous in their information diets. Such "political omnivores" still rely on major broadcast media for information but regularly depend on the Internet for interactivity about politics. (23)

There is evidence that young adolescents' use of social media--in conjunction with the intent to participate and the consumption of television news--creates a virtuous circle of civic engagement. (24) Most research has consequently focused primarily on small-scale surveys or interview studies. Additionally, it has proven difficult to actually measure levels of civic engagement over social media platforms, especially because there is usually not one central social media site that citizens and politicians use. Being exposed to online activism...