Trust, confidence, credibility: Citizen responses on Twitter to opinion polls during the 2010 UK General Election

Abstract

I wish the media would stop over-analysing, bombarding us with stats and polls and trying to manipulate our opinions! @MissLeeLeeeeeee1 this polls are crazy Does appear we’re heading 4 a hung parliament I have a bad feeling Libs will go with Tories.. . @teessidedazza Being told to turn phone off by @crossy but can’t stop reading stuff about #leadersdebate surely the polls are wrong.. . @ajcross In the months that preceded it, the 2010 UK General Election was widely discussed as being the country’s first Internet political contest. However, as it transpired, the centrepiece of the election was to be on television, not online, in the form of the three televised debates staged in the weeks before polling day. In part, this was because these were the first televised leaders’ debates in a UK election. It was also because of the impact they had on the polls, seeming to boost the support of the third-placed Liberal Democrats and undermine the position of the incumbent Labour leadership and the Conservatives, who had previously led comfortably. The ultimate electoral outcome of this process is up for discussion (despite their post-debate surge, the Liberal Democrats went on to lose seats, but it might still be contested that this surge cost the Conservative Party an outright majority) but what is beyond dispute is that the debates certainly played a major role in shaping the campaign (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010). However, it is inappropriate, we would contend, to understand the relative significance of the television debates vis-à-vis the Internet. Rather, we share Chadwick’s view that news media is now made up of ‘assemblages in which the personnel, practices, genres and temporalities of supposedly “new” online media are increasingly integrated with those of supposedly “old” broadcast and press media’ and that old and new media ‘simultaneously engage in competitive and cooperative interactions’ (Chadwick 2011a, pp. 25, 32). Hence, as Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2007, pp. 13-17) had earlier written, the integration of social media into broadcast practices creates ‘renewed’ mainstream media. Indeed, Chadwick documents in detail the manner in which major news organizations in the UK used real-time reaction worms, live blogs and Twitter trackers to present viewers of the 2010 leaders’ debates with a form of augmented liveness where viewers were not just confronted with a live broadcast but a live broadcast with live responses (and responses to live responses) embedded within it. Consequently, we reject the idea that the 2010 election was a zero-sum game, wherein the contest can be defined through reference to one media type, such as an Internet election or a television election. Instead, the interaction between uses of different media could create and reveal new forms of information, discussion and relationships. This should not be surprising. In the past, shifts in the technology of communication have brought about changes in the way news was constructed and who was commenting on it. For example, the demands of 24-hour rolling television news led to a class of frequently appearing talking heads known from the early 1990s as the commentariat (Hobsbawm and Lloyd 2008; Stevenson 2010). In turn, the development of the Internet, and especially very simple social publishing services, lends itself to a new phenomenon wherein individual viewers are able to share their thoughts on the media they are consuming in real time as they watch, perhaps with thousands or even millions of people. We term this emergence of large numbers of citizen-users as the viewertariat (Anstead and O’Loughlin 2011). We employ the term citizen-users to define those who are performing roles defined as public-political through the use media technologies. This development, while at its very early stages, and still the preserve of a relatively small minority of the population, has huge potential to shift the way both individual audience members and audiences collectively respond to and understand broadcast information, and relate to those producing it. While we do not accept the idea that audiences have ever passively absorbed information as it is presented to them, we would contend that the growing ability to discuss, seek additional information and publicly express doubt will change the way news is consumed. This chapter is an early attempt to understand this process, using the second leaders’ debate in the 2010 UK election as a case study. In particular, we are interested in examining how people relate to information they are given about the outcome of the debate - especially, who they are told the winner is. In common with practice in much of the world, media organizations announced a winner minutes after the debate finished. They did so by referring to opinion polls taken during or seconds after the debate’s duration. However, our examination of comments on the social media site Twitter found that this information was treated in a number of distinct ways, and certainly not accepted at face value or seen as a definitive truth. This conclusion speaks to broad issues within the study of politics and media. First, it allows us to address a core concern within modern politics, namely how citizens relate to political elites. It particularly speaks to issues of trust, and how the wider population assesses the credibility of statements made by politicians, journalists and pollsters. Second, it allows us to consider and problematize the idea of mediatization, one of the dominant paradigms for contemporary discussion of the relationship between the media and other elements of society. So far, studies of mediatized politics have addressed how media logics penetrate and drive the decisions and practices of political actors. If, as Deuze writes (Deuze 2011, p. 138, emphasis in original), ‘Our life is lived in, rather than with, media’, then we must explore not only how political elites adapt their behaviour but also how ordinary citizens question, interact with, and even contribute to elite politics and its mainstream mediation. As Chadwick (2011b) documents, we are witnessing ‘hybrid’ media systems through which political elites and non-elites together assemble or constitute political events. This chapter moves this research trajectory forward through analysis of the views expressed, positions taken and roles performed by members of the viewertariat around a single political event. We find, for instance, that alongside the expected partisanship, cynicism and humour, some viewertariat performed a lay tutelage function, informing others about how procedures work, historical precedents and the nature of opinion poll methodologies, which suggests a commitment to informed democratic participation and reflection. Are there ways, then, that democracy is enhanced with 140-character communications?.