At the Senator THE PONDITS PONDER
friends know that this is obviously a good person, someone who’s associated with our family, are they going to be inclined to believe horrible things said about this person? Are they going to use that as the introduction to this person’s name? Are they going to look further in to this person? There’s a way in which this is going to connect to people who have otherwise fallen off the grid.
occur in social media; candidates “macaca” mo- ments. You’re going to have candidates who have published things on Facebook get followed around by a camera, and then something gets posted on YouTube. In the last federal election, you saw can- didates being bounced for things they said on their blogs, for things that were posted on Facebook and this is a problem that all of parties faced. All of the parties had candidates who were bounced, for lack of a better word, for things that they’ve done on- line. I think the implications for people running campaigns insofar as opposition research goes are really quite important.
CR: Any responsible party will do a deep social media check of their candidates.
MS: If you think of people today in their twenties and thirties who’ve spent the last five years with very active social media presences through their Facebook or MySpace page or Twitter accounts or their personal blogs, and you think of some of the things they’ve said, done or posted.
RS: I don’t know how anyone under the age of twenty today is going to ever be elected to public office because there are drunken, absurd pictures of all of them making out with somebody they might rather forget.
RS: You mentioned advertising. Some US candi- dates have recently done extraordinarily great jobs targeting advertising with social media. We haven’t seen anything like this yet. Funny, clever, witty, over-the-top ads can quickly go viral for a candi- date who couldn’t do a real ad buy. But, for very little money, they can shoot an online ad. I wonder, in the Canadian context, if we’re going to start see- ing some local candidates or parties shooting ads specifically for YouTube with the intent to go vi- ral. We know parties are doing little to no ad buy. They’re launching ads online and counting on the fact that the traditional media as well as the social media will spread the ad. I wonder if we’re going to see more parties start doing ads that work better in social media which need to be funny or witty or have some other way for them to go viral.
MS: Yeah, I don’t doubt that. The other thing you’re going to get, more and more, are the problems that
8 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
MS: What this is going to become is just another survey question in the vein of, “if you grew up in the 1960’s did you smoke dope?” As it stands, the opposition research implications are huge. I think over time it will probably just bounce out. People just sort of give people passes for these sorts of things. They say, “Well who wasn’t in that position at some point.”
CR: The only thing, to Rob’s point, is in the tar- geting potential not the scandal potential. Think of Facebook alone in the standard profile, and I talk about Facebook exclusively because the new stats say eighteen million Canadians are on Facebook now. It is the dominant platform, over and above every other. Think of just the information that’s on the standard profile. You have declaration of political beliefs. You have a declaration of religious beliefs.
RS: Marital.
CR: Marital status, relationship status and a com- plete breakdown of likes and dislikes. If I wanted to target an ad today to people who say they believe in God, who have leftist views and who have a
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